Sloppy Firsts

by Megan Mccafferty

  "You give me an effing headache. Good night." Scotty hung up the phone.

  And I was tired, tired, tired, tired.

  the twenty-ninth

  Today was Hy’s trip to N.Y.C. with the Clueless Crew. Big whoop.

  It turned out that I didn’t have a meet. Coach Kiley pulled us from today’s relays to rest us up for the more important meets coming up. I didn’t intentionally lie to them. But once I realized my mistake, I didn’t correct it either. Too demoralizing.

  So I could’ve been on a bus to N.Y.C. this morning. Instead, I was downing coffee and Cap’n Crunch while my mother yapped about making table favors for the big day. But I was too tired for tulle talk.

  "Spare me, Mom."

  "I am sick of your bad moods," she said.

  "It’s not my fault I’ve been PMS-ing for five months."

  "What?!"

  I informed her that I hadn’t had my period since December. And that’s when she freaked out. Her eyes immediately shot down to my abdomen, looking for signs of life.

  I laughed out loud. "Mom! There is no possible way I’m pregnant."

  Mom wanted me to go to the gyno but I told her I wasn’t getting in the stirrups until I was eighteen or sexually active—and let’s face it, we know which one of those is going to come first. So she called up our family doc, Dr. Hayden. To tell you the truth, I was incredibly relieved. It was about time I found out what was wrong with me.

  As soon as I got there, I remembered why I’d held off. I hate waiting rooms in doctors’ offices. First of all, they’re full of sick people, spreading their germs all over the place. I found this particularly annoying today because I wasn’t sick. I was getting all the contamination without giving any. Secondly, the magazines suck. I guess they figure Highlights will appeal to both ends of the drooling spectrum: children and senile senior citizens. Everyone in between can just die of boredom, or of whatever disease you’re at the doctor’s office for, since they make you sit there so damn long.

  After an eternal wait, I was finally called into the examining room.

  "Do you want me to go with you?" my mom asked.

  "No."

  First I got measured (5 feet 5 inches) and weighed (105 pounds in my clothes). Then I put on the gown and got my blood pressure and temp taken. The nurse drew some blood. I gave a urine sample.

  Then I waited for another twenty-five excruciating minutes.

  Dr. Hayden finally came bustling into the room and got right down to business.

  "So Jessica, what’s the problem?"

  "Well, let’s just start off with the one that brought me here. I haven’t gotten my period in five months."

  "I see. Jessica, I’m going to ask you some sensitive questions that I need to know the answers to. You can be sure I won’t tell your mother."

  "I’m not sexually active, if that’s what you want to know."

  "Yes, that’s one thing I wanted to know."

  He looked over my chart. "You’re very thin. Are you familiar with the female athlete triad?"

  Jesus Christ! My own doctor thinks I’m anorexic.

  "Perhaps you don’t eat enough and exercise too much, which contributes to the absence of the menstrual period.…"

  "Amenorrhea," I said.

  "Amenorrhea," he repeated, surprised that I knew the technical term. "Which, over time, leads to a third problem.…"

  "Osteoporosis."

  "Correct!" His enthusiastic affirmation reminded me of a combo of my professional counselor, Brandi, and Regis in the $32,000 round of Millionaire. "So you’re familiar with it?"

  "Yes, I’m familiar with it. Not only have I had months to think about this, but my coach has warned us all about it around a bizillion times. But I know that’s not the problem because I eat more food than any girl I know."

  "I see."

  "And I don’t vomit it up either, which is more than I can say about the girls I eat lunch with every day. Only they don’t eat. They sit there and worship anorexic models in magazines."

  "I see."

  "I hate them."

  "Who? The models in magazines?"

  "No," I said, picking at the fresh Band-Aid the nurse had just stuck on the crook of my arm. "My friends."

  As I sat there with my butt hanging out of the paper gown, I told him about how I stopped sleeping when Hope moved away. Then I told him all about how Hy and the Clueless Crew were blowing a bundle in the Village. Next I was revealing how my dad is obsessed with my running career and the pressure he puts on me to win every race and Notso Darling’s Agony of Defeat, Volume One. Then I exposed my mom’s obsession with my sister’s wedding. It got even more personal as I went on and on about asking Scotty to the reception, and how Kelsey is closing in on him, and to top it off, how I don’t have a boyfriend, probably because I’m too busy being in love with a guy who doesn’t know my name.

  But for some reason, I stopped short of telling him about the Marcus Flutie situation. I guess at the time I thought that would’ve been a bit too much information. I already knew that it was kind of needy and desperate and insane that I was spilling my guts to my doctor. But he was the first adult to treat me like I was one, too. Unlike my parents, he didn’t trivialize my feelings by trying to talk me out of them. He just sat there silently and let me go off, which I really appreciated. It was all very weird.

  Afterward, Dr. Hayden called my mom into his office so they could talk privately about me, which was very annoying. But I knew he couldn’t go into the details because of doctor-patient privilege and all. Five minutes later, my mom came out with a very tight smile.

  "Let’s go," she said through clenched teeth.

  "Bye, Jessica," Dr. Hayden said. "Have a great season. I’ll be looking for your name in the sports pages."

  I said good-bye. Then I asked my mom what he had said about me.

  "Nothing."

  "Isn’t it illegal to talk about my medical problems without me in the room? Don’t I have a right to know?"

  My mom sighed. "Not until you’re eighteen."

  "So you’re not going to tell me what’s wrong until I’m eighteen?"

  "No, I’m going to tell you what’s wrong right now," she said.

  I have to say, I was looking forward to this. I had my amateur opinion—that my mental instability was pushing me toward a nervous breakdown—but I wanted to hear what a pro thought was wrong with me.

  "Dr. Hayden thinks you could benefit from taking a multivitamin."

  What a disappointment. I thought he had really listened to me. Adults suck.

  "He also thinks I should consider taking you to a psychologist."

  Hallelujah! Now we were getting somewhere.

  "Does he think I’m borderline schizophrenic?"

  "No," she said. "He says you worry too much. Put on your seat belt."

  "I worry too much? I’ve always worried too much," I said. "That’s the best diagnosis we could get for a hundred dollars?"

  "He says stress is taking a toll on your health. That’s why you’re not sleeping and probably why you’re not getting your period. Put on your seat belt."

  "I will gladly live without my period …"

  "Put on your seat belt."

  I put on my seat belt.

  Dr. Hayden had given her the name of a good child/adolescent psychologist. If I were a legitimate wack-job, sure I’d hit the couch. But I told her there was no way I was going to see a shrink just to mellow out.

  "Is there anything you want to tell me?" she asked, very earnestly.

  Is there anything I want to tell her? Sure. There are a bizillion things that I want to tell her. If I could talk to her, I wouldn’t have had to spill my guts to poor Dr. Hayden, now would I? But as much as Mom would love a touching mother–daughter moment, she can’t suddenly become my bestest bud just because she stopped thinking about the big day for the two seconds it took her to ask the question. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

  "No."

  She sighed
for about ten minutes.

  "I’m not going to tell your father about this. It will only upset him, too," she said, picking up speed on the highway. "What I don’t understand is what you have to be so worried about in the first place. And why you feel the need to take it out on us …"

  I love that she twisted this around to make it about them and not me. That’s when I zoned out, listening to the hum of the tires. Staring at the yellow dashes on the road, I reveled in my contentment and my decision to keep my mouth shut from now on.

  May 6th

  Hope,

  Period Watch 2000 continues. Of course, my amenorrhea anxiety has reached an all-time high ever since I found out that there’s no legit diagnosis.

  So it’s no coincidence that my tolerance for the Clueless Crew has hit a new low. I’ll spare you a torturous travelogue of that shopping trip I told you about. Suffice it to say that Mr. D’Abruzzi’s credit card got quite a workout; the four of them have been sporting new gear and makeup all week. Blatant buddy-buying at its best. Or worst.

  And now Hy is the ringleader. She knew Wally D would pay up if Sara told him she’d been crying all the time because she was the only one left out on all the prom-related fun. No one noticed or cared that I wasn’t going to the prom. They were so completely suspended in their own collective delusional reality that they were oblivious to the fact that they’d left me out of their prom-related fun, and that the real reason Sara had been crying was because she thought she’d gotten knocked up. In one of her first acts of solidarity, Hy had rechristened Sara’s devirginizer That Frat-Boy Fuckhead.

  Hy now jokes with them like she enjoys it. As I’ve said many times, she wasn’t best-friend material for me. But I was cool with that as long as she wasn’t best-friend material for the Clueless Crew either. Hy changes personas as often as she changes the color of her highlights (currently shades of purple). Maybe she never was who I thought.

  Oh, and Scotty still isn’t talking to me. Combine all this with about three minutes of sleep each night, and the fact that prom hysteria is at its shrieky peak, and you’ll understand why I’m feeling psycho and not at all ready to run in the qualifying time trials for the state sectionals this afternoon. Hopefully, I’ll be cured before our next convo.

  Schizophrenically yours, J.

  may

  the fourteenth

  This is how I spent my Saturday, instead of running in the state sectionals or participating in all-day prom prep:

  I woke up at 1:45 P.M.The only reason why my eyes opened is because my mother tore into my bedroom, whipped up the shades, and yelled, "It’s one-forty-five p.m.—well past time to wake up!" before swirling out the door in a blur of pastel and perfume. My tongue was too weighed down by nocturnal mouth muck to give her the lashing she deserved for destroying my slumber. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pretend that she was just a cheerfully terrifying nightmare. Once I’m up, I’m up.

  So I got out of bed. I looked out the window. The sun was shining and it was seventy-one degrees—perfect for prom photos. And track meets. I put on a pair of board shorts and a tank top and twisted my hair back into two lopsided pigtails. Then I grabbed a hand mirror and bounced my real reflection off the full-length mirror on my door.

  All of this took about forty-five minutes.

  "Jessica Lynn Darling! Are you up yet?"

  I went down to the kitchen.

  "Nice of you to join us," my mom said as she sorted through the Accepts and Declines, with regrets that arrived in today’s mail.

  My dad, who was still mad about me blowing my race last week, just grunted and pretended to read a computer magazine. I mumbled some sort of greeting and poured a mammoth breakfast-and-lunch-size bowl of Cap’n Crunch.

  "Maybe if you had a better diet you wouldn’t be so tired all the time," my dad said, eyeing my bowl.

  "Very subtle, Dad," I said. I knew this would provoke him. I wanted to provoke him. For the past 168 hours he’d been either grunting at me or ignoring me altogether, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

  "What does that mean?"

  "You were obviously referring to my race," I said.

  And we were off.

  "That wasn’t a race. It was the furthest thing from a race I’ve seen out of you all year." The words came pouring out, as though he’d been sitting there all morning, waiting for me to wake up. "You beat three of those girls during dual meets this year. How could you lose to them? I never thought you wouldn’t qualify for the sectionals."

  "I had a bad day."

  "That’s all you can say?" he said. "You had a bad day?"

  My mom finally looked up. "Dar, take it easy on her. She had a bad day."

  "Back when I was playing ball, there was no such thing as a bad day, Helen. I worked through my pain. I gutted it out," he was really getting on a roll. "I wouldn’t be so upset if she had been outclassed by superior runners. I don’t know what was wrong with her. I know she’s a girl, but she’s got to get tough."

  And that’s when I lost it.

  "STOP TALKING ABOUT ME LIKE I’M NOT EVEN HERE! I AM SO SICK OF BOTH OF YOU! JUST LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!"

  I sprinted out the back door before they could react. I hung out at the playground about a half-mile away from my house, hoping that there’d be a bunch of rugrats running around and doing cute kid-like things. Yet even though it was a gorgeous day, I was the only one there.

  When I came home a few hours later, my parents went ballistic. They had put up with my outbursts in the past because they knew I was upset about Hope. But they could tolerate my tongue no longer. They revoked my phone and computer privileges for two weeks, which completely and royally sucks because keeping in touch with Hope is the only thing that prevents me from completely losing it. And I told them that. So, being the totally unfair, tyrannical assholes that they are, they added another week. I didn’t want to go for a month, so I grunted that I understood and went upstairs to my bedroom.

  How I spent the rest of my day is just too depressing to write about. But maybe I’ll write about it another day. When I’m extraordinarily happy. After Paul Parlipiano has pledged his undying love. Or when Hope has moved back to Pineville. Or I’ve gotten a perfect score on my SATs and can go to any college in the country, particularly those far, far away from here. When I’m so bursting with joy that I simply can’t believe that pathetic girl crying at the kiddie park and me are the same person. A day when writing about today doesn’t make me ache.

  Until then, I’d rather just forget it.

  the seventeenth

  I spent the rest of the weekend and all day Monday in bed. I told my parents I’d been feeling flu-ey for awhile and they were happy to let me stay home because my illness provided them with a reasonable excuse for last week’s bad race and my even worse mood.

  Point being—I hadn’t talked to anyone since the prom.

  I was at my locker before homeroom this morning when Scotty came up to me. This wasn’t weird, mostly because he’s been coming up to me before homeroom to say hi since the invite. What was weird was the look on his face.

  "You look beat," I said. "Don’t tell me you’re still recovering from the prom?"

  "Yeah. Sorta."

  Right then, three baseball players came over and pummeled him.

  "Stud!"

  "Home run!"

  "You better score this easily in today’s game!"

  Scotty laughed weakly, threw a few punches, and they went away.

  "What was that all about?" I asked.

  "Why haven’t you called me back? I wanted to tell you …"

  "I’m grounded. Tell me what?"

  Scotty motioned for me to come closer and create the illusion of privacy in the middle of the packed hallway. He looked scared. Then he said the words that just about knocked me over.

  "Kelsey and I had sex after the prom."

  "WHAT?!"

  "We did it."

  I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t believe it. I know we had j
oked about it and everything, but I didn’t think he would actually do it. Scotty. My Scotty.

  "We did it," he repeated. He wasn’t bragging about it. He was merely reinforcing the truth, perhaps for his own benefit as much as mine. I don’t think he believed it—and he’d had two days to get used to the idea. Virgin no more.

  "But you aren’t even going out with her!"

  I white-knuckled my World History book.

  "I know," he said with a hush. "But I think we are now."

  "You think you are?"

  "I’m pretty sure we are."

  "Well are you or aren’t you?"

  He paused for a moment, then looked down at his Nikes. He breathed in again and said, "We are."

  Another baseball player slapped Scotty on the back. Scotty ignored him.

  "So, I can’t go to the wedding with you."

  I was feeling too much to think—humiliated to find this out in the middle of the hall before homeroom; betrayed because I had always thought Scotty would never settle for anyone but me; disgusted because Scotty had acted just like the rest of the bootyhounding Jocks; and most of all, angry at my mom and my sister for possibly being right about Scotty, and how I’d regret not going out with him when I had the chance.

  Before I could respond to his bombshell, Kelsey ran up to us, put her hands around Scotty’s eyes, and cooed, "Guess who?!" Then she spun him around, gave him a loud smacking kiss on the mouth, and yanked him down the hall by his arm.

  It happened in a flash. In less than five seconds, I was alone.

  the eighteenth

  The human instinct for survival is nothing short of amazing. In life-or-death situations, ordinary people can be empowered with superheroic abilities. For instance, the housewife who lifts a bus off her baby.

  Luckily for me, my instincts kicked in just in time for me to cope with the endless post-prom talk. I entered an alternate stage of consciousness—one in which my body would respond to what Hy and the Clueless Crew were saying with the appropriate nods and smiles and uh-huhs, without actually having to process the message in my brain.

  All day their mouths hummed white-noise nonsense. Only occasionally would words break through the static, like a local radio station that wasn’t quite tuned in to the right frequency. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzstraplesszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzqueenzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzlimozzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzdjzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzhilariouszzz zzzbruiserzzzzztequilazzzzzzzbootyzzzzzvideozzzzzzho …