by Sarah Hepola
Anna was also proof that not all teenagers drink. She told me about this time when she was 18. She had gone to a bar and seen two cute boys. She wanted to impress them, so she picked up someone else’s beer can and gestured with it while she spoke. When the cops walked in, the guys darted for the exit, while Anna got her first ticket. Anyone who got caught by the police said the same thing. “But, Officer, it’s not mine.” And Anna might have been the first kid in history to be telling the truth.
We talked till dawn that night, and I was exhausted and exhilarated by the time I returned to my thin foam mattress. Sometimes I call this evening “the night Anna and I fell in love,” and sometimes I call it “the first night of our lives together,” but I can’t call it “the night we chain-smoked and ate cheese pizza in Mark’s dorm room,” because that happened pretty often.
In the later years of college, she and I would drink wine on friends’ porches and sit together at picnic tables messy with tortilla chips and margarita spills. Anna knew how to knock back drinks by then. But in the first year we spent together, our adventures were limited to a 14-story dorm. We made each other mix tapes. We wrote each other handwritten letters and dropped them in the post office slot, even though we lived 150 feet apart, because we both understood the rush of getting mail. And through our long and loping conversations, I began to discover Anna had an industrial-grade memory. She could recall the most mundane details of my past. The make and model of Miles’s car. The names of my cousins. It goosed me each time, like she’d been reading my journal.
Back in high school, an impeccable memory had been my superpower. I had archives of useless knowledge: the number of singles released from Thriller (seven), the actor who played the villain in The Karate Kid (Billy Zabka). Friends used to rely on me to fill in the backstory about our shared past. This was before the Internet, when the very act of remembering could make me feel like a whiz kid bound for a Jeopardy! championship. What was the name of our freshman-year health teacher again? Where was that concert we went to in ninth grade?
And I would think, “How can people forget their own lives?”
But college introduced me to people like Anna, whose memories surpassed my own. And I was dazzled by this, but I was also a bit intimidated, like a star high school athlete who’s joined the pros.
“How can you remember that?” I would ask her, dumbstruck.
And she would arch her left eyebrow, her favorite pose of feminine mystery, and let the question dangle.
I tried to match her. I squirreled away biographical driftwood to lob into our conversations for a future surprise. Bam! Bet you didn’t think I knew the name of your old coworker at the IHOP. Boom! Didn’t realize I knew who sat beside you in philosophy, did you? My shelves were filled with books I could not finish and textbooks I never cracked. But I was always cramming for the test about Anna’s past. I paid lavish attention to every word she spoke. Until then, it had not occurred to me what an act of love this was: to remember another person’s life.
I STARTED SPENDING more time with Miles in our spring semester. We were trying to be “friends,” which is another way of saying I wanted to get back together, and he wanted to sleep with me. It was working out pretty well.
I ditched the dining hall for evenings in his dorm watching old Star Trek episodes with the guys from down the hall. I was bored by Star Trek, but I liked being the only girl surrounded by that boy stink. They passed around a bong, letting their minds expand, while I settled in a beanbag and drank my Carlo Rossi wine (one jug for $5.99).
Miles loved pot. It fixed him, the way booze fixed me. I smoked with him twice, and both times I forgot simple words. Like “chair” and “desk.” Pot did the opposite of what I wanted from an illicit substance. It shut me down, turned me paranoid. I’d also read pot affected your long-term memory, and I worried what might happen to Miles if he continued to use. Back in high school, he was quick-witted, sharp, but now his voice could acquire such a thick syrup. Heeeeey, duuuuude.
I was scared of drugs. I never told Miles this, because I wanted to be close again, but I thought drugs were dirty and wrong and destructive. People often complain the “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign of the ’80s was ineffective, but it worked on one person. I was afraid to touch any of that shit. A line of cocaine made you drop dead. Heroin was a gun in your mouth. As I sat there watching Miles load a pipe or tap out a flaky trail along a piece of thin and crinkly rolling paper, all I could think was: Why can’t you drink like normal people?
But I kept hanging around him. I loved him—at least, I kept saying I did. And I knew if I stayed in his orbit long enough, his better judgment would drift out the window with his pot smoke and there was a good chance we’d end up in his bottom bunk once more.
“What does this mean?” I asked one morning, head on his chest.
He stared at the wooden plank above us. “It means we just slept together.”
I didn’t get it. I kept expecting him to revert to the role of high school boyfriend, snuggling in a booth built for two. But he was a college boy now, who wanted to live with all his doors and windows open. A few weeks later, I cleaned up his dorm room. Like a fucking den mother. I soaked the bowls crusted with cereal. Rinsed off and recycled the crumpled beer cans crawling with ants. I found two empty condom wrappers underneath his pillow, one more than we’d ever used, and I told myself: Surely someone else borrowed his bed. Nights got wild in his dorm, so it was possible. Maybe a condom fell down from his roommate’s bunk. What an idiot. But a person can invent any stupid story to keep herself from uncomfortable truths.
A few nights later, I was hanging out in Miles’s dorm room, but this time I wasn’t the only girl. A pretty redhead shared her ideas about string theory. The girl with the combat boots and the motorcycle jacket dropped by. She was from Venezuela. And she said it with an accent—Ven-ezz-waaay-luh—like she was rubbing it in.
I took long slugs from my jug wine. I didn’t care anymore. I was tired of counting calories, measuring each glass for its pleasure, trying to lose five pounds so I could win back the boy who refused to be won. I drank cup after cup as I sat on the lower bunk and retreated into myself so far I could almost see us from space.
I could see that Miles and I would not get back together, and this was a good thing. I could see I was not the only girl for him. In fact, his life would be rich with women—smart, interesting women who might actually like Star Trek. These women would not apply mascara each morning, might not even shave their armpits, but he would dig that about them, the way he dug the girl from Venezuela, who wasn’t even thin. She was full-bodied and foulmouthed, but he liked her because she was original and comfortable being something other than conventionally beautiful. Because she would suck a bong with him in rooms that were wisely unlit, while I stood in front of a magnifying mirror, adding sparkle shimmer to my eyes.
I left the room without saying good-bye. By the time I got back to my dorm, the wine had taken charge. I fell into the bushes outside the front entrance and spent a while digging around, trying to find the front door.
My last sustained memory is Anna, floating like an angel in a Cure T-shirt down the bright hallway. She held my hair as I threw up into her small sink, the one that kept moving. She changed me into a baggy T-shirt like she was putting a onesie on a limp baby.
Thank you, Anna. I’m so sorry, Anna. I love you, Anna.
“It’s OK,” she said with a gentle shush. “You’re OK.”
Over the years, I would become reliant on friends for the most basic information. How did we get home last night? Do you have any idea what happened to my jeans? Why is there a corn dog in my bed? After a while, I had to get more subtle—dig but not look like I was digging. “I had so much fun last night. What was the name of that bar again?” People repeated my antics back to me, and if I stayed still and laughed in the right spots, I could often complete the field report on my own behavior.
I have a picture of myself from that night. Taken a
fter I blacked out. I’m sitting on the bed, my eyes so narrowed they nearly disappear when I smile. I don’t know exactly why Anna took the photo. We were always documenting our lives back then, complimenting ourselves on how well we were living them. But this photo wasn’t going to be tacked up in my work space. She later told me that after she snapped it, I began crying harder than she’d ever seen me cry. I became unreachable. A void in me had opened, and she had no idea how to fix me. I kept saying the same thing, over and over. No one will ever love me. No one will ever love me.
When Anna told me what happened, I was shaken. And I wasn’t sure which worried me more: that I had blacked out again, or that when the deepest and truest part of me was cracked open, the only thing that poured out was need.
THREE
DRESSING IN MEN’S CLOTHES
I started wearing my dad’s clothes in the fall of my sophomore year. I had raided his closet over the summer, plucking out a gray flannel shirt and a pair of Lee jeans, flecked with paint.
“Can I have this?” I asked.
And my father, confused. “What are you going to do with it?”
It must have been strange, to find his pint-size daughter rummaging through his battered old work clothes. But in the fall of 1993, the accidental lumberjack look was a uniform. I liked the drape of that flannel and how those jeans slid down my hips. I had to keep yanking them up, like a tiny girl in a giant’s clothes.
I wore two of my dad’s undershirts as well, which were thin and nearly transparent from multiple washings, so they had this luxurious softness. I liked that you could see straight through to my bra, which makes no sense, given the insecurity about my body that had dogged me since adolescence. But the shirt points to some essential conflict. A desire to flaunt and be masked at once. The undershirt was like a side door to exhibitionism. I had to be careful not to look too deliberate. That was the worst sin of all: trying too hard.
Sometimes I wore those undershirts inside out. I have no idea why I did this, except that it seemed daring to show a disregard for propriety.
“Your shirt’s on inside out,” a guy told me at a party.
“Your life’s on inside out,” I snapped back.
And he smiled. “You’re right.”
I had a crush on that guy. Mateo. He had a poof of curly hair like John Turturro in Barton Fink, and he was gruff and unsmiling like so many 19-year-olds. But if you nudged him right, he could be adorable and silly. I have a picture of him sitting in my apartment wearing my silky Victoria’s Secret bra over his T-shirt and another of him paging through an old Teen Beat magazine with mock excitement.
My off-campus apartment was the party hub that year. The place was named the Casbah, so we were almost contractually obligated to rock it. My drink was Keystone Light. You could buy two six-packs of tall boys for five bucks at the Fiesta Mart—the equivalent of 16 beers for the price of a Wendy’s value meal, which turned Keystone into the unofficial sponsor of our ragers.
That’s what we called our parties: “ragers.” A word associated with anger and weather systems, which is appropriate given the state of our living room the next day. Halogen lamp kicked over, beer bottle floating in the fish tank. What the hell raged through here last night? Oh, yes. It was us. We raged.
It was during one of these ragers at my apartment that Mateo and I had sex. At the time, we were in a play together, and we would sit in the dressing room before and during the show, knees brushing thighs. The flirtation had been building for weeks, but I needed some inciting incident. A match thrown on our diesel fuel. We were outside on the walkway of my crumbling cinderblock complex. I was chain-smoking, one cigarette lit on the tail end of another. And I said to him, with the confidence of six beers, “I bet you won’t kiss me right now.”
He was leaning against the wall. His forehead rippled as he looked up, all squint and slouch. He looked at the parking lot, at the dozens of people around us. He looked everywhere but at me. Then he said, “I don’t think you’re going to win that bet.”
The idea of coming on to men was new. In high school, this would never have occurred to me. I had waited for Miles to kiss me, for months that felt like years. My coquettish signaling: sit next to him in class, play with my hair, cross my legs so they looked thinner. I read the tea leaves of his every gesture. He called me last night. What does it meeaaaan? This was how I understood seduction. Keep inviting the guy closer, but sit still until he pounces.
College flipped that script. The new imperative: If you want a guy, go after him. What’s stopping you? We didn’t use words like “feminism”—a fussy term for earlier generations, like “consciousness-raising” or the ERA—but it was understood that we ran with the boys. Argue with them. Challenge their ideas about sex and Ernest Hemingway, because they’d been holding the megaphone for too long, and we needed to wrest it from their grip. I even wore cologne. Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men. And slathering my neck in that rich, oaky musk gave me a kinky thrill, like I’d been rubbing up against some low-rent Johnny Depp.
But my lessons in women and power did not extend to the classroom. I was not a hand raiser of any kind. I took a C in my Literature After the Holocaust seminar, because I couldn’t force myself to open my mouth, despite participation being 25 percent of the grade. I ran into the professor on campus one day. She had dreads and a wry smile. I didn’t even know they made professors this cool. We chatted for a bit, and she said, “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you ever talk in class?” And I blushed and said, “I’m shy,” and she said, “Well, you shouldn’t be.”
No, I shouldn’t be. I wasn’t meant to be. And on the balcony of my apartment, I was not. Under cover of night and Keystone tall boys, I was full of righteous fire and brimstone. How I loved the taste of conviction in my mouth.
That is bullshit. You’re wrong. Prove it.
I was done sucking up to men. Fluffing their egos. Folding their tightie whities. I was going to smash my bottles against the wall, and someone could clean up after me, goddammit. I stopped leaning over makeup mirrors and blow-drying my hair. I wore clothes that stank of hamper and Marlboro Lights, and it seemed to me that men got off on this new uncorseted persona. That’s what they said: We like strong women. That’s what they said: Be yourself. So, death to the girl of the nervous fidgets, behold the woman with a beer in her hand and one endless cigarette. No more hearts doodled in spiral notebooks. No more falling in love with every boy who looks your way in biology class. But falling into bed—now, this was another topic entirely.
That’s what Mateo and I did that night. We slinked off into my bedroom while the party rambled on, and we ripped off each other’s clothes in a blind, snarling rage. For so long, I wondered how it would feel to sleep with someone other than Miles. To run the tip of my nose along the powdery skin of his stomach, soft as a puppy’s belly, and into the feral thicket of short, wiry hair leading down below. But I couldn’t tell you what sex with Mateo was like, because all I had the next day was a flash of a memory, five seconds of a frame: me, on top of him, my hands digging into his chest and my hair swishing around madly. I am told that I screamed. The kind of excitement that travels through flimsy apartment walls.
“I guess I don’t need to ask if you enjoyed yourself,” my roommate Tara said the next day over coffee.
But that seemed like a very good question. Honestly, I had no idea.
I LIKED THE idea of being “experienced.” I was 16 when Miles and I had sex. I saw no explosion of glitter, no doves released into the air. Actually, it felt more like a bowling ball being shoved up my vagina (but a very sweet and loving bowling ball). I adored Miles. But our sex drives were set at different volumes. Mine was the medium hum of a transistor radio. His went to 11.
This is how teenage boys are, right? They’ll hump anything. Hump the furniture. Hump the floorboards. Their dicks are like divining rods forever finding gold inside someone else’s pants. And me? I was a cuddle bunny. I liked soft stroking and delicate kisses, and tho
se nights could be a little heavy on the saliva and the grabbing for me.
I wasn’t a prude or anything. That was a slur in high school. Don’t be a prude. Guys would joke about girls so frigid their knees were sewn together and their tongues sat in their mouths like lazy slugs when you kissed them. I wasn’t going to be that way. My tongue had a graceful twirl. My knees opened without a creak. My bra fell to the floor with a swoosh. I would pull a man in close, let him glide all over me, and my body parts went electric in his mouth. But then.
Then what?
I’m not going to say I faked orgasms. That sounds intentional. As if I knew what an orgasm felt like, and I purposefully pretended to be having one. It was more like: Orgasms happen when you’re with men. You’re with a man now. Are you having an orgasm? Probably so! I leaned in to those swells of pleasure with loud gasps and moans as if, by moving my arms and legs frantically enough, I might somehow learn to surf.
“Did you come?” Miles would ask, looking at me with those eager blue eyes.
And I would smile. “Yes.” It was wish fulfillment, performance anxiety, and sexual ignorance wrapped up into one.
I wanted to be good in bed. Who doesn’t want this? Are there women out there, hoping to be bad in bed? And I understood from NC-17 movies starring Mickey Rourke that being good in bed was a matter of arched backs and open mouths and frantic, animal fucking that ended in a double-orgasm thunderclap. It wasn’t the hardest posture to imitate. Suck in your stomach, find the proper lighting, go nuts.
Being actually good in bed requires an openness, a comfort in your own body I simply did not have. The girl who once shaved off her pubic hair before sleepovers was not going to surrender to a man’s touch so easily. I was wrapped up in “Do Not Cross” tape. I had moles on my back I never wanted Miles to see. I had bumpy skin on my upper arms (the name for this condition is folliculitis, an erotic term if ever there was one), and I would brush away Miles’s hands while we were making out.