Scrappy Little Nobody

by Anna Kendrick

  But I didn’t say that. I was stuck in the limbo of wanting a fifth-grade relationship but not being able to admit it, even to myself. I mean, I wanted to do something before I graduated, but not everything. And the only thing worse than having sex or being a virgin loser forever would be having a mature conversation with a guy I liked about waiting until I was ready. The world would have ended.

  Even though I remember high school as a never-ending barrage of rejection, I would feel dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that there were guys who liked me. Or at least one. Noah left a rose by my locker on Valentine’s Day and had to trick me into walking past it, because my locker was on the third floor and I didn’t use it. I panic-hugged him, said “No thank you,” and walked away before I had to look at his face. He was remarkably cool about it and made sure things didn’t get weird. We stayed close friends throughout high school, and when he asked me on a Friday, “You wouldn’t want to go to prom on Saturday, would you?” I wrongly assumed the late ask and casual tone meant “as friends.” I was grossed out and frankly kind of hurt when he drove me to a motel after the dance. I had to pull the old phone call to Mom where I loudly whine “Why not?” and say my mom’s being a bitch and I have to go home. (An excellent tool for getting kids out of situations they don’t want to be in. My mom always played along and I would recommend this trick to any parent.)

  Some bitter boys reading this might accuse me of “friend-zoning,” but I’d like to say that even if a girl has misinterpreted a situation that someone else thinks was obvious, she does not owe her male friends anything.I

  Noah knew me well. He knew I was a virgin, in every possible sense, and that I didn’t take it lightly. But the motel implied that he hoped we could fool around, even though we weren’t dating. He was a nice boy who did something skeezy, and it sucked. We stayed in touch for a while after I moved to LA. In fact, he and a friend once stayed on my couch for a week and left a lovely thank-you note on the refrigerator the morning they left. I woke up and saw the note and felt guilty for being irritated by the end of the visit. Then my roommate stuck his head out of our bathroom. “There’s an enormous shit sitting in the toilet.” Maybe you’re just destined to lose touch with some people.

  * * *

  I. Needless to say, this applies to every arrangement of gender and orientation. I mention males pressuring females because that’s been my only personal experience of it, but it turns out my personal journey isn’t an infallible barometer of the entire human experience. Weird, right?

  i guess we’re doing this, or how does this scene end?

  I met Landon through the internet. Not ON the internet like some kind of freak. No, I met him the normal way: Heather (my hot blond friend) met Brent (Landon’s hot blond friend) on Myspace and those two introduced us right around the time they were getting tired of having hot blond dry-humping sessions. Because hot blonds need break-up wingmen, I guess?

  Landon was attractive and he knew Anchorman by heart, which at the time passed for really funny. He was kind of a jock, which made me want to turn my nose up at him—as I did with all jocks—so I could let the world know that not being with a handsome, athletic type was MY CHOICE. But he was persistent and a genuine romantic, and when I weighed my options logically it seemed silly not to date him. I wanted to escape the wasteland of being the nineteen-year-old loner and, to the naked eye, this guy was perfect. He was polite and punctual and my friends liked him a lot . . . and he was very handsome.

  One day during our courtship, he dropped off a novelty trucker hat on my doorstep. I know we’ve all figured out that novelty trucker hats are hideous, but it was cool at the time. Today, that would be like a guy giving you a spiked ear cuff, or a turtleneck crop top (or for future editions: a novelty trucker hat, because fashion is cyclical). It was sweet and original and I could resist no more. Let’s be real: he had a pulse and he wanted to be my boyfriend.

  On our first official date, he took me to a trendy restaurant. I rolled my eyes over how “LA” it all was. I’d never been somewhere so stylish, which should have made me nervous, but being openly disdainful of anything cool is in my comfort zone, so I still had a couple moves at my disposal. I really shine in a Taco Bell parking lot with a water bottle full of vodka, but I could work with this.

  After dinner, we went back to my apartment and talked with my roommates for an appropriate length of time before retiring to my room and crawling into the luxury of my twin bed. We fooled around for a while, I employed a few suggestions from the early chapters of the Guide to Getting It On!, no one recoiled in horror at any point—a successful first-date-level encounter.

  I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, the first thing that went through my mind was Why is he still here? I was thrilled! I was proud of myself. I was still in control! Just because we’d hooked up didn’t mean he had the upper hand. I was still powerful, and hard-hearted, and I could walk away from this whenever I felt like it.

  The next morning, we drove to breakfast and I told him as much, just so he knew the score. “Okay, creepy,” he said, and turned up the radio.

  I assessed the situation. We’d had a nice dinner, some playful banter, and fooling around that was in no way objectionable. All right, world, let’s do this, let’s have me a damn boyfriend.

  I looked at dating him as a kind of personal experiment. Something about him being a jock or liking nice restaurants or having the stench of family money despite his studio apartment made me feel like this would be a safe bet for me. In theory, I should have been intimidated. Instead, I felt superior. He’d also never met a girl as bossy as me, and knowing that emboldened me even more. I am a boss bitch, and this dude is too basic to hurt me. Neither of those slang terms were around yet, but that’s the vibe I had.

  I am a jerk for feeling superior to anyone ever, and that was equally true of Landon (despite being the kind of guy who saved up to buy the exact suit Ashton Kutcher wore on the cover of GQ). I made fun of him a lot—luckily that’s the kind of thing that comes across as playful at nineteen—but Landon turned out to be fun, caring, and seriously right-brain smart.

  After a satisfactory couple of months, I felt more committed to this “dating experiment” and started subconsciously, and sometimes consciously, making a bizarre coming-of-age checklist. (Had I learned nothing from my beads-and-lipstick pen pal episode?) It was mostly stuff I’d seen in movies, and I knew it was stupid, but every milestone gave me a sense that I was approaching normalcy. Nothing in my life was going especially well at that point, but if the guy I was seeing burned a CD for me (Check!) it felt like I was becoming a standard American adult.

  He asked me to take a road trip to meet his parents.

  “Okay. If I meet your parents, would that make us boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  “I thought we already were boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “No, we’re not. But would you agree that me ‘meeting your parents’ would make us officially boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, creepy, I guess it would.”

  “Okay, great. I’m looking forward to it.”

  The road trip hit a lot of items on my imaginary relationship checklist. We shared painful childhood memories during the long stretches of the drive—Check! We took pictures kissing in front of national landmarks—Check! He showed me his childhood bedroom—Check! It was like a real relationship! All of it was genuinely meaningful to me, but the checklist was always there, giving me little bonus rushes of validation.

  After I met his parents and we got back to LA, I addressed a big unchecked box. “Okay, we’re boyfriend and girlfriend now. So we should have sex, right?”

  Landon had had sex before and always assured me that he was fine with what we were doing. Gently, he said, “I’d love to, but only if you want to, and if you think you’re ready.” He put his hand on my arm.

  “Blechhhh. Don’t make this weird, let’s just go have sex.”

  Sex was GREAT!! Why hadn’t anyone told me?!
I mean, it hurt. It actually hurt a lot, and not just for a “moment” the first time (I’m lookin’ at you, “erotic novels”). But, okay, it was crazy! Sex wasn’t like the other stuff at all!

  Each time we’d finish (actually the first few times no one “finished” per se, but, you know, we’d stop) I’d talk a mile a minute:

  “God, I wish I could explain what it feels like, but I can’t put it into words ’cause, like, a person is IN my body. You are IN my body. And I’d never really thought about it, but nothing’s ever been IN my body before, you know? Like, I can’t just open a hatch in my leg and put something in there, you know? What does it feel like to you?”

  “It feels really good.”

  “Ugh, that’s not what I mean. You are the worst. Tomorrow can we try a different position?!”

  I felt alive. I didn’t just feel different, I felt like I had superpowers. And I definitely felt like I was in the club. I saw a cool-looking girl in line at Starbucks and thought, I’ll bet that girl has sex. And I have sex, too. We get it. Like, I could go up to her and be like, Oh, hey, do you have sex? and she’d be like, Yeah, and I’d be like, Yeah, me too. I totally know what it feels like.

  The sex checklist was the most egregious of all. Most people I knew had been at it for years now, and I needed to catch up. I wanted to check off all the greatest hits. I barreled through every cliché, and it turned out a lot of it wasn’t that sexy, but we both pretended that it was. We did the blindfold thing, we did the whipped-cream-and-chocolate-sauce thing, I bought a tacky red bustier for Valentine’s Day and fuzzy green handcuffs for St. Patrick’s. Oh, and the Guide! I put that baby into well-organized action. When Landon would question something, I’d pull out the Guide and point out that according to a book I bought in a West Hollywood thrift store called Out of the Closet, plenty of couples do it.

  Shower sex—Check! Sex with ice—Check! Sex in the back of a parked car like teenagers in a movie about the 1950s—Check!

  I wanted to ask if he was circumcised, because I couldn’t tell, but my roommate Peter told me, “Dude, you can’t ask him that. Don’t ask that.” I don’t know why I wasn’t allowed to ask, I guess because it would make me look stupid, or make him uncomfortable, but I didn’t know how else I was supposed to find out. (After we broke up I didn’t see another penis for a year and by that time I couldn’t retroactively compare the two, so I still don’t know.) Aside from that, I was in the trenches, having fun and learning a lot. Landon and I were both more interested in the other person’s pleasure, not because we were selfless people, but because we got validation from it. It led to some energetic but fruitless evenings.

  Anyway, the sex was a blast and the relationship was going great! Well, it was going okay. Well, it was tolerable. At the end of the day, we were just incompatible (which we wouldn’t figure out for a few more months) and better off as friends (which we wouldn’t figure out for a year after breaking up). But c’mon, we were living the dream: going on coffee runs in the morning, finding ways to kill time in the afternoon, and having sex before bed. Being normal!

  About four months into dating, we were casually having the kind of philosophical conversation that no nineteen-year-olds should be allowed to have without supervision, and Landon said, “Well, sex before marriage is a sin.”

  At this point, in my opinion, religion played a convenient role in Landon’s life. The hypocrisy bothered me and I liked to debate him on it. This was so flagrant it was delicious.

  “Excuse me? Then what the hell have we been doing?” Guys, I wasn’t even that mad, it was just too silly for words.

  “Well, no, I mean I used to believe sex before marriage was a sin. Now I think it’s okay as long as the people are in love.”

  “I’m not in love with you. We’ve never said ‘I love you.’ Are you in love with me?” Admittedly, I wasn’t exactly setting him up to say it, even if he had been.

  “Um, okay, no, but we care about each other.” I rolled my eyes. He was digging himself to China. Then he said, “And you always initiate it.”

  I stared at him.

  “What does that mean? What is that? Some Adam and Eve temptation complex?” (A term I made up on the spot.) “Are you saying you want to be having less sex? Or just that when we have sex, it’s my fault? Need I remind you that you’d slept with seven girls before we met?”

  “I’m just saying that it’s one thing if we can’t help ourselves. You don’t have to be so, like, ready and willing. I’m not saying we wouldn’t be having sex at all, it’s just you don’t always have to initiate it.”

  “So, what, you’d prefer it if I had to be . . . convinced?”

  He chose his words carefully. “Okay, it’s just that the chase is kind of gone. It’s kind of a turnoff.”

  Huh, I thought, I wonder how much therapy I’ll need to undo the damage from this moment.

  The origin of his logic had taken a turn, but I couldn’t even be bothered to point it out. The behavior that I’d thought was adventurous, and awesome, and earning me girlfriend-of-the-damn-century points was making him lose interest in fucking me because I seemed too . . . available? Three months ago I was terrified of being outed as the virgin freak. Now I’d had sex with all of one person and somehow I was getting slut-shamed.

  I’m not interested in pretending to be a reluctant participant because you think girls who like sex are a turnoff. If you think girls are supposed to object to sex until they find themselves incapable of resisting your magic penis, fuck you. (Unless this is a role-play fantasy between consenting adults, in which case I’ll go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and grab some props right now.)

  We fought for a while, he backtracked a lot, and we made up. I don’t think he meant for it to make me feel the way that it did. Honestly the worst thing that happened was I wrote some truly appalling poetry about it.

  No one was going to make me think women were supposed to hate sex. I knew I was right, which is a comfortable place for me, even when I’m really pissed off. But it rattled me. I found it troubling, because I wondered if other guys felt the same way.

  We didn’t last much longer. He drove to my apartment one afternoon—on a day that I had miraculously bothered to do my hair and makeup—and said he felt like it wasn’t working anymore. At first, I thought I could just ignore that it was happening. I kept going about business in my room. “You’re right, I need to make more of an effort. We should hang out with your friends more, I know that.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s it. I just think— Can you sit down?”

  Okay. Crap. We’re really doing this. And it sucks. But at least I look half cute.

  Our relationship had started as an experiment in adulthood, but I was really invested now (Oh! Real emotional investment—Check!) and he was dumping me. Deep breaths. Obviously, a breakup wasn’t on my checklist, but I wanted to make the best of a bad situation.

  “So,” I said, “what happens now?” He was giving me this horrible concerned face. The pity stung worse than the rejection. I wanted to punch him.

  “Well, we can stay friends if you want. I know I’d like to. But I’ll understand if you—”

  “No, I mean what happens right now. Like, how do you finish a breakup? Like . . . how does this scene end?”

  (Okay. A word here: I’m not some sociopath who can’t tell the difference between real life and a movie. I was just using “scene” to differentiate the immediate situation from our hypothetical future dynamic. That said, my deliberately robotic demeanor probably confirmed that he was right to cut and run.)

  He’d gotten the ball rolling; I wasn’t planning to change his mind. I just needed to know how to wrap it up. Still, he was taken aback.

  “Um . . . I don’t know. Do you want me to stay for a while?”

  “So we can make ‘pity’ faces at each other for half an hour? I’d rather you just leave.” I was being vindictive, but give me a break, I was getting dumped.

  “Okay . . .” He was doing a
good job of looking appropriately bewildered by my callous response. Whatever, I reasoned, I totally let that guy off the hook. Easiest breakup ever.

  I cried after he left. And it wasn’t just something I needed to “get under my belt.” It sucked. And my ego hurt. That night my roommates stayed home with me. We watched bad movies and ate cookie dough straight from the tube and talked about what a jerk my ex-boyfriend was—Check!

  I went ahead and hated Landon passionately, but only because I thought it was another requirement of my relationship experiment. If you’d asked me about him while we were still dating, I doubt I would have said, “I can’t get enough of him and I feel great about where our relationship is heading.”

  Half of my brain knew it was a blessing. The other half screamed, “How dare he dump me?!” That feeling only lasted about a week, and then I got comfortable knowing that I had an “ex-boyfriend.” Talking about “my ex” was just another thing that normalized me, so I counted it as a win.

  The lingering confusion about how liking sex with my boyfriend could be a turnoff messed with me for a little while, but no more so than the virgin/whore stuff that’s everywhere in our culture. The hard part is that Landon is a good guy, and sometimes good people can still hurt each other.

  I didn’t have sex again for a year, but based on who I was hanging out with during that period of my life, I doubt I missed anything spectacular. Lesson for young men: if you want your eventual wife to be excited about sucking your dick for forty years, don’t create a generation of women who think enthusiasm about sex is a bad thing.

  I ran into Landon about a year after we broke up and immediately realized I didn’t hate him at all, and we’ve been close friends since. His favorite thing to do is drag me to Starbucks even though he knows I don’t drink coffee anymore. My favorite thing to do is whisper “He beats me” to the barista when Landon turns his back. He does not find it funny at all.