Sophomoric

by Rebecca Paine Lucas

  I was an idiot.

  It was the ultimate cliché: “You okay?” Like anyone would say no at this point. There were a few minutes of fumbling and then damn-it-Cleo-lied. It was a weird pain, like I was stretching, pulling apart, but it was still pain. And I wondered whether it was possible for him to go too far, even though I knew it didn’t work that way from pornos and sex ed and Ask Alice. His eyes were heavy lidded, and I had seen his face like this before but it was different now and my body tried to hold together even though everything in me wanted to let it all go. Breathe in, hold your breath, bite your lip because holding it was a lost cause and I knew my body was shaking and there was sweat and sex and smell and I didn’t even care anymore.

  He threw the condom out and I curled up in the sweaty, sexed-up sheets. I almost thought I should feel different, but I didn’t except that my thighs and the muscles behind my stomach hurt.

  It was disappointing that this wasn’t life changing and mind altering and I didn’t really feel any more like a natural woman. But I think I was okay with that.

  He kissed my forehead firmly and suddenly I was worried that it, that I, wasn’t enough. My neck tilted up and back to look up at him and my hand covered his on my hip, lifting it and playing with his fingers. “Hey.” I felt shyer than I had been that first meeting in the dining hall. Except, I guess, that last time everyone was wearing clothes.

  His smile was slow and sleepy and his eyes were still half-closed, now for a different reason. “Hey.” He kissed the top of my head again. “How you doing?”

  “’M good.” Naked was still awkward, but I pulled myself closer to his body. There was still some space between our hips. I was okay with that for the moment. Then our lips were touching, just softly because I kept smiling and he kept laughing. It was the same and it was different and it was almost disappointing that pop culture was completely making all that stuff up. Lucky for pop culture, I didn’t want to worry about that anymore.

  24.

  “You’re what?”

  Dev had dropped me off at school at ten fifty-nine last night and I hadn’t slept more than four hours, so I really could not deal with my mother standing in the doorway of my room, unannounced, at noon on what was supposed to be a Sunday filled with nothing but sleep.

  ”We thought we’d surprise you. Take you out to eat.” My mom had on a genuine smile. “Since we didn’t get you for the long weekend.”

  I think, in the end, it was Erin standing behind my mother that saved me from throwing a temper tantrum. That and her enthusiastic hug that set me back a few feet further into my room. She always had an obnoxious tendency to make my anger dissipate as quickly as it came.

  “Awesome.” Cheesy smile. After three weeks of all-natural laughter, it felt strange to force the expression. There was a part of me that wanted to care. She was my mom, after all. There was also a part of me that couldn’t.

  Then it occurred to me that twelve hours ago, I had lost my virginity and had sex with a guy Mom probably didn’t approve of. And all of a sudden I was too conscious that I had only taken a quick shower last night and, even though the mirrors kept saying the opposite, I was convinced that I had to look different.

  Perfect timing.

  Her arms surrounded me in an awkward hug of stiff bodies and clumsy arms. “Let me sign you out. Get dressed and I’ll meet you in the hallway.”

  She never asked.

  Erin stayed with me while I stripped off the big T-shirt I’d been wearing since 11:01 the night before and went looking through my laundry basket for a clean shirt. She was excited to see me, launching into the epic narrative of freshman drama. She had broken up with “awesome guy” from a month ago. Big surprise: relationships were best short and sweet for her. Since then, apparently, a lot had happened: the ex’s best friend and she had totally started liking each other a lot, so she’d broken up with the original guy, but now since her best friend’s naked picture was totally circulating, like, the entire grade via cell phone, because of the best friend who liked her, she definitely couldn’t date him, you know? Thankfully, the captain of the basketball team was totally cute and totally into her.

  I couldn’t follow half of the story. Mostly I got the main ideas: don’t date your boyfriend’s best friend and, more importantly, Polaroids are key. Anyway, it was a story I’d heard a hundred times, ninety-nine of them from her, and I knew how to nod and smile and make sympathetic noises in all the right places while I got dressed.

  My mom came back as I was pulling my sweater over hair I definitely should have washed before this. Since it was a gray, windy, thirty-degree day, she thought we should walk into town to enjoy the weather. I think even my mom was regretting her idea by the time we made it back to the same semi-nice restaurant. Unlike Parents’ Weekend, it was almost completely empty except for a few guys in T-shirts sitting at the bar, watching a football game.

  Erin and I sat on one side of the booth, across from my mom. She sat, one finger pressed to her temple. Her diamond ring flashed in the light, tasteful and austere, sharp and hard. Just like she was sometimes. The two of us ordered Diet Cokes. Mom ordered an Arnold Palmer.

  Who was Arnold Palmer anyway?

  I knew there was only a small window before she started asking the inevitable, predictable questions.

  “How’s Aunt Melinda?” I asked. I already knew the likely answer: busy. Erin’s mom was currently working to get the bid to design advertising for Tide detergent. Last month it had been Camel, last year, Kmart. That was part of why Erin and I had grown up together. She stayed with us until her mom came home at eleven, smelling like Ralph Lauren and a hint of cigar smoke, wearing a tailored suit.

  “Working.” My mom didn’t even let Erin speak. “She’s sorry she couldn’t come down to see you, but she sends her love.”

  I had heard that one before.

  I tried to deflect again by asking Erin another question, but apparently that wasn’t on Mom’s itinerary. She started asking about my classes, my PSATs, my friends, long weekend, the SATs I wouldn’t take for another year. My answers were something like studying hard, bottled water and going to bed at eleven every night we were at Cleo’s. Didn’t even bother answering the last one.

  It should have bothered me more that I didn’t even consider telling part of the truth.

  She had two fingers at each temple, massaging a small circle. Soon, she’d move to her cavernous purse and pull out the Advil.

  Because it was the obligatory parental question, she asked about boys. Unfortunately, Erin decided that was the perfect time to step in.

  “She has a boyfriend, Aunt Carrie.”

  I bit my tongue, trying not to accidentally contribute something about naked pictures and the basketball team captain. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The second one just leaves you a little bit more satisfied.

  “Yeah.” I anticipated the next question, swirling a straw around in my Coke. “His name is Devin. He’s from LA.”

  “Bizza, that’s great.” Now it was Mom’s smile that was fake. “Is he in any of your classes?”

  Brace yourself. “Only one. He’s a senior.”

  “Oh.” The teeth on the edge of her smile, slightly yellowed by years of coffee, tightened slightly and some of the wrinkles around her eyes released. “Does he know where he wants to go to college?”

  I pursed my lips around the straw and didn’t look up. “UCLA if he can get in. Maybe UC Santa Barbara. He wants to stay in-state.”

  There was a pause as my mom struggled to find a response. The smile that threatened at the corners of my lips was more than a little bitter. She had been expecting Princeton, Harvard, Stanford at least, the places I was supposed to go. Ivy, Ivy, proto-Ivy. Too bad for them I didn’t really care. Didn’t they realize it was just a football league? No one in my family even watched football.

  “That’s great,” Erin volunteered. It was an effort, but it didn’t really help.

  Awkward silences are like fat people on airpla
nes. They sit there, taking up more space than they should, squishing the people next to them and making the ride uncomfortable. And even though everyone knows the facts, no one ever says anything.

  Fortunately, our waitress, a local high schooler named Brenda who Alec hit on every time we were here, arrived to take our orders. Once she left, we started talking about my dad’s department at the hospital: podiatry. I was happy to pick at my grilled cheese and make appreciative noises at appropriate times. That is, until Erin excused herself from the almost empty plates to use the bathroom.

  It wasn’t really surprising when my mom leaned on her elbows and looked at me in the way that mothers always look at their kids when they want something they know they have to pull. Unlike my loose teeth, there was no handy doorknob. The look, however, promised just as much pain.

  Then she reached for her purse and I knew I was screwed. Two red dots fell into her palm and then her mouth. She swallowed them dry.

  “What time do you need to be back to school?”

  I swirled a fry in ketchup, writing Help Me in letters that faded away in seconds. “I’m meeting Dev and some friends at four.”

  She shook her head. “We’re not leaving until five. That boy can see you once we leave. We only get today with you until Thanksgiving.”

  That boy. Figured.

  My sigh was long and drawn out. “Mom.” It was an effort to restrain myself from dragging her name out into the three-syllable whine of a little kid.

  She didn’t say anything, in that quiet way mothers have that lets you know without a doubt that they disapprove immensely.

  “Mom.”

  Her sigh was wearier than mine. “Bizza, sweetheart. This boy is…” She struggled to find an appropriate word. Unacceptable? Underachieving? “Surprising.”

  My arms folded over my chest and I leaned against the smooth plastic of the booth, all but braced for a confrontation. “Because he’s not on a fast track to the Ivies?”

  Her silence was all the confirmation I needed.

  “Mom. He’s my boyfriend and I like him.” So much that I had sex with him last night. “So what if he’s not curing cancer?” Sex is better. Sorry, Mom.

  “It just doesn’t seem as though you have similar interests.” She was trying for political correctness, I think.

  Translation: Your boyfriend is an idiot.

  “So my IQ is an interest?” My laugh was bitter. She didn’t know me at all and she thought she did. And people wondered why I thought boarding school sounded like a good idea. “That’s like saying I should only date people with brown hair or who can’t kick a ball to save their lives. Intelligence is genetics, not interest.”

  “Sweetheart, you know that’s not true.”

  I resisted the urge to make faces. It was hard.

  “You have always had such intellectual curiosity.”

  There were many examples of my curiosity in the last few months. Intellect didn’t exactly feature.

  “Combined with cutting that class a month ago, which is so unlike you, I can’t help worrying a bit.” A concerned smile flickered across the straight, stern set of her lips. “That’s my job.”

  “Mom. That’s not the point.”

  “I understand, Bizza. It’s just…” I could see her shifting tactics. “He’s a senior. What about when he leaves at the end of the year?”

  I huffed air out my nose. Why was everyone so obsessed with what would happen seven months down the road? Dev couldn’t even convince me to agree to come to LA with him over spring break. He called it pessimism. I still argued realism.

  “Mom, it’s not like we’re getting married. We’re just, I dunno, dating. I don’t even know if we’ll be dating in June.”

  It was so tempting to imagine walking into prom with his arm around my waist or kissing him as the clock counted down the seconds until the official end of the school year. It would be a lie to say my fingers weren’t itching to look for internships in California this summer. But it would not only be lying but stupid to say I was counting on that possibility.

  “Besides, I’m not even sure I’d want to date a college guy. Just drop it.”

  That was actually true, as much as my mom might preach the virtues of long distance phone bills making the heart grow fonder. She just wanted me in a relationship where I couldn’t actually touch anybody. If only she knew. They hadn’t even given me The Talk until eighth grade, still stuttering over “condom” and “birth control.” That was the one time in my life I was thankful for cramps. They saved me from the awkward “so I need to go on The Pill for no reason at all” conversation.

  “Honey, I’m not saying you shouldn’t make friends.”

  Just not boy ones.

  “I’m just worried.”

  “Mom!”

  “Back!” Erin slid into her seat next to me, the proverbial saving bell. Thank God. For some reason, I had hoped that having sex with Dev would make me feel more adult, more able to deal with my parents. Right now, though, just felt the same as ever and I was so tired of having a conversation that just went in circles.

  “Pass the ketchup?”

  Erin and I hung back, walking back to school. I could see the tension in my mom’s shoulders, the determined pace of her stride, and for a moment I did feel guilty. My distance, my carefully measured personal space, was somehow succeeding in shutting her out. But that shut me out, too, and, for a moment, I almost regretted it.

  Then Erin started talking about something and I moved on, shying away from things that fell in the category of serious, difficult thoughts. There had been enough big things for one weekend.

  It did occur to me that she knew much more than I had told her. She was my mom, after all. They always have their ways.

  So she probably knew that she wasn’t the person I curled up with to talk about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Maybe she wasn’t the person who I went to when I had a bad day, or who made me hot chocolate when it rained. But I hoped she knew enough to know that this wasn’t permanent, irrevocable distance. This was me-trying-to-figure-out-my-life distance. Me-trying-to-grow-up distance, because at least so far I needed the distance to run into walls, whether I bounced back or fell down on impact. I needed space to skip homework and watch movies and have sex and drink too much caffeine and just drink too much and make my own decisions. Even if they were really shitty decisions.

  I wondered if she would tell me that she told me so. She would definitely think it. But somehow, I didn’t think she would actually say it.

  The walk back to campus felt shorter than the walk into town and I was hoping too soon that we weren’t about to run into Dev. That would be awkward. Beyond words.

  When my mom hugged me before she got in the car, I felt like I should have some kind of definitive emotion. But she got the same casual embrace you give grandparents you don’t see very often and teachers who have to congratulate you in the sweaty heat of graduation. As I watched her and Erin pull away from the curb with the crunching of loose gravel and the low groan of the engine, I didn’t really feel anything. Part of me thought it was because she was my mom and she saw through all the growing up I was trying to do. Part of me suggested that it was just because she didn’t know me at all anymore. I didn’t even know what I wanted the answer to be.

  She cared what I did and it sucked sometimes when she just didn’t understand. But it was enough that, instead of calling Dev when I got back to my room, I left a message for my dad, to ask him to tell Mom to call me once she made it home. Just to be sure. And I told him I loved him. Then I called Dev.

  25.

  Nothing got done in the days before Thanksgiving break. Seniors were running around with college applications, but it wasn’t like the week before break where everyone freaks out about finals. We were only going to be gone for five days.

  Cleo’s eighteenth birthday was the day before Thanksgiving break, so Amie and I snuck into town on Sunday and bought cake mix. It was a valiant struggle not to eat the b
atter as we threw in a little less egg and a little more butter than recommended in her dorm kitchen that night. I was just glad I wasn’t the one whose desk it had to sit on all of Monday. If it had been my responsibility, there would have been no cake to surprise Cleo with in the dining hall when Dev brought her in.

  Alec led “Happy birthday to you,” screamed across the dining hall. There was, of course, thunderous applause. Cleo stood on a chair until one of the dining hall staffers started advancing on us and she half fell of the chair, laughing, into Scott’s arms.

  “You know.” Dev was struggling to use a table knife to cut out a piece of our cake. So far, he had just gotten frosting all over his fingers. Which meant I could lick it all off. Frosting was the best part any way. “That’s illegal now. Better hope Scott doesn’t scream rape. And forget about the freshmen behind you.” He pointed the knife at two boys too skinny, short and generally prepubescent to be anything but freshmen, three tables behind us. They were trying to pretend they hadn’t been watching us.

  Cleo flipped him off and used her fingers to pull out the piece of cake he had been trying for.

  Alec had his fingers in her cake and an arm over her shoulders before Dev had time to sulk about losing his cake. “Sucks for Scott. But you can buy me lottery tickets and reunite me with my Naughty Nannies.”

  We ignored him. Instead, Cleo was now looking through her lashes as the two freshies watched her lick frosting off her fingers. Their wide eyes would have been more appropriate to a church service or the Second Coming or Santa Claus. I bit my lip to stop laughing and dipped a finger in the frosting. I almost wished that was how Dev looked at me when I sucked frosting off my fingers. I probably looked ridiculous.