by Foster, Lily
I never returned to Mr. Witt’s class, and following an immediate evaluation, both psychiatric and educational, I was deemed to be severely dyslexic and dysgraphic—a fancy way of saying that I was not only reading disabled, but my writing also sucked. On the plus side, I was gifted in both mathematics and nonverbal reasoning skills, whatever they were. I was not psychotic or emotionally disturbed, as Zit had asserted.
I’m sure if I hadn’t punched Zit and if I’d had the reputation of being a calm, good boy, the school would have kept me and arranged for remedial services there. Since I had, in fact, assaulted a teacher, the school approved funding to send me to a private school that specialized in educating kids with learning disabilities.
They wanted me gone.
I remember Mrs. Connolly assuring me, telling me that I would love this new school. I wasn’t convinced. I also remember her telling me how smart I was. When I smirked, she took me forcefully by the shoulders again and said, “Jeremy, some people are not smart, you’re right. Some people, though, are smart in different ways. You can do math at a tenth grade level, did you know that? I do because I tested you. You can arrange puzzles better than ninety-seven percent of kids your age. Did you know that? I do because I tested you. The mathematicians and the puzzle solvers of the world are the inventors, the artists, the builders…the creators. Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Ansel Adams…great men who failed abominably in school. Trust me when I tell you, Jeremy, everything is going to be okay.”
I cried walking out of her office with my dad that day but they were tears of relief. And within two weeks of going to that new school, I had hope.
“Are you all right, Carolyn? You kinda look sick,” Erica said, concerned.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, recovering. Drew had just sidled up to me as the guys were making their way through the gym towards the locker room. He tugged lightly on my braid as he whispered, “It’s August twenty-ninth, Carolyn. The countdown is on.” He proceeded to raise one and then two fingers up in the air, smiling sweetly at me.
“I don’t know if Drew is going to last two months. Stop teasing him,” Samantha scolded me. She was smiling but sometimes, like now, I felt an undercurrent of animosity simmering just below the surface with her.
Kerri’s auburn curls bounced as she trotted over and sweetly chimed in, “Drew is a hottie, Carolyn. And it seems like he’s hopelessly devoted to you, bitch. I’m jealous.”
“Yeah, Drew’s nice,” Samantha shrugged noncommittally, drawing her words out slowly, “but the question is, will he wait for Little Miss Innocent here to finally say yes to a date? Really, Carolyn, most guys aren’t into being tortured.”
I said nothing. Drew had been playing this game with me, teasing me—taunting was more what it felt like. It started last year. When he asked me to the movies, I panicked. I don’t know where the lie sprang from but before I knew it, I was bound by it: no dating until my sixteenth birthday. Since then, he’d been counting down the months, which would soon be weeks.
Drew was gorgeous, well-mannered, at the top of our class and a great athlete. He was effortlessly popular and girls flirted with him given any opportunity. Drew and his closest friends, Will Clarke and Mike Hanson, were three of the most sought after boys in our class. I noticed a few female members of the senior class sniffing around them as well.
I couldn’t figure out what Drew saw in me, Little Miss Innocent. And that moniker? It sickened me. Samantha and the rest of those girls—my supposed closest friends? They didn’t know me at all.
Kerri swooned, capturing my attention again. “No, I think Drew looks like he would happily wait for Carolyn.”
“Boys like Drew do not wait,” Samantha said, definitively. She was the authority on everything, apparently. “Do you think any of those boys have turned down Taylor…or Lara Reynolds…or that goth slut, Vanessa?”
Erica’s eyes widened at the sound of Taylor’s name. She whispered, “Ohmigod, do you know what I overheard Taylor saying last night?” We all crowded around because Erica sounded like she had some grade-A dirt to dish. “She was telling Lara about some new guy. Just moved here, I guess. She told Lara she’d met him at a party down by the lake and,” she looked around, giggling, to make sure no one else was eavesdropping, “Taylor said his cock was so colossal she couldn’t take him all the way in. His dick,” she was cackling now, “choked her!”
Fact was, we talked trash about Taylor and girls like her—girls deemed slutty, easy—but we were really fascinated by them. Taylor was sixteen, nearly seventeen, but seemed light years older and more sexually aware than the rest of us. Rumor had it that she’d lost her virginity to her much older stepbrother when she was thirteen. She didn’t seem to care that everyone gossiped about her. Taylor was gorgeous, rich, she was into guys, she dressed in a way that was sexy and provocative…she owned it.
I wondered what it would be like to be Taylor sometimes. She was confident around the boys, in control. She pranced around in a teeny bikini at pool parties, sat in boys’ laps, purred in their ears…she fucked, that much was obvious. She was even rumored to have lured one of the younger P.E. teachers into a tryst on school grounds.
The way I assumed she was with boys both excited and repulsed me. The mere thought of metaphorically taking a walk in her shoes, shamefully, made my thighs clench with want.
It would never happen. Carolyn Harris was virtuous, smart, accomplished, serious…a good girl, or so everyone thought.
“Mr. Rivers, how did you feel reading this chapter? What emotions did D.H. Lawrence evoke in you?”
I loved Ms. Margolis. She was my English teacher and a part-time struggling actress. She lived and breathed the plays and novels she taught, and she inspired us to do the same. With me, she didn’t bat an eye that my earbuds were plugged into my audio e-reader as the rest of the class read their paperbacks, and she counted my oral answers as equal to the written responses the other students gave. She also treated me like my opinions were intelligent and insightful.
“I guess in this chapter, it was humiliation. I could feel the mother’s prideful anger at being ignored by the waitress in the pub and the humiliation Paul felt on her behalf.”
“Yes, yes, yes, Mr. Rivers! The pain of feeling less-than, of being judged, discounted…” she went on, dramatically waving her arms and moving about the room, calling on other students, most of whom felt like I did about her. She made my transition back to Westerly High bearable. English Lit my favorite class? Who would have guessed it? The rest of my classes were a mixed bag: Science: mheh, Math: easy, Global History: painful. I was managing.
“Want to cut after this class?”
“I can’t, Vanessa, I have practice. Seems stupid to cut and then just come back here later, right?”
We walked to the lunchroom together and then joined the rest of what had become my group at our table. Vanessa was beautiful, with porcelain white skin, jet black dyed hair, and a really nice body. She was also into Ms. Margolis, Tori Williams, Samantha Cavanaugh and every other good-looking female at school. She let me in on that nugget after I’d tried to kiss her, slightly drunk one afternoon when she and I had skipped class and went wandering down by the lake. After that she became a close friend and I was honored to be the only one she trusted with her secret.
Vanessa was the only girl in this group and she liked it that way. She wasn’t comfortable within the girl cliques. She had no girl friends. Because she dressed the way she did and patently ignored them, the other girls assumed Vanessa was a slut who preferred to be passed around among the rough crowd of guys she spent her time with. She liked to let them think that. As a joke, she’d bat her eyelashes at me or wiggle herself into my lap when one of the “it” girls was paying attention. As a result, the entire school assumed I was banging Vanessa. You would think this would keep other girls at bay, but certain girls liked the challenge.
“Mike, Jeremy, Blake,” Taylor purred as she came up behind me and placed her hands on my shoulders. Mike
and Blake were teammates of mine. Taylor addressed us, ignoring Vince Roman and Frank Carr, two of my less popular friends—ones who inhabited my same income tax bracket.
Taylor made me uncomfortable—the way she licked her lips when she paused in conversation, the way she trailed her nails down my chest or rubbed my shoulders in a way that was overly familiar. Frank had dragged me to a party down by the lake the week before classes started. Taylor and her friends were there. She wasted no time, groping me about ten minutes after she met me. I hardly knew this girl but fuck, she scared me.
“I’m having a party after the game Friday. You better be there,” she teased.
Vanessa pretended to gag on a carrot, simulating a blow job. Taylor ignored her and leaned down to whisper in my ear, “Please come, Jeremy.” Yes, she put full emphasis on the word come. “You keep blowing me off. You’re hurting my feelings.”
“We’ll be there,” Blake assured her. “Make sure the Jacuzzi is a comfortable eighty degrees, Taylor.”
“You got it. Bye guys,” she chirped, raking her nails lightly against my neck before walking away.
“Why do I get the feeling that this party is going to be all guys and Taylor,” Vanessa said, scowling.
“Nah, I’ve been to her parties before,” Blake said. “She’s a schemer, though. It’ll be the one guy she has her eye on and then she tries to figure out who else to pair up.”
“So it’s totally for the purpose of hooking up?” asked Vanessa.
“Absolutely,” Blake answered. “Her parties are actually borderline weird. The music is low, the lighting is soft. It’s very Eyes Wide Shut, you know?”
“She’s after you, Rivers,” Frank teased.
“You can have her.”
“She doesn’t want me. Believe me, if she was rubbing my shoulders and scratching my back like that, I’d be at her house getting that blow job you know she’s itching to give you.”
“Yeah,” Blake teased, “she likes initiating the new guys.”
“You’ve got that bad boy thing going on, Jeremy,” Vanessa said, glaring at me. “You’re brooding, kind of guarded. You’re her pet project this fall.”
Vince looked at Vanessa, cocking his head. “That doesn’t piss you off, Vanessa?”
Vanessa rose from her seat, grabbing her tray. “Jeremy’s a big boy. He can do what or do whoever he wants. I don’t own him,” she said, feigning disinterest.
After she left, Vince looked to me. “What was that? And what’s up with you two anyway?”
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re friends, that’s all.”
“Then tap Taylor this weekend. Take my word for it, she won’t leave you alone until you do,” Frank chimed in, knowingly.
Frank and I walked to our next class together, Studio Art, with him teasing me about Taylor the entire way.
The absolute best thing about being in an affluent school district was the enrichment programs. My basic art class was taught by a working artist who was—hello, seriously?—a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And Chuck Watters also taught an after school figure drawing class. Chuck—he insisted all his “fellow artists” were on a first-name basis with him—only allowed a few serious high school students into this class. I thought my chest would burst with pride when he invited me to join the group that met once a week after school hours in the studio. It was a mix of local college students and a few of us juniors and seniors.
Frank was jealous. Not because he wanted the instruction but because figure drawing meant nude models.
Frank and I had become good friends almost immediately. I knew him from Driscoll. Like me, he wasn’t an honors student and the fact that we both came from single-parent homes, weren’t filthy rich, and both liked tinkering with crap bonded us.
Frank’s dad was a cop who worked a side job doing carpentry. Frank used his dad’s equipment to fiddle around, making chairs and other furniture. He blew me away with his talent but he downplayed everything. “Get off my dick, Rivers, it’s just a table,” he’d snap in his smart-ass way, even though I knew he was proud and recognized the artisan quality of his work.
On Sunday mornings I’d help him haul his pieces to craft festivals around the area. He was making a decent buck, too. People who trolled these markets were usually upscale. They’d smile, all giddy as they handed over their cash, recognizing that they were getting a steal.
It was cold that Friday night, one of our last games of the regular season. Still, I was set on going to the bonfire down by the lake. I’d rather freeze my ass off than be snared in Taylor’s web. Maybe because I looked older people assumed that I was experienced, but nothing could be further from the truth.
My encounters were limited to heated make-out sessions with my friend, Andie, from my old school. Andie was beautiful, funny, a really talented artist and a fellow dyslexic. We were each other’s first kiss in ninth grade. I was thrilled to have a girl to kiss and some soft, bare skin to touch. We never rounded more than second base. I didn’t push her and she hadn’t offered more than that, so Taylor’s advances seemed like jumping from the sandbox into the strip club.
Vince, Mike, Frank and I piled out of Will’s brand-new, shiny truck. I was beginning to really like Will and some of the others, but man, all these boys were fucking spoiled. A truck like this with a big cab and flatbed was wasted on Will. The boy was never hauling payload, that’s for sure.
We made our way towards the party with people stopping me, Mike and Will to slap our backs and yell their congratulations on another win. I’ll admit, it felt really good. To be recognized and told you were good at something felt great, but it was still a somewhat alien experience for me.
There had to be two hundred kids there, mostly juniors and seniors. Spence Davies, my new BFF who was coming around because my interceptions at cornerback made his job easy, waved me over. Just then, Samantha Cavanaugh all but plastered her tits up against Will, whispering in his ear. I was happy to leave them to it. As I walked over to Spence and a few other seniors, I looked in the direction Samantha had walked over from. Carolyn and a few of her friends were there, nursing their beers. Drew was there too, leaning into Carolyn as he spoke to her. She looked up at him, smiling shyly.
Drew had made good on his promise, asking Carolyn out the night after her parents had treated ten of her girlfriends to a Broadway play and nice dinner in Manhattan, limo transportation included, naturally.
Vanessa had heard about Carolyn’s mellow, understated Sweet Sixteen celebration and had tallied up what this small gathering had probably cost, which was way more than a month’s salary for someone like my father. It burned Vanessa more than it burned me—the have and the have-not nature of this town. I was resigned to it, whereas Vanessa was resentful.
As I stood there bullshitting with Spence and a few of his buddies, who slinks up next to me and wraps her arm around my waist but Taylor. “Taylor,” Spence greeted, eyeing her from toes to tits. He never once made eye contact with her.
“What’s up, Spencer? Long time, no see,” she answered, drawing her words out in a way that pretty much oozed sex.
“Well,” he faked a hurt expression, “I don’t seem to be on your guest list anymore, Taylor. You found someone new? I thought we were going steady,” he teased.
“Well you were my first, Spence, so you’ll always be special to me,” she teased right back.
This kind of advanced flirting was foreign to me. I stood there, mute. Taylor turned her body in closer towards me then, almost to the point where I could feel her crotch pressed up against the side of my thigh. “I do have a new friend, though. You are coming tonight, right, Jeremy?”
“Uh, I don’t know what I’m doing yet.”
She put her hand inside my jacket and rubbed her nails across my chest as she said, “I’m heading back there now with Lara and Kim. Don’t disappoint me.”
She slowly drew her hand out and licked her lips before walking away. She was too much,
a caricature of how you pictured the fast, easy girl at every high school. As she walked away, Spence raised his eyebrows. “Please tell me you’re not contemplating turning that down.”
I shrugged. “Don’t think I’m that interested in going where so many have gone before, you know?”
Spence nodded. “Yeah, I don’t think I’d stick my dick in that either…but a blowjob? Best one I’ve ever had,” he said, looking at me as he drained his beer.
Drew joined us and zeroed in on me, smiling. “Heard you’re heading to Taylor’s tonight, Jeremy.”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“Right from Taylor’s very own talented mouth.” He must have sensed my unease. As Drew patted my back, he said, “I can relate. I was shitting a brick the first time she invited me over. I was a babe in the woods.”
Spence smirked. “And now you’re a man of the world, Drew? Popped Carolyn’s cherry already?”
“Shut the fuck up, Spence.” He wasn’t angry, though.
Spence smiled. “No, Carolyn’s a girl you take your time with. She’s,” he rolled his eyes, “special.”
Drew shrugged his shoulders. “She is.”
The conversation moved onto other topics, onto other girls then, but my thoughts were stuck on Carolyn. She had not acknowledged me once since I’d been at Westerly. To be fair, we didn’t share any classes; she was in all honors and advanced placement. The one time I did pass her in the hallway and our eyes met, I didn’t get the feeling that she even remembered me. Just as well, I guess. I didn’t need her remembering the learning disabled, hot tempered delinquent that I’d been.
She may not have noticed me but I, on the other hand, was pretty much actively stalking her. I’d see her sitting in the library, I’d notice her in the cafeteria, I’d lurk in the gymnasium doorway when her volleyball team was playing.
