So I just stayed still in Kyle’s bed, waiting for it to be over so I could know what to think. I just lay there like a dead person. Thankfully, after ten seconds, Kyle rolled off me and stood up, pulled his boxers and jeans on. I sat up then, super relieved that he had finally given me the chance, and scrambled for my underpants and jeans.
“Sorry,” he said.
I was confused by this. Had he been able to tell I hadn’t liked it?
“No, no, that was—” I said, even though I wasn’t sure what we were referring to. I didn’t want to admit that it had been bad, was worried that he’d said sorry, because I thought that meant he’d known it was bad too. I had already pulled my jeans back on and was rehooking my bra. A wave of nausea washed over me.
“Um,” he said, “was that okay? Are you okay?”
I looked him over and nodded. I suddenly really liked him again. Liked the way he said “okay” in his friendly, sleepy voice. That he was worried about whether I was okay. We barely knew each other, I realized. Then he took it to a whole other level.
“You don’t have to answer this,” he said, “but have you ever done it before?”
I wished I knew which answer he would like better—I would have supplied it. I tried to buy time.
“Are you serious?”
He looked serious. “Yes, why not?”
What would I have said here? Who else would ever have wanted to? No one’s ever liked me except Joel at the LPA conference and we were fourteen?
I didn’t want to be that pathetic, and it wasn’t totally true, I mean, an average-height boy named Ian had kissed me and put his tongue all over my mouth and face once during a game of spin the bottle in seventh grade, and that had to count for something—I mean, I thought I might drown, there was so much spit. It was like getting water up your nose. Later he asked me to go to the video game arcade with him, but I’d said no, because I couldn’t reach the joysticks or the change machines, and I didn’t want to have to watch while he realized it once we got there. He never talked to me again. But that didn’t seem like a good story to tell Kyle, either.
So I said nothing. He looked into my eyes, in the same serious way he always did.
“Anyway, you don’t have to tell me,” he said, and that made me be like, “No, I’ve never done it before.”
“Oh,” he said, as if he felt really bad about having been my first. “I’m sorry it was so—you know,” he said, and I realized, in one of those epiphanies that’s so obvious it makes you stupid to have had to have it at all, that he was thinking about himself, not me. That there had been something bad or wrong or not cool about how he had done it. And maybe that’s why the whole thing grossed me out suddenly. Maybe it was the way he collapsed. Or maybe he finished too fast or something, and I should have said, “This happens to guys all the time,” but that would have meant I had done it with guys all the time, and I didn’t want to say anything like that. Plus, I had never been totally sure what that meant anyway. Maybe he had totally sucked in some way I didn’t know about. I was glad. Not to be mean, but at least he wasn’t as worried about whether I’d been sexy as he was about whether he’d been. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Kyle Malanack would care at all what I thought, even of him naked, even of him having sex. As soon as I’d had this thought, I had the next one, which was that I had slept with, had sex with, lost my virginity to Kyle. I could not believe that it was true, that it had actually happened this way. His room was so bright. I looked around it again, at the details, trying to memorize them so that when I started to sort this out in my mind for the rest of time, I could supply myself with the pieces that would prove it fact. Then I let myself wander into dream territory: Maybe it would happen again. Maybe he would offer to drive me home the next day and the next.
“Have you?” I asked suddenly.
“Have I what?”
“Ever, you know, before.”
He nodded. Was it someone from D’Arts? Elizabeth Wood? Or Kim Barksper? I hated the thought of either one of them in his room, his bed. Maybe it was someone in Boston, from his old school. But I couldn’t ask.
So I retreated into the bubble bath of my fantasy. We would arrive at school on Monday in love, write notes to each other, eat lunch together, and hold hands walking down the hallway. Of course, when I came to this part I had to block out the part about my short arm reaching up into his long one, looking from behind like a little girl and her father. We would comment constantly in American lit, making it seem like we meant the books, but actually meaning our love. We would raise our hands so many times that Ms. Doman would have to shush us, and then we’d be forced to have meaningful eye contact that everyone else could see. My stomach was somersaulting—with thrill, nerves, horror, everything. I’d never felt that way before, the way I felt after that first time with Kyle, and I don’t expect—or even hope, really —to feel that way ever again. I mean, a lot of that feeling was fear.
If you had told me at any point in my life up until that day that I would lose my virginity to Kyle Malanack, not only would I not have believed it, I also would have thought that whatever happened as a result would be worth it. That’s the funny thing about earlier me’s—they’re so naïve, those domino girls falling over into a dead row behind the me who exists now. I used to like to throw my mind backwards. I’d think, “Okay, if you showed some earlier me a video of my life now, would she be happy?” The reason I liked to play this game was that the answer was always yes. The younger me’s would have been impressed: that I had turned out pretty cute, that I got one of the coveted shabop girl parts in Little Shop of Horrors at Tappan, that I was valedictorian there, that I won a Lilah Terrace Fellowship to D’Arts, even that I had turned out brave enough to change schools like I did. When Ms. Doman read my paper out loud to the class, I thought, “Look at me now, all you younger Judys! Look at the soaring dwarf—if you could only have told me when I was younger that this would be happening, I would have cheered. I would have danced on the roof of a car like they do in Fame.” Because I would have been that excited for myself. But now I hate that game. I never want to play it again, because if you’d shown me the me I am right now, how would I have been able to look myself in the eye?
9 I’ve been watching TV nonstop because I can’t stand to think. So I happened to see an episode of Celebrity Apprentice from the bed in the Motel Manor, and let me just say that if this were the movie of my tragic life, that’s exactly the clip the director would have had me watching. Because in case you think the Wizard of Oz problem was just the result of it being like the 1900s when that movie was made, you’re wrong. Celebrity Apprentice was having a contest for who could design the best ad about laundry detergent. (How can TV producers stand themselves?) For some baffling reason, they decided to call it “Jesse James and the Midgets,” and right when I turned it on, this complete asshole Hershel Walker was like, “What if we let Little People wash themselves in all detergent in a bathtub and you hang them out to dry?” And then Clint Black was laughing, “I’m trying to envision how we’d hang them out to dry,” and Joan Rivers, whose face is hanging off her bones to dry, said, “Well, I have a terrace. We can hang them out on my terrace.” And then she tried to move her paralyzed mouth into a laugh, and failed. My takeaway from this is that anyone who thought that people in America aren’t still dying for a dwarf to hang needs to think again. It’s like a national fantasy or something.
I ran straight to Bill’s room and knocked twice quiet, once loud, and he opened the door and came out into the hallway and we sat down together and he lit a cigarette.
“Do you mind if I have one?” I asked.
“It’s not good, not good,” he said, meaning smoking.
“I know. But I’ll just have one.”
So he lit a cigarette for me, and I puffed and choked until it was halfway gone and then stubbed it out. Whatever Bill thought of this performance, if he thought anything at all, he politely kept to himself.
“Do you want to talk
?” Bill asked.
“I guess so,” I said. “Would that be okay?”
“Of course,” he said. “I like your story. I like it, even though it’s sad. Parts of it are happy, too. Parts of it.”
I liked this idea, even had the thought that I would like to make a kind of percentages chart of the ratio of happy to sad parts of my story. I mean, if you don’t think of it as a plot, then maybe half is happy and half is sad. The fact that the happy stuff is ancient history and the terrible parts are recent makes me feel like the entire thing is a sour mess, but I like Bill’s attitude better. It reminds me of Ms. Doman. So I decided to focus on a happy part: Sam.
After I lost it to Kyle, I was more grateful for Sam than ever before. That night after Kyle’s house, I went to the Grill and helped Sam with his homework while my parents did the dinnertime rush. Being with Sam was like returning from an alternate universe to a safe one. Plus, he was the type who could tell I was jittery with delight, but didn’t know the kinds of prying questions other people might have asked. Mainly I asked him things. That’s how it’s supposed to be with people who are younger than you, by the way. Adults who talk about themselves endlessly in front of young people are unacceptable narcissistic freaks. They should do the asking.
I remember Sam was hunched over the desk in the back office at the Grill, poking the keys on the laptop. “What are you working on?” I asked, reaching up and putting my arms around him.
He kept tapping with his finger, typing one letter at a time. “Lists for my project.”
“Lists of what?”
“Stuff I need from Mom and Dad.”
“What’s the project?”
“Science. Do you want to know my hypothesis?”
“Of course.”
“That if Earth were a different shape, then the effect of climate change would be different.”
“How’d you come up with that?”
“I was just thinking, you know, how we could fix the whole problem. I don’t just mean, like, recycling or whatever. I mean a bigger solution.” He looked up at me with round brown eyes, blinked. “And then I realized, what if we could do something magical, like change the shape of the planet? I mean, that would be so much better.”
“Why, though? Why would that help?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to figure out what shape would make it better.”
“So what stuff do you need?” I asked. I peered over his shoulder at the list on the screen: milk cartons, baking soda, balloons, newspaper, paste, paper, cardboard, glue, weather map, ruler, globe, re-writable DVD, laptop. I thought of Kyle’s neck and my stomach flipped.
“What are the milk cartons and balloons for?”
“I’m going to build different-shaped Earths out of those. For the square Earth, I’ll use the bottoms of milk cartons. The round one I have to do out of papier- mâché.”
“Why do you need a globe?”
“So I can draw the right places on the Earths.”
“Why do you need baking soda?” I hoped there were going to be volcanoes.
“To put with water and soak the milk containers. And then when I’ve built the Earths, I’m going to shine light on them to see how the sun would shine on Earths that aren’t round. The cubical Earth will be cold, right? Because it’ll only have light on one side? And the round Earth will be warm, which is better for plants, but worse, too.”
“Can I help?”
“You want to?” He looked at me happily.
“Of course.”
“You can help me draw the maps and then write up the results.”
“Who taught you to say ‘write up’ like that?”
“Mr. Frank,” he said, proudly.
“You’re a true scientist,” I said. “I’ll go get you the milk cartons and baking soda from the kitchen. And you should add poster board to that list, so we can do a big write-up of the results, with digital pictures of the Earths.”
“But we’ll have the actual Earths there too, and a digital slide show.”
“We should hang the Earths from poster board anyway, so they’re there in three-D. We’ll build a diorama with the Earths and then put the poster board behind them, explaining how the project worked, with pictures of where the light shone on each of the Earths. You can put it next to the projector.”
He beamed.
I went to the kitchen to fetch his things, and my mom kissed me on the head.
“Do you want pasta, honey?” my dad asked. He was cooking.
“Sure,” I said, even though I was too giddy to be hungry.
An old woman sitting at the counter drinking Lipton tea saw me come out of the kitchen carrying crayons and pasteboard.
“Are you working on a project for school, cutie?” she asked me. My dad and I grinned at each other.
“Yup,” I said.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll do a great job. I bet your teacher loves you!” she said as I disappeared back into the office to find Sam.
The next day was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, so we had no school. Kyle didn’t call, but I knew he was going to Grosse Pointe with Alan, so I pretended that it was okay. I had no appetite the entire weekend and was wasting into a primordial version of myself, even though I usually love Thanksgiving and hang out endlessly at the Grill, gobbling my parents’ food. At Thanksgiving dinner, the bird glistened on the table like it had been shellacked for a week. It reminded me so much of Cletus the Fetus that I didn’t even pretend I was going to eat a single bite. And I kept getting up to check compulsively whether Kyle had changed his status on Facebook from “single” to “in a relationship” (which of course he hadn’t, and neither had I). I also called Meghan a few times, thinking I would tell her what had happened and that she would be even more thrilled than I was. I knew what she’d say, things like, “I knew he’d fall in love with you—you’re so gorgeous and brilliant and I knew everything would work out and you’re like the homecoming queen at your acting school” and blah blah.
But each time I heard her voice on the phone, I changed my mind about telling her. I mean, she knew I had a crush on Kyle, but I didn’t want to tell her I’d lost it. Not on the phone, I told myself. She was begging her parents for a ticket to come see me in February when Runaways went up, so I’d wait and tell her then, when I saw her. Maybe we’d be in love by then.
Of course my mom sensed that something was up with me, so the whole time she was scooping oranges out of their peels and refilling them with mashed sweet potatoes and cranberries that would burst in the oven to form red polka dots, she kept asking, “Do you have news for us, sweetie? About the play, or school, or senior voice? What’s happening with you?” And I just said things were good and that was it. The truth is, I ignored my family that weekend, wasn’t grateful for any of the best things in my life, and couldn’t wait for D’Arts, American lit, rehearsal, the first sight of Kyle’s sleepy face.
But he missed class the first Monday back. When I got to rehearsal I was trying not to hyperventilate while Goth Sarah told me about Thanksgiving with her grandparents in Minnesota. And then there he was, leaning against a wall, super casual as always, talking to Kim and Kelly Barksper and Ms. Minogue. He looked up when I came in, saw me. He nodded in my direction, even gave a tiny smile, and then went back to talking. Eventually Rachael Collins came over to me with some small talk about AP bio and I couldn’t watch him in peace anymore. But I was also relieved to have something to occupy me. Maybe that smile was an invitation. Maybe he agreed that now we had both shown restraint, it was time to talk. To hang out again. That’s what I took it to mean.
After we were done blocking, Ms. Minogue gave us notes. She didn’t have any for me, but she told Goth Sarah that she was upstaging me as my interpreter, and that she should try to be more “understated.” Sarah grinned in my direction. As soon as notes ended, I hung around in the hallway, looking at a plaque on the wall commemorating two seniors who had died in a freak car accident four years before. I had seen the plaqu
e and the photo next to it before, but had never spent that much time looking at it. I felt kind of guilty doing it now, just so I could wait for Kyle to come out and see if he wanted to leave with me, but I couldn’t help it. The thing was gold, and it said in carved letters, “In Loving Memory of Mindy O’Grady and Samantha Robinson.”
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