Surviving Valencia

by Holly Tierney-Bedord

  “What?”

  “What part are you needing me to explain?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” I stuffed the sheet of paper in my pocket.

  “So you understand the plan?”

  “Yes Adrian. God! Are you enjoying this?”

  “No. Not at all. We need to go,” he said. “Are you packed?”

  I pointed to two small pieces of luggage on the bed.

  He picked them up and handed me another piece of paper. “Here’s the name and the address of the hotel. I got you a room right by one of the side doors; it’s reserved in both our names. It’s downtown. It’s really old so hopefully they don’t have many cameras. We’re just going to have to hope. Maybe we can stay there for real sometime. Don’t lose that piece of paper with the email addresses on it. Memorize them if you can. Swallow it if you have to. Okay… I think I thought of everything.”

  He put the bags in the car and hugged me. “I’ll see you in a few days. Don’t speed! Don’t get pulled over. Did you pack your vitamins?”

  “Yes,” I lied. Who could think of vitamins at a time like this?

  We kissed goodbye. Then he got in my car and I got in his and we both pulled out, heading toward the freeway.

  Chapter 50

  To my surprise, my dad wanted to help me shop for my first car. I had not expected my parents to allow me to have a car, but they actually seemed enthusiastic about it. I told them I had four hundred dollars saved, instead of four thousand, and this was to be the down payment. I just couldn’t own up to having all that money; they could be so unpredictable. I would have to get a job during the school year to pay for insurance and my monthly payment. After three or four long hot Saturdays of shopping, we found a 1986 Toyota Camry. It was black with a tan interior. I loved it. There was even a tape deck in it.

  “You’re going to have to work a lot to pay for this,” said my dad, preparing to co-sign the loan with me. “If you miss a payment they’re going to come looking for me, and I’m going to tell them to load it up on their trailer and take it away. If that happens, don’t come crying to me.”

  His words did not bother me; they seemed gruff and dad-like, and appropriate. I took the keys, beaming, and I even gave him a hug.

  So I had a car, which is of vital importance in high school, and I had a crush on a new boy who had just moved to our school. I felt that I was primed for victory. I had always had the most luck with new kids because they didn’t know they were supposed to hate me. This boy’s name was Alex Wescott and he pursued me. From the first day of geometry class, he couldn’t stop staring at me. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. And he was cute! Medium height with a muscular build and droopy brown eyes like a Bassett hound, but in an adorable, sexy way. It was obvious enough to aggravate the popular girls, who just that summer had all gone through name-puberty, maturing from Jenni, Kari, Jessi, and Keeli to Jennifer, Caroline, Jessica, and Keely.

  Alex was from Chicago and he was so smooth. “Is this seat taken?” were the first words he ever spoke to me.

  “We have assigned seats,” I plainly told him, because I was not so smooth. “It’s reserved for Paul Dunkel. I guess he’s running late.”

  “Oh,” said Alex, nodding. He sat down in Paul’s seat and looked me up and down. I did not realize he had mistaken my obliviousness for cool detachment. Intrigued, he raised an eyebrow at me and said, “So are we going out tonight or what?”

  The popular kids heard him say this. I felt myself growing hot, my nerdiness spreading from my neck up to my hairline in an itchy, scarlet wave. I waited for someone around us to set the record straight, let this guy know he was barking up the wrong tree, but they watched us in silence.

  I had never done anything with a boy! Alex Wescott, with his worn leather jacket and stubble (stubble!) looked like he ate out prostitutes for breakfast. In that frantic moment I got the clear, sure conviction that I must have sex with someone uncool for practice before accepting his offer. The question was, who? Of course, it had to happen soon, before someone else stole away Alex’s attention.

  “I already have plans tonight,” I told him.

  “Oh. Okay, that’s cool,” he said. Then he added disinterestedly, “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing special. Just going into the Cities for a concert with some friends who are in college.”

  “What concert?”

  “Hmm. Some band they’re friends with. I think they’re called the Middleweights. I’m just going along for the free drinks.” I don’t know where that came from but Alex believed me, I could tell. Feeling bold I said, “Why don’t we go out Friday night instead?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  I shrugged nonchalantly and went back to reading a diagram in my geometry book, my pulse loudly thumping in my windpipe. From the corner of my eye I saw Alex turn away from me to pick at his fraying hem, and I tried to steady my breathing. This gave me four days to get rid of my virginity.

  The logical victim, the only candidate I could think of, in fact, was Dougie the Lawn Boy. Twenty-four and still living at his parents’ house, cutting people’s lawns in the summer and spending the off-season high in the basement. I figured his reputation as a helpful guy around the neighborhood who kept to himself made him a solid choice, so I gave him a call.

  “Hi, Dougie,” I said. “This is your neighbor calling and I need a little favor.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Remember Valencia?”

  “Sure!”

  “This is her sister.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sixteen now. I was wondering if I could come over.”

  “Okay.”

  I went over there and he answered the door in boxers and a t-shirt. He had a body like a fifty year old man: skinny, skinny everything, with a huge gut.

  “Do you have protection?” I asked him.

  He did. We kissed for a while because I needed the practice at that too, and then we tried to have sex. I hadn’t seen any real-life penises before that day, so how was I to know that he was hung like an elephant? We tried and tried but it wouldn’t fit.

  “Are you bigger than normal guys?”

  “Uh, yeah, I think so. Quite a bit bigger, I’ve been told.”

  “Good, cause this feels awful!”

  When I said that he got off me.

  “No, no. Don’t stop. Just shove it in there! I don’t care if it hurts!” I told him.

  “Shhh… My parents are right upstairs!” he told me.

  Finally I told him to just forget it. I had light years of experience compared to the day before, and I was ready for Alex.

  “Thanks, Dougie. Now remember: You can’t tell anyone this happened!”

  “I won’t!” he said, sitting down on the edge of his bed to play Street Fighter.

  Alex offered to pick me up Friday night but I told him that I would meet him. There was no way he was coming to my house! I was working at a coffee shop a few nights after school and on weekends, and I told him to meet me there.

  “You work at a coffee shop? Cool. Can you make me a cappuccino?”

  “Sure.”

  I got behind the counter when he arrived and made us both cappuccinos, whipping the foamy froth expertly while he watched.

  “You’re so fucking hot,” he said. My coworkers Lyle and Sherry looked at us in disbelief.

  “Hot?” I saw Lyle mouth to Sherry.

  “Fucking hot?” she mouthed back.

  It didn’t matter to me if they thought I was hot; Alex Wescott was crazy about me! Suddenly I was catapulting to coolness. Skipping all the gooshy prom dates and dinners at the Olive Garden, landing in the funky Bohemia of twenty-something-ness. I was leaving the Jennis and Karis in a cloud of my dust!

  Alex and I drove around in my car, smoking cigarettes and listening to Tom Petty. We stopped at a Greek place for dinner and Alex casually ordered a beer. The waitress didn’t even flinch, so I ordered one too. Moments later she brought them to us on a roun
d tray, a paper doily attached to the bottom of each sweating glass. I felt like we were, like, twenty-four. I drew on my vast history of movie watching to come up with bored, clever comments. We were Heathers and Pump Up the Volume and The Breakfast Club all rolled into one.

  “Is there a park around here we could go to?” Alex asked after dinner.

  I knew what that meant! “Sure,” I said, eager to put my experience to the test.

  I took him to Willow River State Park, just a mile or two away. When we parked he said softly, in a voice that frightened me with its sincerity, “This is really nice.”

  Instead of attacking me or at least reaching for my hand, he closed his eyes and leaned his seat back until it was almost horizontal. “My parents are divorced. That’s why I moved here. You were probably wondering what made me come here, right? Yeah, they split up. I’m with my mom and she wanted to come here because her sister lives here,” he started in.

  What? Was I his psychiatrist all of a sudden? We couldn’t be characters in a John Hughes movie anymore if he was going to act all needy and nice.

  He poured his whole life story out for me and by the end I was pretty sure he was gay, but that didn’t stop us from going out for the rest of high school. We didn’t have sex for almost a year, and then we only did it about five times before the subject just stopped coming up. And that made the whole Dougie thing so much more pointless and regrettable.

  Chapter 51

  Three days undercover in a hotel with morning sickness that lasts all day is not an experience I would wish on anyone. I kept a steady stream of porn coming my way, the volume muted and a towel draped over the screen when I’d reached my limit of smut. I tried to read some books I’d brought along, but I could not concentrate enough to even follow along with the room service menu. When I woke up the first morning there, I walked to a coffee shop and set up an email account, just buying a cookie with cash. I sent Sexxy Lady a message that said, “Hi. I think I’m coming down with the flu. What should I do?” but the message bounced right back to me. Well, at least I had it set up. Then I went to a different coffee shop and bought a coffee and orange juice with our credit card. I felt completely paranoid, like I was going to goof up somehow without realizing it. I took the coffee and juice back to the room and sat there, waiting for time to pass. It took all my willpower not to stay planted at the coffee shop with the computers.

  I cried every time I thought of the picture of Jeb, afraid I was going to get a letter like that with a picture of Adrian. And then I thought about how my baby had bad, bad parents and I cried some more. If anyone had knocked on the door they instantly would have known I wasn’t half of a happy couple on a dirty rendezvous.

  By three o’clock I was starving so I ordered some pasta primavera for myself, and a porterhouse steak for my invisible husband. I put on a slinky little nightie with a robe tied loosely over it and turned on the shower. The food arrived with those big metal domes over the plates, reminding me of decapitations on platters. The man started to push the cart into the room, but I grabbed it instead.

  “Thanks, I’ve got it,” I said. I handed him a five-dollar bill. I have no idea about tipping. That’s Adrian’s territory. I set the domes inside the closet.

  I worked my way through the pasta primavera, then cut the steak into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet. The baked potato wasn’t too bad though. I decided I had earned the right to watch some non-porn, so I turned on the Gardening Channel and learned how to install a fishpond.

  I waited all evening for something to happen, some phone call or something, but Adrian stayed true to his word and the night passed without any contact.

  The next morning I went to the coffee shop to check my email. There was a message from my husband that simply said, “I have the flu but everything else is o.k. I am going home.”

  So I endured one more day and checked out at nine the next morning. When I got home my car was in the garage. Adrian greeted me at the door with a kiss.

  “Did you have a good time in Atlanta?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I know. I’m just trying to be nice. Why don’t you come with me to pick up Frisky?”

  “Why don’t we just leave him there.”

  “Right. Come on.”

  “Seriously,” I said, “do we need him anymore?”

  “No,” he said.

  The heaviness of that one word settled over us. I began to cry.

  “But,” he continued, softly, “we’re going to get him because he’s our dog. Our pet. Come on.”

  “Can we talk about what happened? What did you do?” I whispered.

  “I’m going on my own then. I’ll be home soon.”

  “No, I want to come with you.”

  We rode along without saying anything for a few minutes and then Adrian said, “You need to trust that I would never intentionally hurt anyone unless I had to. He would have killed us.”

  “Why couldn’t you have gone to the police? What kind of people are we? I feel like I‘m living someone else’s life. I don’t even know you!”

  “That’s not fair! I just put my life on the line for us! You have no idea what I went through these last few days! I have had two hours of sleep in three days! And that’s just the beginning of it. Do you think I ever saw my life going this way? Hell no! But sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to do until you do it. Now I need to be able to trust you. Can I trust you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The police aren’t God. There’s no reason to get them involved. It’s too late for that.”

  He looked at me hard. And we were both afraid of what the other could be capable of.

  Chapter 52

  My high school graduation was a no-frills affair. My parents came to it and then took me out for dinner afterwards at an Italian restaurant called Francesca’s. There was no party. Who besides relatives would we invite? Alex Wescott had broken up with me so he could go off to college and become gay for real. So it was fine with me to bypass having a party. My parents gave me a gift, though: A brand new computer for college. That was a pretty big deal. They were also paying for me to go to the UW. Honestly, both were more than I ever expected. I don’t think I even would have gotten into Madison, but to my surprise, Dave Douglas wrote a really nice letter of recommendation for me.

  I drove myself there and moved myself in, which turned out to be a weird thing to do. All the other students had their parents and families with them. I thought back to my parents helping Valencia and Van move into their dorms. “Your parents aged thirty years when Valencia and Van died,” my Grandmother told me once. Which made them older than her. So when I looked at it like that, it made sense that they couldn’t be there with me. They were practically eighty!

  For the first time I thought about all the things Valencia and Van left in their dorms. Why couldn’t I remember how we got their possessions back? Did other students ransack their dressers and closets? I considered asking my mom about it, but what was the point?

  It was 1993, and I was as old as they were when they died. I envied them for starting college with all their dreams planted in the future, believing in the power of their four years of work to sow a life of plenty. I envied them for their hope. They had been clean, vast expanses of promise, looking forever forward instead of dwelling in the past.

  I, on the other hand, felt like a person with an infected, stinking wound. I resigned myself to a life of bloodstained bandages and flies swarming around me. I’d given up on being somebody. Being average, having a few friends, would have been good enough. But I was continually reminded of how damaged I was by the way nearly everyone avoided me.

  My mother would have slapped me if she’d heard me say how I envied them. Then I remembered that, finally, I didn’t live under my parents’ control anymore.

  I was nervous to have a roommate. When I got to my room she was nowhere to be seen, but I saw that she had already begun to move in. The bed closer to the door had luggage
and boxes on it. I took the other bed but felt like this mystery girl might get mad at me. What if she had just set her stuff on the first bed because it was closer, but wanted the far bed? I paced the tiny room, hoping she would come back so I could avoid making an important decision like where we would each sleep for the entire year. The minutes ticked by.

  I paced around some more. “Please don’t let her be a J or a K girl,” I whispered to God. A toilet flushed in the distance, as if in response, and I frowned.

  My roommate and I had exchanged one letter apiece over the summer but hers had been, literally, five sentences long without a photo (that gave me hope; A Jenni or a Keeli would probably send about ten pictures, half in swimwear). I knew her name was Sara Murdock and she was from Boise, Idaho. That was all. The boxes on her side of the room were just cardboard boxes and I wasn’t about to poke inside to get a better idea, so I fidgeted with my purse, waiting for her to return. After nearly an hour of thumbing through a magazine, waiting for the door to open, I gave up.

  I hauled my boxes in and started to unpack them. Besides my computer, I had only four boxes and a big duffel bag, compared to the crammed-full U-Hauls and pickup trucks I saw all around me. There were student helpers in red shorts and white Bucky Badger t-shirts to help me move my computer. I didn’t have the mini fridge, television, stereo, or other necessities of college life. I wondered what Mystery Girl was bringing into this. I knew she would hate me and be disappointed to be stuck with me. I felt sorry for her already.

  It didn’t take long to unpack. I sat on my new bed excited, but a little surprised that I felt lonely. I missed my parents, which was a new feeling for me, and I considered calling them. Just to let them know I was settled in. Then I remembered the elaborate care packages my mom packed for my brother and sister and I started to cry. This is ridiculous, I decided. Here I was, away from them. Hadn’t I wanted this for my whole life? I decided to take a walk.