Doug Lisowski and Josh Ableman snickered. I was mortified.
“I’m not! I’m—”
“It’s fine, dude. It’s just, you’re not that high.”
I tried my best not to try so hard for the rest of the afternoon, until my mom picked me up before dinner. But I never really hung out with Julie again.
Not too long after that, Lacey and Kendra met some skater boys at the mall who went to another high school. They were so cute, so obviously we decided we had to make them our boyfriends. The three of us started to spend every free moment we had at the mall. We’d share fries at Johnny Rockets and wait for the older skater boys to show up. There was a group of probably six or so, but Lacey and Kendra had already decided which three we should go out with.
Lacey had dibs on a boy named Trey, who was seventeen, short and stocky with a mop of curly hair. He was fairly dopey-looking and seemingly not terribly bright. Kendra loved Jacob, who was tall and skinny and I think the youngest of the boys, closest to our age. I picked a boy named Charlie, who had short black hair and was kind of a nice, quiet guy. For a while, we would just hang out in the parking garages and watch them skate and practice their kick flips or whatever. And then it got to the point where we would get in Charlie’s car and drive around and hang out in deserted playgrounds or parking lots or strip malls. We got away with our parents not knowing where we were by telling them we were going to the movies. I must have supposedly seen Free Willy about four thousand times. To this day, I have not seen it once. I assume the whale lives, right?
I was nervous as summer rolled around, because I was going to a fancy performing-arts sleepaway camp in upstate New York. Emily had gone to it for the last two years and loved it, and we had convinced my mom and dad to pony up and send me too. I wasn’t nervous about the sleeping-away part. I was nervous that while I was gone, Lacey and Kendra would achieve the goal of making boyfriends out of those high school skater boys and I would be left behind. A few nights before I was supposed to leave, I was with Kendra at the rec center, where kids tended to hang out at night. By this point, I had bought Etnies, a skate shoe, and had started wearing bigger jeans and baby T-shirts. My style was for sure evolving into skater girl. I had just never gotten on an actual skateboard.
As some of the guys from our high school, Josh and Doug and Jason—did their best attempts at tricks, Kendra and I sat by and made fun of them and laughed.
“You think you can do it better?” Doug asked. “You girls do it.”
Kendra and I jumped up, defiant.
I watched as she stepped gingerly onto a board while Doug held her hand. Kendra was one of those girls who had a perfect flat tummy and a mouth that turned up on the sides so it seemed like she was always smiling. I was always jealous of the fact that she could wear Calvin Klein underwear out of her pants and look like Kate Moss. When I did it, it looked like a mistake.
“No fair!” I shouted, giggling. “I want to skate too!”
Josh Ableman shrugged and handed me his board. I got on and skated literally no more than two feet—maybe—when the board flew out from under me and I fell to the ground.
FUCK.
I knew immediately what had happened because of the year before. Except this time it was my other knee. I grabbed it with both hands as everyone raced over. Then I gritted my teeth and tried my best not to cry in front of the boys.
“Kendra, you have to call 911,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I dislocated my knee. Fuck. And my mom. Call my mom.”
You guys. I don’t know what to say here. It’s insane. Like literally what in the actual fuck?? Since we’ve already been through so many injuries and it’s only chapter five, I’ll give you the CliffsNotes on this one. Ambulance shows up, Mom arrives insanely pissed ’cause I’m leaving for camp in two days, I’m horrified and embarrassed, I cry, the boys are freaked out, Kendra feels terrible, Josh Ableman wants to make sure I’m not going to sue his parents (not a joke—WHY IS EVERYONE SO CONCERNED ABOUT LITIGATION?!). A hot paramedic (HOW ARE THEY ALWAYS HOT?) tells my mom I’ve dislocated my knee (AGAIN), but this time, I may have cracked my kneecap in half when I fell, which means I’ll need surgery.
AND SCENE.
Emily came over the next morning, so disappointed we wouldn’t be going to camp together. My mom spent most of the day on the phone, talking to the doctor and scheduling my surgery. Then calling the camp to get them to defer my tuition until the following year. Meanwhile, I lay on the couch and watched Saved by the Bell reruns, my braced leg propped up on a pillow. I had knee surgery a few days later. It was supposed to be arthroscopic, but they ended up having to cut my knee open and put a pin in it, just below my kneecap. The next few weeks I spent on the couch or at physical therapy. Kendra and Lacey came over to visit me a bunch and regaled me with stories of the hot skater boys and the headway they were making with them. I was super jealous and ready to get back to that mall so I could hang out with those boys too. I hated being left out because of my stupid knee.
“Trey is having a party,” Lacey told me one afternoon. “We have to go!”
“I can’t even really walk. And I have this huge brace on, how are we going to go?”
“Kendra talked to Charlie,” she said. (My Charlie. Ugh. Of course. Kendra was so hot. I’m sure that Charlie wanted nothing to do with me and my broken knee.) “And he said that if we get dropped off at the mall, he’ll pick us up. We’ll just tell your mom we’re going to the movies.”
My mom agreed that it seemed reasonable to go to the movies, and she dropped us off at the theater that night. But to be honest, I didn’t feel great. I mean, I’d had major knee surgery two weeks earlier. I was embarrassed about the brace but still I just didn’t want to miss out. (Are you sensing a theme here?) We waved goodbye and walked into the mall, waited ten minutes, and then went back to the parking garage to wait for Charlie. He picked us up and took us to the party. When we got there, Kendra and Lacey took off and I sat on the ground in a corner and tried to put pillows around my brace so that people wouldn’t really notice it. Some high school girls asked me about it and I tried to be cool and say I fucked it up skateboarding. I mean, technically that was true.
“How old are you?” one of them asked, giving me an appraising look.
I was thirteen. My fourteenth birthday was in a week.
“Fourteen.”
“Oh. You look like a baby.”
She was right, in retrospect. I did look like a baby. I desperately didn’t want to be one though. That’s why I was there.
At a certain point, I realized we had to go back or my mom would come get us and we wouldn’t be there. There was a discussion as to who was the least fucked up and could drive us back and it was decided that Jacob would take Charlie’s car to drop us off. He and Kendra ended up making out, which of course made me so jealous. That should have been me and Charlie! If only my stupid knee wasn’t all messed up!
The rest of the summer, we had the same routine. Sleepovers at each other’s houses. Watching so much MTV (it was the summer that both “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. and “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden came out and were on heavy rotation). Calling the skater boys and taking turns talking to them. Waiting at the mall for hours for them to show up. Feeling so dejected when they didn’t. Planning how to make out with them. Charlie seemed less interested in me than the other two boys were interested in Lacey and Kendra, and it bummed me out. I wasn’t sure why he didn’t like me. Was I not hot enough? Maybe not. I was kind of awkward and weird, I guess. And maybe what Julie said was true. Maybe I tried too hard. I needed to relax.
In August, my sister was leaving for college in Nebraska and my parents were going to drive her out there. It was decided I could stay at home and their friend’s daughter, Nicole, who was twenty-one could stay with me. I hugged my sister goodbye and waved as they drove away in my dad’s Audi. As soon as they were gone, Nicole turned to me. “I assume you want to have people over. That’s fine. I’ll stay at my parents�
�, but call me if you need anything.”
What’s so crazy is I don’t think it had really occurred to me. But of course! A party! I called Kendra and Lacey and we called the boys. That night, they came over and brought a ton of beer and vodka we got super drunk. I didn’t have a bed in my room, because my parents had agreed to buy me a new one (from Z Gallerie!) and the frame hadn’t come yet, so I just had a queen mattress on the floor.
At some point, Charlie and I were sitting on the mattress on the floor and Kendra came in and turned off the lights in my bedroom. Finally, the moment I had been waiting for! We started kissing and messing around. I reached into his pants, ’cause that’s what I thought I was supposed to do, but I had no idea what to do with my hand once it was in there, so I took it out again. Then Charlie put his hand down my pants and shoved his fingers inside me. It didn’t feel great. Just, like, fingers inside my vagina, not really doing much there. He pushed them around a little and then pulled his hand out and wiped it on his jeans. Then Kendra and Lacey burst into the room and jumped on the mattress with Jacob and Trey.
“ARE YOU GUYS HAVING FUNNNNNN??”
I don’t remember much after that ’cause I was so drunk and everything started spinning, but at some point Charlie got up and left, and I felt so rejected. I had obviously done everything wrong. Jacob started kissing me and lifting up my shirt, and I let him, even though I thought it was gross and I was pretty sure Kendra would be pissed. She wasn’t. She was laughing hysterically and thought it was all so funny. At some point Charlie came back in and told the other boys it was time to leave. They took off and Kendra, Lacey, and I passed out.
I woke up the next morning to the sound of bottles and cans and someone mumbling.
“Jesus. Busy! I said you could have some people over! I didn’t think you would trash the house!”
Nicole had come back over to check on me and was furiously picking up empty bottles and cans and throwing them away. I wandered out into the living room, super hungover. It was trashed. I helped her clean up while trying to process my hangover and what was essentially my first real sexual experience, even though I was so drunk it was hard to remember what had happened the night before, who I had even hooked up with. Maybe I should like Jacob? He seemed more into me than Charlie did. For God’s sake, I just wanted someone to want to kiss me.
It wasn’t long before school would start, and Lacey—who was going to a different high school—told me and Kendra she was going to have to focus on making friends, which we thought was rude but whatever. We stopped going to the mall to see the boys. I tried calling Charlie a few times but he basically blew me off.
A few weeks into September, my phone rang. It was Trey, the skater boy that Lacey had called dibs on. Weird. I asked him if he had seen Lacey, since she was at the same school as him. He said he’d seen her around a little but he wasn’t really into her.
“Yeah,” I said. “We haven’t really talked to her much since school started. She’s got new friends there, I guess.”
He told me she was hanging out with the cheerleader girls, which made sense. Then he said, “Well, we should hang out sometime.”
What? This was so strange. Trey had never showed any interest in me whatsoever. I was thoroughly baffled but also obviously flattered. I hadn’t ever really considered him before—he was basically like last on my list, but I guess he was pretty cute? I mean, he seemed a whole lot cuter now that he was showing some sort of interest in me.
I told Kendra about it at school the next day.
“Ewww. No,” she said immediately. “You can’t. Lacey would never talk to you again!”
The truth was, I wasn’t sure if I cared. Lacey had totally abandoned us once she started at her new school. At least that’s what I told myself when I dialed Trey’s number a few days later. We talked for a bit and then he asked what I was doing the next night.
“There’s a football game at my school,” I said, “so I think I’m gonna go with Kendra and her new boyfriend. You wanna come meet us?”
“Yeah. I’ll find you there.”
I borrowed a dress from Emily, a red, thick cotton baby-doll dress that was super short. I wore my black-and-white striped over-the-knee socks that hid the hideous scar across my knee. I couldn’t care less about sports and the game was of little interest to me. But finally, I spotted Trey in the crowd, wearing a white T-shirt and baggy jeans, looking out of place at a football game. I wandered over to him, trying to be cool. I mean . . . was this a date? I honestly didn’t know.
“Hey,” he said when he saw me. “You wanna go?”
“Oh. I mean, Kendra is over there. We were gonna go back to her apartment in a bit . . .”
“Yeah, I don’t really want to do that,” he said with a shrug. “So . . . do you wanna go or what?”
I shifted my weight to my good leg and sucked on the inside of my cheek. I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen or where we were going to go. And Kendra was already being weird about me hanging out with Trey.
“Let me go talk to her.”
He nodded, and I ran over to where Kendra was hanging with her arms around Dan, a new skater boy who had recently moved into her apartment complex.
“I’m gonna go with Trey. He doesn’t want to watch the game—”
“Eww. Busy, no. Do not go anywhere with him! What’s wrong with you!? He’s so gross!!”
She laughed and Dan did too. My face flushed.
“Okay then,” I said. “You don’t have to hang out with him!”
Kendra rolled her eyes. “WELL, DON’T THINK YOU’RE JUST GONNA COME BACK AND HANG OUT WITH US AFTER!”
I glared at her, then turned and walked back to Trey, thinking, You know what? Fuck you, Kendra! With your perfect stomach and all the boys that love you and hang on your every word.
I looked at Trey. “Let’s go.”
And just like that, we got in his SUV and drove away from the school.
“So where are we going?” I asked, and he looked at me. Really looked at me, and I felt it.
“Is there like a park or a playground we could hang in around here?”
I tried to think of someplace not far from my school. “Yeah. Turn right up here.”
He pulled into a playground, and we got out of the car. For a while, we just sort of awkwardly swung on the swings. Then he scrabbled up on one of those climbing structures and I followed. We didn’t really talk. We were sort of just sitting there, not saying anything, not doing anything. Oh, good. Here was another boy who didn’t want me. Cool. Cool.
“Oh. I guess I have to do everything?” I said, trying to be seductive. I reached over and clumsily started to unbuckle his belt. I have no idea why I didn’t kiss him but instead just went for his belt. It was so weird. But then again, I was fourteen and painfully inexperienced. I had no idea what qualified as normal behavior. I took his dick in my hands. It was already hard. He lurched forward and put his mouth on mine. I tried my best to give him a hand job, something I had heard about from my friend Bailey. I thought I was doing all right. We made out for a bit and then he pulled away and said that he was really uncomfortable, that we should move to the car. I followed him and he opened the back door to his SUV and put the seats down. I climbed in, not sure of what to do or how to end it. I wanted to go back to Kendra’s now, but I couldn’t figure out how to say that without confirming all of my worst fears about myself. I was unlovable. I was not attractive. I was a fucking baby.
As soon as he got in and closed the door, he was straight up on top of me. He pulled my dress up over my head, exposing my purple bra that I loved so much. He weighed so much and was pushing me down so hard, into the carpet of his car. He pulled my underwear down and shoved two fingers inside of me, hard. I was still trying to figure out what I was doing. I had my hand back on his dick in his pants, and at a certain point he kind of pushed me out of the way and took his penis in his own hand, pulled it out of his pants, and started to push it inside me. I didn’t know what to do
. I put my hands under his shirt, digging my nails into his back. I hated it. I didn’t want this. What the fuck was this? It was so, so painful.
“I don’t think this is gonna work.”
That was the most I got out in protest. That was all I said. That was it. Not no. Not stop. Not take me home. Not GET YOUR FUCKING DICK OUT OF ME GET OFF OF ME YOU’RE TEARING MY VAGINA OPEN YOU’RE PRESSING ME SO HARD INTO THE CARPET OF YOUR CAR YOU ARE RIPPING THE SKIN OFF MY BACK AND I CAN’T BREATHE AND THIS IS AWFUL AND FUCKING STOP IT RIGHT NOW.
He didn’t say anything about it not working. He just kept doing it. I found a spot on the ceiling of his car and I sort of spun up to it and just focused on that until he shuddered and rolled off me. Then I pulled my underwear up and my dress down, already aware of the throbbing pain of my vagina and also my back, which felt wet and sticky against my dress.
I was sweaty and gross. I got into the passenger seat and he asked where he should take me.
My voice sounded very small. “To Kendra’s, I guess?”
I was supposed to spend the night at her house. He pulled into her complex and nodded. “K. Talk soon.” Then he drove off.
I walked up to Kendra’s apartment. I could see that there were a bunch of boys inside with her, Dan’s skater friends. I immediately started crying. I reached for the door, but it was locked. When I knocked, Kendra looked out of the shades.
“I TOLD YOU NOT TO COME BACK!” she shouted through the window. “DID YOU HAVE FUN BEING A WHORE WITH TREY??”
“Kendra—” I started to sob. “Please. Please. Let me in.”
“NO! What do you think? I TOLD YOU NOT TO COME BACK. WHORE!”
She was laughing and telling the other boys not to open the door while I just stood there sobbing and bleeding, my underwear stuck to me already, my dress clinging to my back. At some point, Dan came out and said I could call my mom from his apartment. I told her that Kendra and I had a fight and I wanted to come home. Then I waited outside while Kendra and the boys made fun of me through the window. My mom showed up and I got in her car.
This Will Only Hurt a Little Page 5
