“Oh, honey!” she said, putting a hand to my forehead. “You’re burning up!”
She took my temperature: 103. She gave me Tylenol and put me to bed, and then, since I was supposed to leave for camp in two days, she took me to the doctor the very next day.
“It looks like it could be strep or it could be mono or maybe just a viral infection,” he said. “We won’t know until the tests come back in a few days.”
“Well, Busy’s leaving for camp tomorrow,” my mom told him. “She’s going to camp. We already had to defer last year because of the knee incident!”
I slept the rest of the day, waking only to talk to Ben on the phone when he got home from his job at the grocery store where he worked. The next morning, bleary eyed and with my throat almost swollen shut, I said goodbye to my parents and boarded a flight to New Jersey. I found the camp bus easily when I got off the plane and made it there with no issue. I was excited to see Ami, but I felt terrible. It didn’t seem like I was getting better. In fact, I felt much, much worse.
I took a top bunk but had no energy to put away any of my things. I skipped the welcome bonfire and instead fell asleep immediately. When I woke up the next morning, the whole cabin was discussing my insane snoring. On the way to breakfast, I threw up twice. I tried my best to make it through the rest of the day, until finally my counselor found me and led me to the infirmary. My parents were called; options were discussed. My mom felt terrible. I spent exactly one week at French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts, the whole time in the infirmary. I remember hearing a few years ago that Adam Levine attended French Woods, and since we’re the same age, I like to think he was there while I was, out living his best future-rock-star camp life, while I was asleep in the only building with air conditioning, trying not to die. And maybe, if I hadn’t been so run-down and so me, I would’ve been out there too. And maybe Adam Levine would’ve become my camp boyfriend and I would’ve forgotten all about Ben Miller and everything that was about to happen wouldn’t have happened. But I wouldn’t meet Adam until many, many years later, and, as it turns out, I’m not really his type.
My mono test came back positive, and since it was then clear that I wouldn’t be getting better anytime soon, it was decided I should leave camp. My dad used his miles to upgrade me to first class for my trip home, since my parents both felt so terrible about how sick I was. The drive to the airport was super weird—they had a groundskeeper take me in his van. He immediately asked if he could smoke on the drive, which I thought was strange, but since I had a hard time seeing a way to say no, I said of course it was totally cool! I wish I could smoke! I’m just too sick! Otherwise, PASS THOSE SMOKES! He smoked the whole way and talked nonstop. I was trying to keep my eyes open but I was just so sick.
Later, as I was waiting to board my flight, I saw a businessman chatting with the flight attendant. He had gray hair and an easy smile, and I remember feeling oddly comforted by his presence. Adding to my terrible case of mono was the fact that I was an incredibly nervous flyer. The summer between third and fourth grade, one of my best friends and her whole family were killed in a commercial plane crash. I remember I knew there was a crash from the news, and I knew that my friend and her parents and brother were coming back from visiting family in Detroit, because she and I were supposed to play My Little Ponies that week. But my parents didn’t know that they were on the flight until the newspaper printed the names of all those on board a few days later. My mom was trying to figure out how to tell me when I snuck into the kitchen and read the article myself, scanning until I found my friend’s name: Megan Briggs, 7. It was obviously devastating and almost impossible to understand as a child. But what I did understand was that plane crashes happen, and since they’re so random, they can happen anytime. For years, every time I would be on a plane taking off, I would think of Megan and her family. So needless to say, I always looked for things to comfort me on planes, and still do. A baby or a group of teenagers or a priest or someone really famous, and I would decide that my plane, this plane, couldn’t possibly go down. I know it doesn’t fully make sense but that’s how these things work. They don’t really make sense.
• • •
On board, I settled into my seat, and just before they closed the doors, the older businessman slipped into the seat next to me. We exchanged hellos as the flight attendant offered us orange juice. As she left he looked at me and said, “Tell me about her.”
“The flight attendant?” Great. My day was not getting any less weird.
“Yeah. I feel like you’re the kind of kid that knows things about people. What’s her story?”
Look, I don’t know how to explain this without it sounding totally crazy. But I was a kid who knew things about people. I am a person who knows things about people. My imagination has always been such that I can invent and create whole narratives and worlds for strangers to live in, and a lot of times, my imagination lines up with the reality. People fascinate me. They always have, and I’m really good at paying attention and listening. The same stories are happening all over, just to different people. If you figure out the type of person you’re dealing with, you can guess at some approximation of a narrative that fits. I don’t know all people’s stories, obviously, but I think it’s a talent. You just have to pay attention.
So this man asked me to tell him about our flight attendant and I did. I actually went back and read my diary from this time, because I needed to remember exactly what I thought right after it happened. Basically, I ended up talking to him for most of the flight from Newark to Dallas (where I had to change planes), and this guy told me, among other things, that my heart was in New Orleans (okay, I mean, I really do love New Orleans. Maybe I should move there now?), that few people have the ability to make their dreams come true in life but I was one of them (a classic thing to say), and that I was about to enter a dark period in my life but there was a light at the end of it (I was fifteen, so that seems like a given, but still . . . ).
Finally, he asked me if I was afraid of flying and when I said I was, he replied, “Well, I don’t want you to concern yourself about that anymore. Nothing will ever happen to you or anyone you love on a plane again.”
I hadn’t told him about Megan Briggs but maybe he just guessed that’s why I was afraid of flying? All of these things have logical explanations, for sure. But it was such a wild experience, made even crazier by the fact that I was so sick. All these years later, I’m still slightly baffled and awed by the whole thing.
As we got off the plane, he turned to me and said, “It was so nice talking with you, Busy! You’re going to have a wonderful life and I’ll be thinking of you often.”
I know that could easily sound creepy coming from an older businessman, but it really wasn’t. I called my mom from a pay phone and told her about it, and my mother, in her typical dramatic fashion said, “Oh Busy! You were sent a guardian angel to take care of you since I couldn’t be there with you!!”
• • •
The rest of the summer I spent mostly in bed, getting better and taking visits from friends. Rachel and Emily would come play board games with me when they weren’t at their own sleepaway camps. Kendra would come over, and we’d call whatever boy she was currently interested in and cut out pictures from Spin magazine to hang on my wall. And of course Ben came to see me as much as he could. He wouldn’t kiss me for a few weeks since I had mono, but eventually he did. I was so in love with him. I wrote in my diary that I sometimes felt inadequate because I was sure that he and Samantha had “fucked all the time and everywhere” and I wasn’t like that and he knew it. I asked him in August if he loved me while we were on the phone, and his response was, “Yeah . . .” Which was good enough for me.
The love I felt for Ben was that all-encompassing first love. He was all I could think about, the only person I wanted to talk to or see. But I was also very aware that I didn’t want to be a slut with him. He was my boyfriend and I wanted him to love me and respect me. I w
anted the opposite feelings that Trey had left me with.
I waited until September to have sex with Ben. It seemed like an eternity. My friend Ella’s parents were going out of town and leaving her alone in the house (seriously, parents of the ’90s, get your shit together!!). Ben and I talked about it and I told him I was ready. He brought over a bunch of pot and we got super stoned and hung out. He told his parents he was sleeping over at Grant’s house and so he was able to spend the whole night with me.
The sex was fine, I guess. We were in Ella’s brother’s bedroom and I remember looking at his Red Hot Chili Peppers poster hanging on the wall and noticing how his sheets were soft, like they had been washed a million times. I derived no pleasure from it, really—I certainly didn’t have an orgasm, but I made a lot of noise and we did it a few times, and truthfully, I was just so happy to be that close to him and to be able to give him what I knew he wanted.
For the next few weeks, Ben and I would have sex whenever we could. I mean, he was sixteen and it never lasted long, so we did it a lot. I started to have a creeping feeling like maybe we should use something so I didn’t get pregnant, but it never occurred to me to say something to him. That would be embarrassing. Plus, I was so lucky he loved me. Little unlovable me. I didn’t want to bum him out by telling him he should use a condom. Ugh. I wasn’t totally lame!
I guess I thought that sex was something that just happened to you if you were a girl. That it was something that the boys controlled and your job was to do your best to please them. I was never taught any different. Not by sex ed in school, not by the movies I watched, and certainly not by my parents.
“What if I get pregnant?” I asked him one night while we were lying on the side of the storm wash by his house, smoking pot and cigarettes and looking at the stars.
“You won’t. I promise.”
I already was. I’ve now been pregnant three times. And all three times, I knew immediately. Again. I’m one of those people. I knew the whole time I was pregnant. I knew the morning I woke up at Ella’s house. I was just hoping against hope it wasn’t true. I waited a few weeks, and then one night at my acting class, I told my teacher, Mary, that I thought I could be pregnant. I’m not even sure if I had missed a period. Mary had known me since I was seven years old, over half my life at that point. She looked at me, not heartbroken exactly, just resigned like, Oh, fuck. Then she said, “Well, I guess we’re not gonna get much work done until we figure this out. I’ll go buy a test at Walgreens.”
I took the test in the bathroom of the theater and those two fucking lines showed up long before the three minutes were up. I started crying and then went outside with my friend Bailey and we smoked a million Marlboro Reds. Mary told us a story of an abortion she’d had in her twenties. She told me to talk to my mom.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “I can’t do that!”
I mean, I literally had never talked to my parents about anything having to do with down there. When I got my period, I hid it for months; I just stole my older sister’s pads and figured it out. I don’t know why exactly. My mom was so cool about so much, but she was also raised very Catholic and it wasn’t ever discussed in a real way. We had the where-do-babies-come-from discussion when I was little, but sex was just something that I knew was shameful. Bodies were shameful. There was no fucking way I was going to tell my parents I was pregnant.
“Well, then,” she said. “I think you need to go to a Planned Parenthood.”
I need to interject two separate entries in my diary here. Written in gray marker in my messy swirly teenage-girl handwriting, the first is dated October 8, 1994: “I think I may be pregnant. I’m really scared. Oh well.”
The second, dated October 11, 1994; “Mary got me a pregnancy test at Actor’s Lab tonight. I’m pregnant & I’m getting an abortion on Fri. Ben’s paying for it and he’s been great. I’m glad I know he’s there for me. That’s all now. —Busy”
When I read those entries again recently, I was truly shocked. I’m not sure why I wrote about it so casually when I know that I was freaking out. But I think there was a part of me that was trying to do emotionally the same thing I’d done with Trey: to keep it under control so that it wouldn’t affect me.
Bailey had agreed to drive me to Planned Parenthood on Friday after school. As it turned out, another friend of ours, Tasha, ALSO thought she was pregnant and needed to go in for an appointment. So the three of us hopped into Bailey’s open-air Jeep and drove to the Planned Parenthood in Scottsdale, smoking cigarettes on the way. We went in and the two of us filled out paperwork and waited our turns to pee in a cup and talk to a counselor. My name was called and I went in. She asked me how many sexual partners I’d had (two), if I’d ever used protection (no), if I knew my options (yes, ONE ABORTION, PLEASE).
It turned out it wasn’t as easy to get an abortion as I thought in my diary entry. She gave me a phone number for a clinic I could call and make an appointment. Then she also encouraged me to talk to my parents about what was happening. I explained that they would not understand this at all and that I didn’t want to bother them. An abortion at the time was around three or four hundred dollars, I think. I called the clinic from the pay phone in the mini mall where the Planned Parenthood was and made an appointment based on the information they had given me. Bailey said she would drive me. I would have to skip school, but that was okay. I would probably get in trouble, but that was the least of my worries. The worst part, as far as I could tell, was that I had to wait almost three weeks before I could get the abortion, so I had to be pregnant for two more weeks. When we left, Bailey said she’d drive me to Smitty’s so I could tell Ben what was happening. Tasha hopped in the car with tears in her eyes. I offered her a cigarette and she shook her head no.
“So. I . . . ummm. I think I’m gonna have the baby, guys.”
We agreed that it was the right decision for her and that we would be there and help in any way we could. We dropped Tasha off at her house. She was going to tell her mom that night. Then Bailey drove me to Smitty’s, where Ben was pulling carts in from the parking lot. He came over to give me a hug, and then I told him I had to wait and go to a clinic in a few weeks. Neither one of us knew how it worked, clearly.
“I’m so, so sorry, baby. I can get the money. Did they tell you how much?”
I told him, and he assured me he would get it as soon as possible. Then he kissed me and promised to call when he got home from work.
The next week was fucking awful. I had to go to school, obviously. I had to pretend I was fine to my parents, obviously. I started getting morning sickness and my boobs felt like they were going to explode. I threw up in the trash can in the main building of my school in between first and second period as Kendra and our other friend Kate were walking over.
“Holy shit! Are you okay??”
“Yeah. I’m fine now,” I said wiping my mouth. Kate gave me some water from her backpack and I went on my way.
Ben had started hanging out with an older girl named Melanie from his econ class, a horrible-looking girl with terrible pocked skin and hair that was thinning from how many times she’d bleached it. She had a car, though, and so she could drive us off campus for lunch. That day, Ben and Melanie insisted we go to Arby’s, and I remember picking at my fries and trying not to vomit as Melanie ate her roast beef sandwich with extra Horsey sauce, all of it getting stuck in her clear braces as she chewed with her mouth open and laughed at Ben’s dumb jokes.
“I don’t want to go to lunch with Melanie anymore,” I said to Ben that night on the phone. “She’s weird and I don’t know. . . . I don’t have anything to say to her. Can we just hang with Kendra on campus tomorrow??”
“Yeah. Sure, whatever, babe. But she’s cool, you know.”
The next day at lunch, I waited for Ben in the quad with Kendra and Kate and our other girlfriends, but he never showed. I didn’t even eat; I was just waiting for him, like an idiot. When the bell rang, I couldn’t help the tears and just let t
hem flow freely as I made my way to the theater building. I ran into Tim Lochran, one of the nice older kids who I used to sit under the tree with.
“Hey! Hey. Are you okay? What’s wrong??” I still remember sweet Tim, looking at me through his round, tortoiseshell glasses, like Harry Potter.
I started to sob for real. “I can’t. . . . I just . . . I didn’t eat and I really—”
“Oh jeez! Do you want me to get you food?”
“I don’t know. . . .” I said in between sobs. “I just really want an egg roll . . . I guess?”
“Well, I can do that. Come on, I’ll drive you to Chop and Wok.”
It was such a small thing, really. But it didn’t feel small. I ate my egg roll on the way back to school and thanked Tim as we walked back from the parking lot, careful not to let any administrators or security guards see us. When I thanked him, he gave me a big smile.
“No problem,” he said. “Feel better! It’s all gonna be okay, especially now that you’ve eaten!!”
• • •
Ben called me after school with some story that it was a misunderstanding and he had looked for us but had eventually gone with Melanie to Burger King. I told him it was okay, I understood and wasn’t mad at all.
On Friday at school, Ben found me before the first bell. “Ummmm. We have a problem. My mom and dad found out and they won’t give me the money and they’re insisting that you come over after school and talk to them.”
I stared at him. “What? What the fuck, Ben? No!”
“Look. If you don’t, my mom is going to call your mom and tell her. This was the deal I made with them—it was hard enough to get them to agree to this, Busy. You have to.”
I couldn’t fucking believe it. I tried to understand how they found out, but it didn’t even really matter. I was so scared the rest of the day. Kendra and Kate prepared me for what to say to Mrs. Miller. Ben’s friend Alex assured me it would be fine, that the Millers were reasonable people. I called my mom from my drama teacher, Mrs. Carrick’s, office and told her that I was going to Ben’s house after school and that she could pick me up there when she was done with work.
This Will Only Hurt a Little Page 7
