We go home after shopping and put on the swimwear. I wear a Nike yoga outfit over my one-piece bathing suit (I am not going to wear that tiny bikini Emily and Janet got me, puh-lease!) because I know for a fact it’s going to be freezing cold at the beach. My dad got these floral Hawaiian-looking trunks and a big T-shirt. It’s way better than the thong Speedo I was expecting. I suggest he wear a jacket, but he looks at me like I’m crazy.
“This is Southern California, Punkin, not Alaska,” he says, tying a bandana around his head. Yes, I just said my dad is tying a bandana around his head, like a gangster from a movie. Or J. Lo in a video where she’s pretending to be Ciara. I am so embarrassed, and we haven’t even left the apartment yet.
He’s been doing some serious work on the Squeegeemobile — seriously weird work, like the kind that might land him in the loony bin, but whatever — and people stare at us as we drive through Aliso Viejo toward Laguna Beach. You’d stare, too, if you saw it. It’s not puke green anymore. It’s cherry red, with flames licking the sides. It’s got the mural on the front, some Aztec-looking guy and the floppy Mexican hottie in his arms, and a picture of George W. Bush with a big red circle around it and a line through the circle. Dad’s stuck a big plastic sculpture of Squeegee Man on the hood, the squeegee held aloft like a saber. It’s crazy to look at, but from a completely artistic standpoint, it’s not that bad. It would look cool in a museum or in a photograph. When it doesn’t look cool is when I’m sitting inside of it. Or at least it makes me look so not cool. I’m surprised that most of the people who stare at us seem to really like the car. A few guys give Dad the thumbs-up, and two of them ask him about the car at stoplights. I can tell he’s super proud of it. He blasts Green Day’s “American Idiot” song over and over, like he thinks he’s making some kind of a statement. I look at him funny, and he says, “This is a Republican county, they need to be schooled.” I actually kind of agree with that part. Maybe I don’t appreciate my dad enough. He’s one of a kind, anyway.
We get to the beach, and Dad finds parking about five blocks away. As we walk, I point out that the only people in the water are those wearing wet suits. The wind is freezing, just like I thought, and my dad knows I’m right but doesn’t want to admit it. He hates to lose. I love to win. I think I get it from him.
We find a bench near a playground and sit down.
“I didn’t want to swim anyway,” he says.
“Yeah, right.”
“No, I didn’t. I really just suggested this because I thought it would be a good chance for us to have a talk.”
“Oh.” A talk? No, thank you. Anything but that.
Dad looks nervous. “I don’t know how to bring this up. But I’ll do my best.” He looks like one of those people on Fear Factor, about to jump into a tub of scorpions.
Uh-oh. I try to think of what might come next. Dad looks so awkward and scared. Did he knock someone up? Am I about to have an illegitimate baby brother or sister? Do I need to tell my dad about condoms?
“I know we had that birds-and-bees talk a couple of years ago,” he says.
“It was six years ago,” I say. “When I was ten. When I got my period.” And you took me out for ice cream and humiliated me, I think.
“Six years?” He looks at me like I’m lying. Maybe it’s just that the bandana is cutting off circulation to his brain.
“Yes, Dad. Six years.”
“God, where does the time go?”
“I don’t know, Dad.” Funny. To me it feels like eternity.
“Well, I realized after this whole thing with that little bastard Andrew and the ‘party’ that there’s more I need to talk to you about than the basic biology of the whole thing. Things I haven’t talked to you about because I’ve been too anxious or lazy. I didn’t want to give you any ideas or make you grow up too fast. It was stupid, and I should have brought all this up sooner, but anyway, better late than never.” He’s all sweaty. “So,” he says. “Tell me what you know and what you don’t know.”
“Huh?” What is he talking about now?
“I mean, I don’t know where to start. Fill me in.”
I think about what he said a minute ago, and I ask, “If I don’t know something, how can I tell you about it?”
“What?”
“You just told me to tell you what I know and what I don’t know, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell you something I don’t know. It’s not logical.”
Dad looks confused. “You know what I meant.”
“No, I don’t. I really don’t. What are you talking about?”
Dad sighs, and I instantly feel guilty. How does he do that? How can he make me feel guilty just by breathing? Is that a special gift parents have? “I mean boys, Paski. And —” he pauses and gulps. I can actually hear the gulp, like a sound effect. My dad is turning into one of his characters. That’s what’s happening here. “And sex.” He chokes on the last word, and his face turns dark red.
Oh my God. My dad brought me to the beach to have a sex talk with me? Why couldn’t he humiliate me in the comfort of our own home? Why does he have to do it out here in the open where everyone can see me?
“I’m going to be very frank with you now.” Dad clears his throat, and I realize he doesn’t want to be here, either. “Have you . . . I mean, are you still . . .” He has to wipe his brow. Only he doesn’t exactly wipe it. He pulls a piece of the bandana down and sops it up. Eew. “What I’m trying to say is, I am, I’m wondering —”
“No,” I say. “I haven’t done it yet.”
Dad looks relieved, then suspicious. “You don’t have to lie to me about it if you have. I’m not one of those dads who’s gonna get all mad about it and tell you you’re ruining your chances at marriage by not being a virgin or anything pendejo like that.”
“Okay,” I say. I didn’t even know there were dads like that anymore. Are there?
“But I’m not going to be this dad who’s encouraging you to drop your pants, either.”
“Not even to go to the bathroom?”
Dad doesn’t smile. “You know what I mean.”
“Good,” I say. “Then I guess we don’t have anything to talk about.”
“So, have you?” he asks me.
“Have I what?”
“Had . . . intercourse with a boy.”
“No, Dad! I just told you that!”
“Well, I wasn’t sure you were being honest. I wanted to make sure you felt safe being honest with me, and now that you feel safe, or at least I hope you feel safe, I wanted to ask you again and see if your answer had changed.”
“I told you the truth the first time.” Baked. Totally baked.
“Okay, well I saw this study in Details magazine that said the average age an American girl loses her virginity in the United States is sixteen, and this lightbulb went off in my head and I realized the clock was ticking because I hadn’t talked to you about it yet.”
“Dad,” I say. “First, I think you need to stop reading Details magazine. Second, I don’t think we need to have this talk.” I mean, what is he going to tell me about sex that I don’t already know? I know all about sex in theory. I’ve read about it, and Emily and Janet told me everything, even if I didn’t want them to.
“I wish we didn’t have to have this talk,” says Dad. “Trust me. I do. I hate this. It’s pinche embarrassing to have to talk to your teenage daughter about this stuff.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Especially now that you’re getting to be that age where you need Viagra and everything.”
For the first time since he started this conversation, Dad’s mouth turns up in a smile. “You are such a pain in the ass, Chinita, you know that?” he asks with affection. He looks out at the ocean. “You are so much like me. God. How did you end up so much like me?”
“Bad genes?” I offer.
Dad laughs out loud. “Yeah, bad genes.”
“Speaking of bad jeans,” I say, “you should stop wearing them so baggy, Dad. It’s, like
, so last decade. Did you learn that in Details?”
“Very funny.”
“So are we finished with ‘the talk’ now?” I ask.
“No! You keep messing up my train of thought. I had this whole speech all planned out.” He takes a piece of folded yellow paper out of his pocket, the kind with lines on it, and opens it. His hands are trembling. He wrote a speech? What is this, an inauguration or a heart-to-heart? “Okay,” he says with a deep breath. I can hear the paper rattling. “What I wanted to say was — oh, hold on. Wait a minute.” He turns the paper over. “I wrote two speeches. One for if you weren’t a virgin anymore and one for if you were.”
Oh my God. It is so creepy to hear my father speaking like this. It makes me sick, actually. I want this to stop. It’s like I used to feel in haunted houses when I was a child, waiting for the end, afraid that something horrible was going to scare me to death around the next corner.
“Dad, you don’t have to read me your speech,” I say.
“No, no. I want to. Here.” He clears his throat. Sniffles like he’s going to cry. Oh my God. He’s put so much work into this whole thing. I sink down lower on the bench and pray no one can hear him or see us. I wish for powers of invisibility. “Pasquala,” he reads. He sounds all robotic when he’s reading. My dad would not make a good actor. “As you enter this time in your life . . . uhm . . . Okay.” He takes a deep breath and looks like he wants to hide. “As you enter this time in your life, you are going to be feeling many strong feelings about boys, and they are all completely normal. No matter what anybody says, girls are by nature just as sexual as boys, and they aren’t just there to be used by boys.”
“What?” Where did he get this?
“And I want you to remember that no matter what anyone tells you or tries to make you think and feel, nature doesn’t screw up. And nature is what made all human beings have a sex drive. That’s why there are so many people in the world. Billions of us. We all have these feelings. They are completely healthy and normal.”
Ooookaaayyyy . . .
Dad takes a deep breath and continues. “We live in a puritanical society that will try to shame you at every turn, but you have to remember that your body is your temple and you are just as entitled to enjoy it as you are expected to take good care of your health and make good decisions that you won’t regret later and that won’t ruin your life or even kill you.”
“Dad! Shut up!”
He frowns at me. His hands are still trembling. He says, “I’m not done. By ‘good decisions’ I mean condoms. I am going to assume you know what they are. Do you?” I laugh. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he says. “When that day finally comes and you have found a boy you love and who respects you, I know that you will make the right choice and choose to protect yourself from disease and pregnancy in this most sensible of ways. I have made an appointment for you at the local Planned Parenthood office —”
“You what?”
“— because I love you, and I want you to be informed and protected out there. It’s what any good liberal parent would do. I don’t want to sit here and preach abstinence to you, because I was sixteen once, and there is nothing scarier than the hormones of a sixteen-year-old. At sixteen, people are rather insatiable that way.”
Oh my God. My father has lost his mind.
He looks like he’s thinking about something. “No, wait,” he says and keeps reading. “There is something scarier than the hormones of a teenager. Sex in the absence of love is scary. It is one of the ugliest forces in the world, and I don’t think you are foolish enough to place yourself in a situation like that. Sex with love is the divine expression of our beauty and potential for connection as human beings, and I would say that if you love a boy enough to trust him not to hurt you . . .” Dad gets his crazy cholo face going.
“This is like torture,” I interrupt. “Here.” I hold out my hand. “Just take my fingernails off with tweezers. That’d be easier than listening to this.”
He ignores me. “So, without going into details about technique — that’s half the fun, learning as you go —”
“God, Dad! Enough! I surrender! Leave me alone!” I cover my ears with my hands.
Dad grabs them and pulls them off. “I will just say that I salute your blossoming adulthood, and I know that you will make smart, mature decisions about your health and future. I also know that if you have any questions about any of this, you will feel safe and comfortable coming to talk to me, your dad, like as if I were your mom — well, not your mom exactly, but a mom — or a good friend, because I love you and I want you to be around for many years to come, with a college education, and good health, none of which will be possible if you have unprotected sex and get AIDS and have a baby as a teenager.”
I stare at him in disbelief. Dad folds up his paper again and stuffs it in his pocket. Speech over.
“Any questions?” he asks. He takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose, a thing he does only when he’s really worn out and stressed. I will never, ever, when I grow up, take off my glasses and rub the bridge of my nose in the presence of my child. It will make him or her feel guilty and awful, and I’m not going to do that.
“No.” I say. “No, wait! I have a question.”
“Okay.” Dad puts the glasses on again and stares out to sea with a serious look on his face, as if bracing for something painful. “Shoot.”
“Can we go home now?” I ask. I need to call Janet and tell her about this. She’ll freak. Her parents never talk about this stuff with her. I need someone to laugh with about it, I so do. Maybe Emily, too, but Emily thinks my dad is way cool, and she’ll tell me to appreciate his openness. I would bet you anything that Tina, if I were to tell her about it, would say the same thing. All these people think my dad is cool. Weirdos.
I’m freezing, and after hearing him talk about sex and humanity, my nausea is back with a vengeance.
24
I still have the stitches in my forehead, like these tiny, raw train tracks, but I don’t think that’s the only reason all the kids in the hall at school are staring at me. I feel like a celebrity, but not a good celebrity. I feel like Mary-Kate or Ashley, whichever was the anorexic one, on the way to the clinic where they’re going to force-feed me with a tube. I feel like Paris Hilton after an unfortunate intimate video incident. Exposed. Pitied. Laughed at. Like people might have once thought I was sort of cool, but now they all think I’m tragic.
Basically, I’ve become that kid.
By the way? Every school has one — a that kid. Back in Taos, it was the geek boy with the uneven bowl cut and the short pants who tried to kill himself. Everyone ignored him for years, made fun of him, and then one day he went home and sliced up his wrists with a bread knife. Then, all of a sudden, everyone knew who he was, and felt really bad for having teased him. We all went to visit him, and he got popular for the totally wrong reason. Over in Española, that kid was a boy who shot both of his parents after they told him he couldn’t stay out past eleven. Every school has that kid who does something weird and gets schoolwide attention. That’s me now, only I didn’t do anything so much as I had something done to me. How is it possible? I haven’t even been here two weeks, and I’m that kid.
A few people smile with their shoulders up by their ears, like they can’t finish a full shrug about me, but mostly they just stare. Some of them lean in toward each other and whisper. The nicer ones wait until they’ve passed to do it. When they see that I’ve noticed them whispering about me, they turn around and pretend to be looking for something in their lockers. It’s stupid. I know why they’re freaked. I’m the girl who got drugged and almost got killed by Jessica Nguyen. In other words, I am exactly what every girl in this school is afraid she might be one day. Everyone lives in the menacing shadow of Jessica.
I get to Mr. Big’s class and take my seat. I pretend to read my textbook, because I can’t deal. In truth, I keep reading the same chapter-end summary over and over, without really co
mprehending any of it. People come in, talking loud like usual, but as soon as they see me, everybody shuts up. Some even say, “Oh my God.” I hate this. I don’t want to look at them. Most of all, I don’t want to look at Jessica. She comes in wearing tight jeans and a white leather blazer with what looks like black lacy lingerie beneath it, and then it really gets quiet in the room. Chris comes in with his shiny motorcycle helmet tucked up under one arm, wearing jeans and another extra-soft hoodie sweatshirt, in dark blue. He takes an empty seat far away from Jessica. He’s called me at home a couple of times since the party, to see how I was doing.
For the record, Chris told me he totally broke up with Jessica and she cried and acted like a big baby about it. Actually, he didn’t say “baby.” He said, “She wailed like a banshee.” I had to look “banshee” up. Just so you know, a banshee is this mythical Irish fairy that shows up and shrieks to warn families of bad things to come. Great. Jessica is a shrieking banshee warning of bad things to come. I don’t like the sound of that. Chris said he wants to take me out, but he wants to make sure I’m totally better first. I told him that my dad won’t let me see him, and he said he wants to come over and talk to my dad “man-to-man.” Yeah, like that would go well.
The truth is, I don’t really know if I want to date Chris. I mean, I want to, but I don’t know if it would be a smart thing to do. I’m a little down on the whole trusting-people thing right now. Especially guys. And Jessica. First Ethan swears his undying love for me, then he falls in love with the first thing he sees after I leave town. Then Andrew drugs me and I almost die. You might say I’m a little boy-scared right now.
Haters Page 18
