by K. B. Draper
The U-Haul Diary
K. B. Draper
Illustrations by:
essie Maxwell
From the Author:
The U-Haul Diary is a very loose interpretation, semifictional, or a lot fictional, autobiographical story of my dating life. I’ve changed some of the names and events to protect the not-so innocent, namely them, and the innocent, namely ME … duh! (Yes, I have avoidance issues.) Plus, honestly, I don’t have a very good memory and I have ADD, so I don’t always remember the things that I actually paid attention to. Oh, and there’s the small fact that I’m scared of a couple of them.
So, what you get is The U-Haul Diary, the story of how my love life replays in my mind. I hope you learn a little and laugh a lot!
3rd Edition
Copyright ©2014 by K.B. Draper, LLC
Illustrations by Jessie Maxwell
Cover art by Nick Freeman, Out Foxed Media
Edited by Elizabeth Andersen
www.kbdraper.com
ISBN978-1-105-15215-3 Paperback
ASIN B00QPJNOCG Ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form without permission from the author.
Table of Contents
ONE-Sabrina January 1991–March 1993
TWO-Stacy March 1993-July 1994
THREE-Maggie August 1994–October 1994
FOUR-Loren December 1994–March 1995
FIVE-Lindsey October 1995–January 1996
SIX-Loren May 1996–October 1996
SEVEN-Jordyn August 1997–April 1998
EIGHT-Loren May 1998–June 1998
NINE-Carly August 1998–February 2000
TEN-Loren September 2000
ELEVEN-Alicia November 2001
TWELVE-Abby January 2002–December 2002
THIRTEEN-Kellie May 2003–February 2005
FOURTEEN-Nicole July 2005–September 2007
FIFTEEN-Sometime Later
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WITH MANY THANKS: To all the amazing and wonderful people in my life. Stacy W., for being there for me and for supporting me through the process of writing this book. If it weren’t for you, this wouldn’t have happened. Pat, thanks for all your time and support. If nothing else comes from this book, I’m glad I met you because of it. Thanks to Jessie for bringing the characters to life! Thank you to Stacy S., Sheila, Janet, and all my friends for being there through the breakups and makeups, all the meet-’n’-greets, and all the good-byes. Mom, Dad, Brook and “steps,” thank you for letting me be me and loving me anyway.
I might not have been the luckiest in love, but I’m so lucky in life! Thanks to all of you.
You always remember your first love.
Unfortunately, it’s the breaking up with her that’s the problem…
Sabrina January 1991–March 1993
I knew college would provide me with expanded lessons in common educational subjects such as English, science, algebra, and anatomy. I failed to realize these lessons would not all be taught in a classroom. For instance, I had an idea one could have a relatively good command of the English language, however, after a small consumption of keg beer, I would be reduced to the following phases: “You’re the coolest ever,” “I love you,” and “No seriously, I really love you.” In the area of science, I learned you cannot mix cheap brown liquid consumed from an aluminum can with any other color liquid consumed from glass bottles or two-ounce glass vials without having a serious chemical reaction. My algebra lesson came from finding the answer to the question: If at approximately 10:45 p.m. you pour a twelve-ounce container of liquid into a funnel with a six-inch circumference, which then travels at approximately sixty-five miles per hour down a two-foot-long clear tube which has a one-inch circumference, what would be the approximate time you arrive at the toilet? The answer: 10:46 p.m., 10:49 p.m., 1:00 a.m., 2:14 a.m. Then there was anatomy.
My best friend, Kristi, and I ended up choosing the same college. Besides being tall, beautiful, and an excellent student, Kristi was also a skilled basketball player who had been offered a full-ride scholarship. Then there was me: not-so-tall, not-so-beautiful, not-such-an-excellent student. My parents saved all their college aspirations for my A-obtaining younger sister since there were no offers in my mailbox. Despite that, it had been easy to pick a school. My options were some Harvard place that seemed somewhat pretentious if the movie depictions were accurate; some place that required a long flight over water, which I thought would be a little obnoxious when bringing home laundry for mom to do on the weekends; my hometown college; and a college at which I had attended a week-long basketball camp.
My very, with an extra helping of very, Baptist hometown college didn’t seem like a likely choice since I didn’t really like going to church, or to school for that matter. Therefore, I figured I wouldn’t excel in classes that taught church. And since I already have a fair amount of explaining to do once I arrive at the Pearly Gates, I didn’t think I needed the added task of explaining an F in Religion. So, a non-church, non-pretentious, get home to wash your clothes without jet lag college it was.
I enjoyed college life for the first semester. However, by the second semester I knew I’d flunk out if I didn’t replace the sport of seeing how high I could stack empty beer cans with more useful activities. I pondered my athletic talents and deemed I have above average skills in most sports. Basketball was my favorite sport but, by college standards, I was lacking in the height department and in the skill department since I failed to impress the basketball coach in camp. So I quickly ruled out basketball. Volleyball was a sport I excelled in, but once I discovered that in college the women wore underwear over their underwear instead of shorts, I quickly decided I didn’t have the thighs for it. I considered track and field for a millisecond until I remembered I hate running and I didn’t figure at five-foot-six and 125 pounds that my long jump or shot put skills would impress anyone. All that remained was softball.
With softball, I was relatively confident in my fielding, throwing, and batting skills, but I heard that college softball was largely populated with “dykes.” I didn’t know what dams had to do with softball. Training, maybe? I guess having to run up and down them could be beneficial and add a little fun? Adds kind of an American Gladiator element to the game.
On the first day of tryouts I was a little disappointed the outfield was the typical flat green expanse. There were some American Gladiator like she-men on the team, but they never once hit me with foam-ended batons or yanked me by the ankle off a large pyramid of exercise mats. They did, later, swiftly remove me from a table at a local bar, but that was really for my own good and for the good of the rest of the patrons. Damn two-for-one shot specials.
I made friends quickly but developed an especially close friendship with the left fielder, Sabrina. Sabrina was friendly, attractive, could beat me eight out of ten times in the torturous after-practice sprints, and was the coach’s favorite.
Sabrina was also living with her boyfriend, Ryan. When I wasn’t studying or practicing, I hung out with Sabrina. Ryan, as most guys would do when a single girl is always hanging out with their girlfriend and severely limiting their opportunity to have sex, started with the “you should go out with my roommate” suggestions.
“How about Tom?” Ryan suggested first.
Tom was one of those know-it-all, arrogant, geeky computer guys. I pictured that one date with him would end with me letting him know where he could byte me and where he could shove his hard drive.
“Ahhh, no thanks,” I replied.
“How about Dwayne? He’s cool,” Ryan offered as a second option.
Dwayne was nice enough, but he looked like the Count fro
m Sesame Street, minus the monocular eyeglass. I could’ve almost overlooked that resemblance, but in my head, every time Dwayne spoke I heard a Count-like ending.
Dwayne: “Hey, would you grab me a beer?”
In my head, I heard, “One beer ahhh–ah-haa.”
Dwayne: “Dude, how’re your grades?”
I heard, “2 C’s, 1 B, 1 A ahhh-ah-haa.”
Knowing this, I couldn’t imagine going out with Dwayne, let alone having sex with him. I’d be hearing, two boobs ahhh-ah-haa, one penis ahhh-ah-haa, one vagina ahh-ah-haa, zero orgasms ahhh-ah-haa.
“Uh, no.”
That would now be two nos, ahh-ah-haa.
“Okay, how about Jeremy?” Ryan asked, sighing.
Jeremy? Jeremy? Why am I so reluctant to date any of Ryan’s roommates? It’s not like guys have been beating down my door since I started college.
Pondering a date with Jeremy, I suddenly flashed back to my junior year in high school.
I had found myself standing in front of Kristi—confused, speechless, trembling, and changed forever. Kristi had known there was something wrong when I stood shaking in front of her. She looked at me with concern and care.
“What’s wrong?”
I didn’t and couldn’t respond immediately. I only stood there looking at her, attempting to find my balance while feeling a growing ache and throbbing coming from my upper thigh. I reached for her in desperate need, grasped her, wanting to cling to something familiar, for her to hold me. She placed her hands on mine with growing concern on her face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked again.
Finally, finding my voice, I blurted out, “I just saw Jeremy Stringer’s balls!”
It had been my worst day in PE history. I’d just been struck in the thigh by a rubber ball thrown by Randall Butler, who had freakishly good dodgeball skills. As I hobbled to the side of the court and past all of Randall’s other victims, I looked down at my leg to see if the bastard had actually left a mark this time, when out of the corner of my eye I saw something protruding from the inside of someone’s shorts. It was like passing a car wreck. I knew I didn’t want to see but I couldn’t help but turn and stare directly at the catastrophe. And there they were just hanging out, all wrinkly, hairy, sweaty, and disgusting, just sitting right on the hardwood floor. Geez, couldn’t he feel the difference between gym floor and cotton?
I finally peeled my eyes away to look up at their owner. Of course, it couldn’t be Shane, captain of the football team, or any member of the “hot popular guy” clique. It was Jeremy Stringer, whose sole reputation was based on eating boogers, not all of which were his and not all of them when he was in elementary school.
I shivered at the memory, came back to the present, and looked back at Ryan to say “NO WAY,” but he had a desperate look on his face. Sigh. “Okay, fine. Jeremy. But tell him he has to wear pants. No shorts. Ever!”
“What? Why? Wait ... never mind. I’ll tell him!” Ryan said with just a little too much relief in his voice.
I was a little relieved, too. I was kind of tired of being the third wheel when I went out with Ryan and Sabrina, and the pants-wearing Jeremy was a nice guy. He was an Eagle Scout, a twenty-two-year-old Eagle Scout. I didn’t realize there was a career in Scouts after the age of thirteen. I was apparently wrong. But hey, it might turn out to be a good thing. I mean with his sworn oath to uphold the Eagle Scout honor, he’d be handy if we got lost in the woods and I got a hankering for a s’more. He could just build a fire on the spot with pocket lint and a stick. Not to mention, he was a virgin who was saving himself for marriage so I figured he was a relatively safe date. I was counting on his vow of abstinence unless we got drunk, flew to Vegas, and got married. I wouldn’t have to worry about seeing another Jeremy’s sweaty, hairy danglies anytime in the near future.
As the softball season went on Sabrina and I grew closer and closer. We’d hang out after practice and on the weekends, occasionally including Ryan and Jeremy, but more often than not finding reasons for it to be just the two of us. We went on this way for several months until she called one night to ask if she could come over. She said Ryan was having a party, she was tired, and she wanted to go to bed. Always willing to help a friend and happy for any excuse to not study art history, I quickly replied, “Sure!”
It didn’t take long before I heard the front door to the house open and close, and footsteps head my way down the hall. When she got back to my room, she dropped on the bed next to me, not the least bit tired acting.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing. I just thought we could talk for a while,” she replied.
“I thought you were tired?”
“Not really. I just said that so I could get out of there.”
“Okay, so what do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Nothing really,” she said, looking around my room.
I was immediately glad I had done a quick floor sweep of dirty clothes before she arrived.
“Kristi here?”
“No. She’s out with either the mascot guy or the baseball dude,” I answered, secretly hoping she was with the mascot guy. Though the mascot guy spent a small amount of his time in a mule costume, I thought the baseball guy was pretty much a jackass all the time.
Sabrina was acting weird so I started talking to fill the awkward silence. I was thirty minutes into a conversation about resorting to licking the rocks in geology class to recognize them by taste since the typical visual and physical identification techniques were failing me and we had a test on Tuesday, when she stopped me by saying, “I want to kiss you.”
I was caught off guard. I looked at her, speechless and a little perplexed. That was pretty much the exact opposite response I’d gotten from the geology class when I told them about my rock-licking idea. Of course, I’d followed that conversation up with actually licking a chunk of peridotite, which I quickly renamed peri-doo-doo, since it tasted like crap. (I did get that one right on the test.) Sabrina apparently took my non-response as permission and leaned over and kissed me. It was soft at first, just a touching of the lips, but my heart began to thump, my lips went tingly, and my stomach twisted. It was probably my delayed reaction to the peri-doo-doo. Then she kissed me harder. The full impact of her actions hit me. Nope, this is definitely not from licking a rock.
I pulled away quickly, looked at her, and then slid off the side of the bed abruptly. “Um, yeah. Can you hold on a minute? I’ll be right back.”
My mind was swirling and I was a little taken over by the moment, but I managed to move down the hall to the bathroom. I walked in, closed and locked the door behind me, made my way directly over to the toilet, and threw up. Twice.
I’m twenty years, four months, and nine days old. And I’m gay. Gay: The new word my college education had also taught me. I think. I kissed a girl, so I’m gay. Wait. Sabrina kissed me so that doesn’t mean I’m gay … but … I liked it, sooo I’m pretty sure that means I am. Hmmm … oh well.
I brushed my teeth. Twice. Then I returned to my bedroom and kissed her back.
I woke the next morning to the phone ringing. Thoughts of last night’s events flashed through my head. Maybe it was just a dream. I stretched and assessed my mental prowess. I decided it was extremely low and that it would be a complete waste of time for my professor to attempt to teach me anything about psychology and personal adjustment this morning. Of course, I was dreaming about kissing girls, so there may be a slight need for some “personal adjustment.” Nah. I flipped over to go back to sleep and struck Sabrina in the face with my elbow. She shot up in pain at the exact second Kristi opened my bedroom door.
“Your mom is on the pho-” Kristi took one step in the room, phone in her outstretched hand, and froze.
I looked at her, looked at Sabrina, and then looked back at Kristi, who cocked her head to the side and gave me a sly smile. The blood drained from my face as a flash of the last two months ran through my head.
D
uring our first week of college, Kristi came back after her first day of basketball practice with two pairs of new basketball shoes, four sets of practice uniforms, and one big lesbian admirer. At the time I found this amusing. Kristi, however, did not. This of course caused me to make fun of her and her wannabe lesbian (another word my college education added to my vocabulary) lover at every given opportunity. Now, looking at her half-cocked smile, I was really regretting my actions, especially since my harassment had escalated to a daily persecution after her lesbian admirer had given her a present. This in and of itself justified a small amount of shit-giving. It was a gold necklace and charm with “Someone Special” spelled out in delicate cursive script. For the past two months, I mercilessly harassed her about the necklace. I’d called out to her at random times. “Hey, Kristi, guess what?”
“What?”
“You’re special.”
We’d go out to eat and she’d ask, “What are you getting?”
“Well, I’m thinking about the special, seeing as how I’m withhh someone sooo SPECIAL.”
We’d be walking together and I’d rush ahead to open the handicap entrances to buildings, and as she walked through I’d say “This is the special person’s entrance.” Not exactly politically correct, but it amused me. Most recently I had added to my repertoire of “special” jokes. Every time she was in the bathroom I’d fake irritation, bang on the door, and yell, “COME ON ALREADY! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? SOMEONE SPECIAL?”
I sighed. This was it. I’m dead. My perfect, quiet, shit-taking friend is going to take this opportunity for the ideal payback.
Her eyes narrowed as she arched a brow.
I watched as I knew, in her mind, she was formulating the ultimate revenge phrase, “I’m sorry she can’t come to the phone right now because she’s in bed with another woman.”
