I had never obsessed about guys before I met the sisters, nor was my only goal in life to have sex with some cute guy. Something about the way they viewed sex changed my perspective over time. They also lived a few miles from my house, so they had to take the same city bus across town to hang out with Fish and his friends. I decided hanging out with them might be fun even if they were always talking about boys and who they wanted to "do it" with.
Since we didn't go to the same high school, it didn't matter if they were popular or not. With my mom being sick a lot and my dad working all the time, any distraction from the sad reality of my life was worth pursuing. Little did I know, though, that my pursuit of pleasure would end up causing me so much pain. In fact, nothing I experimented with ended up being as glamorous as I'd imagined it would be.
Later that same evening, I decided to go home with the sisters to see where they lived. I'd already called my parents from a pay phone and told them I was going to my new girlfriends' house. When my mom picked up the call, she told me to have fun. While I liked this new thing of not getting interrogated by her, it saddened me at the same time. What did it say about my mom that she didn't bother to ask me for details? Or did she simply believe I could be trusted? I didn't want to think about that.
As the three of us walked to the bus stop to leave the west end and return to our neighborhood before dark, a girl called my name and waved at me to come closer. I strolled over to where she stood so I could find out what she wanted.
The moment I stepped within two feet of her, she punched me in the mouth and yelled, "You stay away from Fish, or I'll kick your ass."
I blinked and touched my mouth, now bleeding and sore. A coppery odor and salty taste filled my senses and made me gag. I had no idea who this girl was or why she cared who I dated. As she swung her fist at me a second time, I grabbed her hands before she could hit me and pinned them down at her sides. I didn't know why she hated me, but I knew enough to subdue her before things got any worse.
Once she finally settled down, I let go and turned away from her. She tossed a lot of F words and verbal threats at me as she stormed off with a few girls I didn't recognize. I walked the rest of the way to the bus stop with my friends, more than a little stunned.
"Who was that girl? Why did she hit me?" I glanced at Mary, who had exchanged a knowing glance with Cathy. They both smirked. They knew something they weren't telling me. I could sense it.
Mary shrugged. "Her name's Beata. I think she's dating Fish. Or at least she was."
What kind of name was that? Come to think of it, she did have a bit of an accent.
"He never said anything to me about another girlfriend. I thought I was the only girl he was seeing right now." I dabbed my lip again, which had split where it hit my slightly crooked tooth when Beata punched me.
Mary shot her sister another knowing look and I decided they definitely knew more than they were letting on. But since I'd just met them, I wasn't going to push it or nag them until they told me more about her and Fish.
Besides having a nasty mouth, that girl Beata had a seriously strong right hook. If I had realized her intent to punch me in the face, I wouldn't have gotten so close to her. But why did she have to hit me anyway? What did I ever do to her?
I never heard anything about her liking Fish, or him liking anyone else. I didn't know a thing about her, so how did she know about me? I didn't even know she existed until she'd given me a bloody lip. I couldn't help feeling a bit betrayed, especially when someone told me later that she was pregnant and Fish was the father. I couldn't have been more shocked since he'd never tried to have sex with me.
Honestly, I don't remember a guy ever liking me before Fish did, so I didn't know how fleeting a relationship could be. We talked about a lot of things and had fun together, at least until that witchy girl came between us that afternoon. The breakup hurt like a knife to the stomach, and even though it was my idea to dump him, I'll never regret meeting him. I'll treasure those memories because he was the first guy to take an interest in me beyond friendship. It's not every day you get a first boyfriend.
Regardless, I thought maybe he wasn't such a great guy after all if he couldn't warn me that he had an angry ex-girlfriend waiting in the wings ready to give me a bloody lip. I stopped seeing him after that and decided his friend Jeff was pretty nice, so I wanted to give a relationship with him a try. The funny thing was Fish didn't seem to care that I had dropped him and started seeing his friend. I thought he'd at least be jealous.
In fact, after all those kisses and flattering words, I hadn't expected such extreme coldness. He never said a word to me when he saw me hanging around his friends until one day he noticed that I was smoking a cigarette with some of our mutual acquaintances. He just looked at me with a surprised expression, and then stared them down before returning his gaze to me.
I thought maybe he was going to apologize for Beata hitting me, or admit he had been two-timing me and say he was sorry. Or maybe he'd even tell me he was angry that I'd dumped him without telling him why. But the words that came from his mouth surprised me.
"That doesn't make you cool," was all he'd said as he walked off.
I wasn't smoking to try to look cool. The reason I'd started smoking with my friends had more to do with calming my nerves. Some of the things I witnessed made me more than a little scared. I suppose I did feel older and more sophisticated when I lit up. I didn't smoke pot though. Only cigarettes. Not a big deal, right?
Besides, my dad smoked a pack a day. And my mom used to smoke until she got sick and couldn't walk anymore without getting winded. Then she just cried a lot. I hated to see her feeling sad, so I spent a lot of my free time away from home. The fact she couldn't -- or wouldn't -- chase me down made it easier to deceive her.
My poor dad worked three jobs just to make ends meet and pay the various medical bills my mom's illness created. There was little supervision in my home, and because I was an only child, my parents must have thought I could handle things like an adult. It was easy to lie so I could hang out with my new friends, and neither of my parents would be the wiser.
If I decided to get drunk with Mary and Cathy, my parents wouldn't know about that either. As long as I was sober by the time I got home, everything would be cool, or so I hoped. I hadn't tested that theory yet.
Mary and Cathy did whatever they wanted because their mom was too crazy to do anything. At least that was their explanation for her lack of concern. That should have tipped me off that these girls could get me into serious trouble. Call me stupid, but I figured their mom's clinical depression didn't have much influence on them. I started to see their mental issues the more I got to know them.
They also had two step-sisters who lived in another neighborhood. The step-sisters had a lawyer for a dad. He was no longer married to their mother, but they often hung out like they were still a step-family. It was bizarre, to say the least.
I liked their step-sisters, Margie and Sharon, sometimes more than I liked Mary and Cathy. They seemed mentally stable and actually tried to pass their classes during the school year. Plus, they had a cute older brother named Clay who was in college. They told me he thought I was pretty hot after they showed him my yearbook picture. At least the step-sisters didn't smoke pot and run around town chasing down the next party.
Anyway, Fish's friend Jeff was nice to me in the beginning, like Fish had been. I heard he worried about me being jail bait too, but despite that, he tried more than kissing with me. Not much happened beyond him touching my chest, but it made me uncomfortable when he slid his hand inside the waist of my jeans. So our "seeing" each other didn't last long. He didn't kiss nearly as good as Fish did anyway, so I wasn't too sad about that.
Now that I was used to guys liking to kiss me, however, I didn't want to go without a boyfriend for long. I felt naked without a guy by my side. The way my heart pounded when a guy wanted to kiss me gave me a feeling of importance. When I had dry spells without a cute guy to make o
ut with, I started feeling a desperate need to change that, which, I discovered later, is never a good thing.
In my case, it set me up to compromise my values, just so I could have a boyfriend. Once you go beyond kissing, you can't backtrack with a guy and return to holding hands. I learned that lesson the hard way.
Chapter Three
After a month of hanging out with Mary and Cathy, I started to lose interest in the things they liked to talk about, like going to druggie parties and obsessing on Dave the drummer. I decided to make a new friend in an effort to show my dad I could make friends with people he approved of.
So for a while I distanced myself from the two sisters and I hung out with a girl my father introduced me to. She sang in the church choir. Her name was Jenny and she was two years older than me. I found out she'd never finished high school, but I'm pretty sure no one in the choir knew that, including my dad.
My father thought she would be a good influence on me because she was a "good Catholic girl" from a decent family he'd known for years. Not that any of that stuff mattered to me. Ironically, she ended up being the worst influence of all. My father wasn't aware of her dropout status when he'd introduced us, or the fact that she slept with her boyfriend.
But I loved singing, and participating in the choir was something I could do with my dad that gave me a chance to spend time with him. Jenny and I hit it off right away and we started hanging around each other after practice. My dad seemed pleased I'd made a new friend that would be a good influence on me, unlike Mary and Cathy, who he referred to as "the girls with the crazy mother."
What my dad didn't know was Jenny's favorite subject to talk about was having sex with her boyfriend, Dirk. I called him Dick as a joke, but she didn't take offense. She just said she really loved that about him. When I asked her what she referred to, she elbowed me and said, "His big thing, of course."
She talked about sex even more than Cathy obsessed on her crush over the drummer, plus she added details I had no idea existed, like various positions and stuff like that. I doubt my dad had any idea she constantly talked about sex and was talking to me all the time about how great it was and how much I needed to try it. She almost had me convinced I hadn't lived until I'd "gotten off" with a guy.
All of the stuff she told me about their encounters made me more than a little curious. Jenny had been "making love" -- the term she used when she referred to sex -- with the same guy for over two years. He was twenty-one and had his own apartment where she slept with him. She hadn't turned eighteen yet, and somehow she'd kept him interested in her even though she wasn't all that pretty.
I figured if someone as unattractive and -- I hate to say it -- "fat" as my friend Jenny, who rarely washed her hair, could keep a man through sex, then it couldn't hurt to find out what was so great about it. Yeah, I was curious, but I still had a moral problem with the whole idea of getting your "cherry popped" just so you could say you did.
Call me old-fashioned, but it seemed wrong for a girl to lose her virginity when she wasn't in love with a guy just so she could tell her friends she did it. But this girl was persuasive, and she told me that was how she and her boyfriend had fallen in love -- by having sex. Now that explanation captured my attention.
I wanted somebody to love me. I needed someone like Fish was at the beginning; someone who treasured me and liked spending time with me. Someone who wanted to kiss me all the time would be a bonus. I needed that experience again like an addict needed cocaine. Jenny said she'd hook me up with a great guy, and I believed her.
I suppose it was my own fault that I listened to her instead of using good common sense, but I finally agreed to talk to one of Dirk's friends on the phone. His name was Mike. I don't remember his last name. He was fun to talk to, though, and I even snuck out of the house a few times to call him back on a payphone so we could talk in private. He was nice -- I'd give him that -- even if he was nineteen going on twenty. And he didn't talk dirty to me on the phone.
Jenny swore he was really cute even though she didn't have a picture of him. She promised me that I'd love him if I got to know him. I figured if I liked him even a little bit, sight unseen, then maybe we could get together and see how things went. He did have a nice voice, but that was all I knew about him. That, and his age.
I don't know how she did it, but Jenny managed to get me all excited about meeting this guy. We'd been friends for less than a month, but she'd made me totally rethink my beliefs about sex. My friendship with Mary and Cathy had planted that seed in my mind. Jenny just made me long for it through her romantic notions. I wanted to meet Mike badly enough to lie to my parents about where I was going that night so I could see where things might lead.
Technically I was going to see Jenny, but the truth was I never planned to spend the night at her house. The idea was for me to meet Mike and spend the night at Dirk's place getting to know Mike, while Jenny fooled around with Dirk.
Jenny said Mike was even better looking than her boyfriend and I was fortunate that he really liked me just from talking to me on the phone. She said she was glad that I'd finally meet him so we could all hang out together.
She gave me directions and I wrote them down and shoved them into my pocket. I brought a little bag of clothes and a whole lot of excitement with me. She said we'd "party up" first, whatever that meant. It sounded fun, so I figured why not? If it would help me relax for my first time, it couldn't hurt. Up to that point I'd never drunk more than one beer in my life, and though I knew people who smoked pot, I still hadn't experimented with it myself. The worst thing I'd done was smoke cigarettes.
So I took the bus to this neighborhood where Jenny's boyfriend lived, and I walked to his apartment as the sun was setting. It made the neighborhood look creepier because the streets were littered with trash, including dirty diapers. Random beer cans and needles rested alongside them on the lawn, as well as little rubber things that looked like deflated balloons. My neighbors would freak out if that kind of trash lay on the ground where I lived. They'd probably call the cops. I shivered at what those disposed items indicated about the neighborhood, well, beyond the obvious.
The sun set pretty late during the summer in Central New York. Earlier Jenny had told me she'd meet up with me at Dirk's apartment between eight and nine o'clock at night. I knocked on his door at exactly 8:30 that evening. Somehow I'd managed to arrive at Dirk's place first, and I didn't like it. My initial excitement about meeting Mike faded as time passed and there was still no sign of Jenny.
If I had realized my friend was planning to abandon me that evening, I would have taken the last bus home. But I didn't find out she wasn't coming to her boyfriend's house until after ten. She called him after she got home from the hospital and said she was sorry, but she had to cancel. Apparently her mother had passed out and she had to stay with her mom at the ER until they released her to go home. By then I'd had a few too many beers so my mind was fuzzy. I didn't know what to do.
"Sorry to hear that, babe. Wish you were here." He winked at me.
He wasn't the only one. I needed Jenny to make me feel safe. The longer I sat in the apartment alone with her boyfriend, the more uncomfortable I got. So I drank more beer, which was the worst thing I could do since I was such a lightweight.
Dirk laughed and told her I'd already gone home. "She was a nice girl, too. What a bummer Mike wasn't here to meet her. He said he'd be late. When he gets here, I'll tell him we'll just have to reschedule. Love you."
He hung up before I could grab the phone and tell her he was lying.
"But I'm still here. Why'd you tell her I left?"
He shrugged and grabbed two more cans of beer from the fridge. Returning to where I sat on a kitchen chair, he offered me one. I shook my head, which spun from the motion. I was drunker than I cared to admit. I'd heard about people getting wasted. I was almost there myself, so I said, "I've had enough."
Cracking open a can, he sucked it down and burped. With a smirk he popped open the to
p of the other one and some froth sprayed in my direction.
I frowned and wiped my face.
The way he looked at me with a gleam in his eye made me nervous, and a slight panic crawled up my throat. The room started swaying when I tried to stand. So I sat back down. Dirk sat beside me on another chair. I studied the cigarette burns on his Formica-covered table top while trying to decide how to handle the last minute change of plans.
I couldn't decide if I should call my dad and ask him to come get me, or hang around and wait for Mike. I dreaded being grounded, so I chose to wait. I remember Mike saying something about having a car. Maybe he could give me a ride home.
When he wasn't looking, I studied Jenny's boyfriend to try and understand what she found so appealing about him. He wasn't nearly as attractive as Jenny had described, and he had a slight body odor about him just like she did. He also didn't take very good care of his house.
Jenny never mentioned he was a slob or that they had regular shootings on his street. If she had, I doubt I'd have taken the bus to meet him or agreed to spend the night. I also had a sinking feeling that Mike wouldn't be that cute, either.
While I waited another hour for Mike to show up, I suddenly sobered up enough to realize I'd be alone with two men I didn't know. So I asked Dirk for another beer, thinking it would make me seem more mature and help me to relax.
My nerves were totally shot from not knowing what to do now that I was stuck at Dirk's house alone. "Is Mike ever coming?" I finally asked him.
"Nope. He canceled hours ago."
I stiffened. "When did he call?"
"When you were in the bathroom earlier."
"Why did you make me think he was still coming when you knew he wasn't? I would have left an hour ago and taken the last bus home."
Somebody Love Me (Journeys) Page 2
