We both leaned forward and kissed one last time. He stood, and I let him go. I didn’t go downstairs until I heard the door slam and the boys’ car drive away.
Lucy and I were alone together in her car. I knew, and was glad, that I was never going back there. The boys had said they would visit us at school, but I doubted they ever would, and I thought it better that way. We lit cigarettes and pulled onto the road.
“So what happened last night?” she asked.
“It happened,” I said.
Everyone in our dorm was well aware of which girls were virgins and which were not, and who the girls who were not had lost it with, and how and where, and whom, if anyone, they had slept with or had their sights on sleeping with on campus.
“It did?!” she asked. “How was it?”
“Fine, good,” I said. “But I could be pregnant.”
“Pooter Bear,” she said sternly.
“I’m probably not,” I said.
“Whatever happens, it’ll be okay,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at me and we both laughed. We had wanted life to happen to us, and it was.
For the next month, sitting in class, I would remember the boy’s feathery hair brushing my face, the shy smile that was more intimate than the sex we’d shared, and the memory was thrilling, and then I remembered to wonder what, if anything, was happening inside of me, and I felt a trickle of worry. Then, it went away. Between response journals and papers, it came back. And again, while drinking forties with Beth and the girls on our hall, and again, while smoking and playing Spit with Lucy.
I went to health services. I was not pregnant. I had not contracted any STDs. I had intuitively picked someone as innocent as I was. Or I had been lucky. Or a combination of both. I would never know. During my exam, I didn’t mention that I still got my period only occasionally. It seemed like a fortunate health irregularity to have.
As much as I liked my purple hair and my red lipstick, and I desperately wanted my first boyfriend, I still wasn’t good at being a girl. I wanted to spend my energy on books. I wanted to run around as hard and loud as the boys, drinking as much and knowing the words to the same songs, and showing I could hold my own with them, as I had tried to prove I could with my dad. Feeling like I was honoring my father—with the acid I was taking and the books I was reading and the free spirit I was cultivating—was important to me. I had not heard from him since his Christmas card, now several months in the past. It was not uncommon for my dad to disappear for six months at a time, but his absence at just the moment I was becoming my own person, and everyone else in my family was supporting me, felt like the worst rejection yet. I didn’t know until years later that he’d gotten his settlement, and when he’d lost all of the money at the track, he’d become suicidal. All I knew was I had taken the risk in order to be a person he would respect, who had ideas and lived with consciousness, and he wasn’t interested in talking with me about any of it.
Even though Mom did a good job of not letting me worry, I knew it was touch-and-go, month-to-month, to keep me at Simon’s Rock. I also knew she wouldn’t let this rare and special opportunity pass out of my grasp. Everyone was invested, except my dad. But his was not the only absence I felt that year.
Oliver also remained absent, until late May, just as my first year of school ended, when he let me back into his life again. I never thought about the timing of his disappearance or his return. He was no longer in school, instead working full-time at a store, but for the summer at least, I wasn’t a student, either. I was a prep cook and busser at the Anchor Inn. Conversations with him were once again a lifeline to the big world.
There was a small window of time, a week maybe, during which it was a relief to be home, catching up on sleep, eating without being ruled by the dining hall’s schedule, and unwinding from the pressures of school. After that, I fell into an emotional gutter, convinced each tomorrow would be the one in which I was finally happy and perfect.
There was still no word from my dad. I went back over our last interaction. It was hard to be clear on what had happened. In my joy at my new freedom, I had eased up on my vigilance. It seemed impossible our relationship had ended over a disagreement about skinhead culture, which neither of us truly cared about. But sometimes it’s only possible to fight about the things that don’t matter, not the things that are slowly and silently tearing you apart. He was gone, and I could feel it was a different absence than it used to be.
At least Oliver wrote to me nearly every day in June, a familiar mix of on-point, charmingly idiosyncratic love letters and dark confessions about how he and his life were shit and he wanted to die. And again, I wasn’t scared of his love or his depression. I had missed him, and I was glad he’d come back to me. My forays into real dating and sex hadn’t left me feeling any more connected than I had felt as a lonely girl dreaming about them. It felt safe to have him far away, to be back in my familiar role of patient listener. But his darkness had deepened. By mid-June, he was wishing he’d stayed away.
I got through the summer by working as many shifts as I could at the Anchor Inn to save money for school the next year, while getting nowhere with a new crush, and going to visit friends in Portland whenever I could. I still hadn’t heard from my dad, and when I finally did in mid-July, I learned he was in the hospital. It was unclear why, but I assumed a nervous breakdown. “I suppose I should care, but I don’t,” I wrote in my journal. “I certainly don’t hate him, but it’s hard for me to worry about someone who is meaningless in my life.” Oliver was going MIA for weeks at a time, too. I was eager to get back to school.
I had applied to be a resident assistant because the job paid well and came with a single dorm room. I was nervous, though, as it required a commitment to not drink or do drugs, and I had drank nearly every night of my freshman year, usually to the point of being messy. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite by breaking the rules I was meant to enforce, but I didn’t know what it would be like to be at school without my alcohol escape hatch.
I had barely passed my driving test, and Mom and Craig had given me their old Toyota Tercel hatchback so they wouldn’t have to shuttle me the six-plus hours back and forth to school. Craig pulled it up onto the lawn and made me show him I could jack up the car, take the tire off, and put on the spare, so I’d be prepared for whatever happened.
On the morning I left for school I backed my car off the lawn, where I had loaded it up the night before, through the opening in the stone wall, and smack into a tree. Afraid I was going to get in trouble, I taped up the light and decided to get it fixed myself once I got down to school without telling Mom and Craig anything about it.
On the drive, I’d had some anxiety about what the new year would bring, but it was wonderful to be back. I loved my new dorm, Kendrick. After I unpacked enough to feel settled, I attended RA orientation. The school was actively trying to subdue the rampant party culture, which I had mixed feelings about. I loved to drink, and many of my best experiences during freshman year had occurred at the freewheeling parties that happened every weekend and most weeknights, too. I felt like the new class of students should have the right to the same growth—from engaging in all that school had to offer: ideas, friendship, books, music, politics, inspiration, and, yes, partying. I let it be known in the least confrontational way possible that I intended to be the kind of RA who helped my kids learn how to handle their drugs, rather than narcing on them.
Then it was time to go down to the student center. I smiled at the newbies in what I hoped was a reassuring way, filled up with love for this place and excited to share it with them. A tall, thin boy with the bluest eyes and a shaved head stopped in the middle of the student center, his gaze fixed on me. Without thinking about it, I smiled at him, as I had smiled at the others. As he watched my smile take shape, his face erupted into the biggest grin. When I met him later that day, he smiled at me with the same intensity.
“Hi, my name is Matthew,” he
said with a Tennessee twang, practically batting his eyelashes at me.
He was one of my charges. I immediately liked all of my kids, but at sixteen, I was younger than most of them, and it was a little unnerving being responsible. At the same time, I knew I didn’t entirely belong in the cliques and romances they were forming as workshop week unfolded, just as my classmates and I had done the previous year.
I missed the upperclassmen, but one of my old drinking buddies was back and living in my dorm. And his roommate, Galen, was the kind of friend who could cheer me up just by giving me a hug, an occurrence I noted with appreciation and wonder. With a compact physicality and full beard that made him seem like a grown man, Galen stood out among us teenagers. He normally wore his long, curly hair pulled back into a careless ponytail, which I fashioned into high valley girl dos after dinner as I sat on his lap on the balcony, smoking Parliament Lights and singing, “Sixteen clumsy and shy, I went to London and I . . .” He called me “Sarah Pop,” and I called him “Gale Boppers,” and we often kissed hello, not in a romantic way, but with a comfort and ease that was special and rare for me.
I wasn’t normally physically comfortable with anyone, especially not boys. My idea of intimacy was chain-smoking on a friend’s bed while she chain-smoked on the other end. So I don’t know why I felt safe sitting on Galen’s lap, leaning back against his broad chest, or letting his beard tickle my face as he kissed me. Maybe because he was so easy to be around, and because he’d been obsessed with my friend Natalia the previous semester. I’d commiserated with him about his longing, because it was a feeling I knew well.
Nok was back, too. I still adored him, but even I had limits to how long I could keep a flame burning with no fuel. It seemed like everyone was having relationships but me. I just couldn’t leap into the fray and commit to a person. It all seemed too messy and scary, not just what happened behind closed doors, but the idea of being linked to that person publicly, the pressure to choose the right person and have the right relationship.
For the first time, I didn’t want to get older. I wanted my freshman year back. I wanted to be experiencing everything for the first time, but I couldn’t, and so I sat and smoked and tried to enjoy myself as the freshmen had their fun. Nothing thrilled me more than when one of them came to me with a problem, trained as I’d been by my dad to adore the intensity of a good tête-à-tête, and reveling in feeling needed.
Beth was an RA in my old dorm, Crosby, but I didn’t go over there much, except to sit in my best friend Claire’s second-floor single and stare at the students who passed by. Most of my friends the previous year had either been girls from the smoking hall or upperclassmen, but my second semester at school I’d become aware of Claire. She was beautiful, but in a spirited, old-fashioned way. She didn’t wear makeup or dress sexy. She had obvious intelligence and a nervous intensity like a hummingbird.
Claire wasn’t a smoker or a party girl, and we often marveled that we’d found each other, since our two worlds could have easily kept us separate, even though we lived in the same dorm. Claire and I spent hours together, talking about books and music and art and culture. She loved Hal Hartley, too, and Blondie and Sylvia Plath. We might just as easily dance around her room to “The Tide Is High” or talk about the wit and wonder of The Bell Jar. Like me, she dreamed of having a big life but felt anxious about if and when everything would happen for her. I envied her because her attitude and smarts were so undeniable. In the frenzy of an all-nighter, she once wrote a paper in which she said “Karl Marx can go suck an egg,” and it was still good enough to earn her a B.
With her powerful persona, Claire was quick to get mad or disappear into her room if she felt slighted. But the intensity of her love and loyalty when she was pleased was as ferocious as her displeasure when she was not. I was devoted to her happiness. I suppose she felt the same way about me, although I still had the feeling that I was an absence of presence, and so it was hard for me to imagine inspiring love in anyone.
We were instantly inseparable again our sophomore year and spent long hours in her room, talking endlessly about the subject that obsessed us: love. Under Claire’s direction, we were reading Marguerite Duras, especially The Lover. We were determined to create an independent study for ourselves on the subject of love, as though, if we could read the right books and have enough inspired insights, we would somehow master the experience.
We were such well-matched friends that we were both equally sincere in our intentions, and totally naive about the fact that the only way to begin to understand love was to put down our books and join the messy world. Plenty of boys were in love with Claire. She was always storming out of rooms and having asthma attacks and otherwise making a scene. When she cut you, no one went deeper, and when she loved you, no one made you feel more seen. I was her perfect foil; giving my constant, unending devotion without ever laying down any consequences for anything she did, no matter if she hurt my feelings, which she inevitably did, given her intensity and my sensitivity.
Claire was also with me in the most important class of my life: my first fiction workshop. Immediately, I was completely, irrevocably hooked. I loved the feeling of honing in on the description of an obscure feeling—both on the page and in a round-table discussion of a story’s themes. I knew this was how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
The guy with the smile, Matthew, began hanging around me more and more. I thought he was cute and liked the attention. His ardor was almost as intense as the depths of my insecurity and self-loathing, which obscured the many ways we were a poor romantic match.
One night, he “fell asleep” with his shoes still on, curled up in my little twin bed. Eventually, there was nothing for me to do but get into bed with him. That was more than the invitation he needed. He “woke up,” turning his face toward mine, already straining toward the kiss. In the instant our lips met, he was fully in it.
“I remember you were the first person I saw at school,” he said. “And when you smiled at me, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I fell in love with you right then and there.”
“I was just doing my job,” I riffed back.
“You were so pretty, and you had such a great smile.”
“Still got all my teeth,” I said, wanting the attention, needing the affection, but unable to handle it without going into my default mode: sarcasm.
In the morning, Matt was the one smiling. He had decided: he was my first boyfriend. Still, I held back, uncomfortable with the relationship. I realized that we had different ways of being and wanted different lives. But he was so sweet, and he liked me so much, and it felt so wonderful to let go, just like when I’d started getting drunk.
It came time for the sex. Even in the dark with the door locked and in the presence of a person who literally could not have seen a single thing wrong with me, I was nervous about what would happen and how. But I didn’t feel comfortable talking about it, either. There was also the matter of condoms, which I’d never seen in action before, and which stressed me out to no end.
At the same time, we were teenagers and all hormones, and it didn’t take long for us to end up naked. Matt pulled out a condom and put it on like it was no big deal. He began to move, and the bed began to squeak, and squeak, and squeak. I froze.
“Are you okay?” he asked gently.
“The bed’s squeaking,” I said.
He rocked harder and squeaked it louder, laughing.
“Everyone can hear,” I said.
“So what?” he said.
I made him stop, get up, and put the mattress on the floor, so we could do it silently. Luckily he was totally unfazed by anything I did. As we lay together afterward, Matt kissing me before falling into blissed-out slumber, I lay awake, paranoid everyone on my hall had heard, uncomfortable in my body, unsure in my skin, wanting everything but terrified I was doing it all wrong.
We never even came close to having sex without a condom. And yet, that fall, I missed m
y period, for weeks and weeks. Matt was overjoyed. He wanted us to move to Tennessee and raise the baby together. When I went home for break, I knew I had to do something. Mom remained calm and took me to the doctor who had given me my first pelvic exam. I wasn’t pregnant. But I still hadn’t had my period. I told her this wasn’t uncommon for me. She couldn’t find anything wrong. I was incredibly relieved not to be pregnant. So everything was fine, until I had sex with Matt again but still didn’t get my period. I hadn’t gotten pregnant before, but I could be pregnant now. I started keeping pregnancy tests on hand, which didn’t exactly make me any more relaxed about sex.
Matt was a devoted boyfriend. He dressed up in an oversize pink tuxedo shirt and took me out to dinner at the town’s Mexican restaurant. He literally sold blood to get money to spend on dates. When I mentioned this fact to my mom—like many teenage girls, I was not a humble despot—she laughed. “Your father used to sell blood,” she said.
The boys in my dorm could be hard on Matt, and I could be short-tempered with him. But he had several female devotees in his class, including a pretty girl named Maxine, who did not try to hide her crush. It was a small school, so our paths crossed often, but we didn’t have more than a nod-and-smile relationship. One night, there was a knock on my door. I expected a friend, or one of my kids. I was surprised to see Maxine.
“Matt isn’t here,” I said.
“I’m not here to see Matt,” she said.
I didn’t say anything, just waited to see what she wanted.
“Why don’t you like me?” she asked.
I was too horrified to speak. This was my worst nightmare: (A) being confronted in any capacity by anyone, and (B) having to lie to avoid hurting the feelings of someone I didn’t particularly like when I was already fed up with the situation.
“I don’t dislike you, Maxine,” I said. “I just think that my relationship with Matt isn’t any of your business, so you should stay out of it.”
She nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say. I watched her round the corner before shutting my door. When I mentioned her visit to Matt, he seemed nonplussed.
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