Screw Everyone

by Ophira Eisenberg

  Like any teenage girl worthy of her Jordache skinny jeans, I instantly fell for Robby, the band’s lead singer. He had dark-brown hair that he gelled out into a spiky halo like The Cure’s Robert Smith—just a little shorter in the front to conform to the grooming code of the chain restaurant he worked at on weekends. The band, we learned, played U2 covers exclusively and called itself “B4”—a name that Robby had come up with, which in my notebook meant he was a borderline genius. I was smitten. Unfortunately for me, Cheryl had a crush on him too, which made mine all the more acute because Cheryl’s was reciprocated.

  This left me with Robby’s dorky best friend, Cameron.

  Tall and lanky, with dirty-blond hair that was more Robert Plant than Robert Smith, Cameron was the bass player for B4. He was nerdy. He was smart. But he liked me, and I figured anyone in the band was close enough. It bothered me that he was so quiet, but it would later turn out to be a valuable trait.

  The first time I saw B4 play live was at a house party—a house party that I’d booked them for. It was spring, and my mother decided she needed a break from working long days at the grocery story and dealing with her two sour teenagers—me and my eighteen-year-old brother, the last of the six children she’d raised. Who could blame her? She booked herself a ten-day trip to visit her family in Holland. My older sister went on a vacation to Mazatlán with her on-and-off-again diamond-nose job-poodle-buying boyfriend, leaving my brother and me alone for half a month. The timing couldn’t have been better. I was going to do the one thing that I’d promised my mother I would never ever do: throw a party. A big one. In addition to recruiting B4 to play, I also planned to serve alcohol—courtesy of my brother. Before I had the nerve to ask him (I’d even rehearsed my plea), he’d already taken it upon himself to bring home a case of beer and a case of wine coolers—the latter for my inner circle of girlfriends. He was a good brother. He was also a stoned brother, and he figured that the more drunk we were, the less we’d notice him hot-knifing hash on the kitchen stove. We had booze, a band, and a basement. It was more than any fifteen-year-old could ask for.

  I loved the idea of breaking the rules, and I say “idea” because by the morning of the party I was a nervous wreck, scared stiff that nobody would come, and if they did, that something would get damaged, someone would spray-paint our lawn, or one of my drunk girlfriends would throw up under a couch cushion. I went nuts, preparing the house as if I were expecting an army of toddlers to arrive. I removed all the vases, taped up sharp corners, and moved out of harm’s way anything that could be crushed, broken, or vomited on. It was a smart move because at seven o’clock the entire school showed up. Instead of losing myself in the revelry, I ran around policing different rooms to make sure no one had too much fun. I actually started to wish my mother were there. She could have controlled the party while I rebelled against her, and we’d both relax.

  A few hours later, when B4 plugged in their instruments to tune them, it hit me that this was one hell of a good party and I should try to enjoy myself. They started their set with U2’s hit of the year, “With or Without You.” Cheryl and I leaned against the basement support beam and swayed to the music, sipping our fizzy coolers. I was mesmerized by Robby’s singing but made sure to smile a lot at Cameron. When the set ended, as a treat I passed around a bottle of Schnapps I’d found in my mom’s liquor cabinet. Judging by the layer of dust on the label, it had probably been sitting there since the first Star Wars movie came out in theaters. After sharing a swig with Cameron, I led him into the “makeout room”—my mother’s sewing room—where we necked and dry humped in between quilt squares and sprigs of crinoline from my ballet costumes. We were both such novices, our groping ended up being too licky and fast paced. Occasionally our teeth would collide. At the end of the night when I puked, it was from the combination of worry, wine coolers, and a dash of melon Schnapps. Cameron biked home on his beat-up ten-speed, and I scrubbed the house and my mouth for two days. It was a near-perfect teenage evening.

  A month later, my friend Karen announced that her parents were going out of town, and she also wanted to throw a party and have B4 play at it. Clearly, I had set a new standard. No longer was it acceptable to play mix tapes on your ghetto blaster. That was so 1987.

  The boys took the gig, and I helped them set up their amps, pedals, and cables on the orange shag carpet of Karen’s basement. While Cameron turned on his amp and checked his pedals, I daydreamed about my future as the band’s tour manager, of how I’d walk around, yapping orders in a sleek-fitting pinstripe suit. I’d still be with Cameron but sleeping with Robby on the sly. This would go on for years. It was the closest I’d ever come to having career goals. No wonder I didn’t get into the IB Program. They didn’t offer a course called “Infidelity and Cover Band Management.”

  Cheryl had to study for a brain biology test or something, so I’d have to sway to the band on my own. On their set break, Cameron grabbed my hand and pulled me into the make-out room. In Karen’s house, it was the furnace room. Only Freddy Krueger would find it romantic, but it was all we had to work with. After a lot of fevered making out, Cameron told me that he wanted to go down on me for the first time. My eyes lit up. Finally! Yes! I was on track, taking steps toward the ultimate objective. I was positively giddy as he slipped off my ruffled skirt and black Jockey-for-Her underwear, tossing them haphazardly into the abyss of the boiler room. I lay back on the cement floor as he dove in between my thighs. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I felt was . . . light punching, like he was cramming his face into me. After about a minute of that I felt something wet, and then nothing. I opened my eyes and half sat up. There was Cameron, looking back at me, his head framed by the V of my legs, his face covered in blood.

  I know exactly what this sounds like—but trust me, it wasn’t that. If I had that story, I’d surely tell it. Apparently some unlucky combination of Cameron’s excitement, the dry furnace air, and his amateur technique had caused his nose to bleed. I grabbed his T-shirt and tried to sop up as much blood as I could, but it was gushing uncontrollably.

  “We need to get some ice or a towel or something,” I said.

  “We need to get Robby!” he whimpered.

  “Wait!” I yelled, but before I could find my skirt or my underwear, a sliver of light fell on my thighs. Robby had slipped in and was now staring at me, my half-naked body in plain view.

  I watched Robby’s eyes move from Cameron’s face to my thighs and then dart back to Cameron’s face. Searching for a way to conceal my embarrassment, I finally looked Robby square in the face and said, “What? You’ve never seen this before?” As if his lack of experience, not my state of bloodied nudity, was the humiliation here. As if I were saying, “That’s right, this shit happens all the time when you hang out with Ophira Eisenberg!” I followed it up with a frantic plea for him to fetch some ice and a towel. Robby, wide-eyed, nodded and ran off. With him gone, I scrambled around the floor and finally located my skirt; my underwear was never to be seen again. Abandoning the still-bleeding Cameron, I rushed out and found Karen, the hostess. I held her by her boney shoulders and backed her into the yellow guest bathroom. “What have you heard?” I demanded.

  “Just that Cameron got a nosebleed but it’s not nothing that Robby’s never seen before.” All those double negatives added up to a major positive, and I fell in love with Robby even more for keeping his highly kissable mouth shut. I told Karen I needed a minute and shoved her out of the bathroom. Underwearless with specks of dried blood on my thighs, I adjusted my skirt to conceal all the evidence and returned to the party as if nothing were amiss. This wasn’t exactly the unique sense of style I’d set out to cultivate, but I felt pretty confident no one would be able to copy it. It was truly one of a kind.

  The boys played their final set, and Cameron wouldn’t look at me. This would never be an amusing story we’d tell our children. After that night, we drifted apart. We didn’t officially break up as much as we petered out. It was a mutuall
y agreed-upon avoidance, and because he didn’t talk that much, I stopped waiting for him to deal with me directly and switched my attention to another group of guys. I’m pretty sure the story of his bloody face and my naked ass never ran through the gossip mill, for which I will always credit Robby and Cameron’s discretion. I’m still waiting for someone to knock on my door holding a Ziploc bag containing a dusty pair of black Jockey-for-Her underwear excavated from a boiler room and ask me to explain. No, I got off easy with not much more than a shared secret and some missing panties, even if my virginity was still intact. Back to the Lotus spreadsheet to see what piece of pie would eat me next.

  CHAPTER 3

  NASTY, BRUTISH, AND SLUTTY

  Cheryl and I thought Banff might be the perfect place for us to “expand our horizons.” A cute ski town nestled in the Rocky Mountains, Banff attracted every good-looking human in the area for spring skiing, drinking, and hooking up. Getting permission from our parents was barely an issue. Cheryl and I both had working moms, absent fathers, and good grades, a harmonious combination as long as you returned home with washed hair and all your fingers.

  We made certain we drove the speed limit, although with every click of the odometer we felt more and more like we were already breaking the law by heading to an unchaperoned weekend in Banff. If I’d known earlier that a 90 percent grade in physics signified that you were responsible, I would have studied harder, sooner. Cheryl managed to borrow her mother’s car for the two-hour drive. I “borrowed” my mother’s credit card and reserved a room at a cheap motel. I remember calling out to my mom from the kitchen while rifling through her purse, “Mom, I’m going to Banff for the weekend with Cheryl! Be back on Sunday!” and hearing, “Okay, be careful!” from the laundry room. At the time, that was considered solid parenting. Then again, this was long before you had to show an ID to buy cold medicine.

  Green Mountain Lodge sounded a lot nicer than it was. I’ve never stayed in a more pathetic place. It hung on to its two-star rating by a fraying set of bed sheets, awarded by a local paper called Pioneers Weekly. It was the kind of place you stayed at if you were planning a murder, running from a killer, or generally second-guessing every decision you’d ever made in life. The bedspread had burn holes, and the carpet was an indistinguishable gray/brown/green color, the same fiber you’d find in a dog kennel. The only decor in our room was a watercolor of two chipmunks fighting over a nut and a placard titled EMERGENCY EVACUATION INSTRUCTIONS. Ultimately, all that mattered was that we had our very own crash pad in a town filled with ripped boys waiting to fall prey to our naive charm. Hopefully, we wouldn’t get carded.

  As soon as our duffel bags hit the floor, we faced our first major challenge: transforming ourselves into college students who passed for the legal drinking age. With the help of Bonne Bell makeup, sparkly tops, miniskirts, and high heels, we looked more like two girls trying too hard to look eighteen than two girls who were actually eighteen, which was enough to get us in anywhere.

  Tentative in our heels, we wobbled down the main strip of bars, every one of them embracing a cabin or moose theme. We’d made it one block when a couple of guys called out from the window of a bar, beckoning us to join them. It seemed like a perfectly valid invitation to us, even if they were drunken strangers. They offered to buy us a beer, and we gave them our fake names, ones we’d agreed upon earlier. By combining our respective middle names with our moms’ maiden names, Cheryl became Lynn Collingwood and I was now Ms. Jasmin van Brunswick. My fake name sounded even faker than my real name. We giggled and told them that we worked as chemistry and biology lab technicians. It was sort of true; Cheryl and I had after-school jobs setting up the labs for experiments and exams. We were paid $3.25 an hour, which was pretty much why we were staying at the Green Mountain Kennel. They claimed to be air force pilots. It was consistent with how they looked; they were both physically fit, with bulging biceps and tight, short haircuts. Cheryl—I mean Lynn—whispered to me, “You know what that means—they’re clean!” Top Gun! That Cheryl-Lynn was always thinking! They didn’t seem to have any interest in investigating whether or not we fit our story. Lynn and Jasmin, a couple of eighteen-year-old lab technicians, was good enough for them.

  The brunette was cuter, but the strawberry blond, although goofier, kept the conversation rolling. After two rounds of drinks, they shifted gears and invited us back to their hotel for “last call.” We didn’t even know what that meant. Their hotel, it turned out, was conveniently located across the street from ours, although it ranked about forty stars higher. The room was nice, but it was clear that they’d been up to some serious partying in it. The room was littered with beer cans, take-out food containers, and towels. I shoved aside a small mountain of crumpled white towels to sit down while the goofy one mixed up something called a Purple Jesus, a classy drink made from grape juice and pure grain alcohol. No cocktail should ever be purple.

  Before I could finish mine—and I was trying—Cheryl was already making out with Maverick on the balcony. Goose grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the other side of the room. I caught Cheryl’s half-opened eye and mouthed, “Expand your horizons?” She nodded slowly and gave me the thumbs-up. Goose tugged at my bra strap and dragged me into the bathroom.

  After some sloppy kissing, the ritual of clothing removal began. He ripped off his T-shirt as if to say, “Here’s what we’re doing—look, I’ll go first!” I hated taking off my shirt, only because it meant explaining the whole scar on the stomach thing. I hadn’t yet prepared the thirty-second elevator pitch version of it, so instead I went back to kissing him. He stopped me a couple of minutes later and asked, “Can I take off your shirt?” (Canadians—we’re so polite!) For the first time that night, I felt waves of panic. I knew where we were headed. I was about to lose my virginity. I replied “yes,” but I didn’t recognize the voice that said it. He started working fast, furiously kissing me on the neck and tugging on zippers. It took a while, as there were a lot of them, plus snaps and grommets—it was the fashion of the time. Next I was hoisted onto the bathroom counter, in between the sink and the travel shampoos. There was no mention of the scar; it was like he didn’t see it. Cool. He was about to remove my underwear (I’d graduated from Jockey-for-Her to Elita) when I stopped the action and did the one thing that still makes me proud: I asked him to put on a condom. He, of course, didn’t have one handy. Being the sophisticated, mature woman I was pretending to be, I fished the one I’d gotten from sex education class out of my purse, and much to his chagrin, handed it to him. That was it. We were officially about to “do it.”

  To say it was disappointing is an understatement. Losing my virginity was about as exciting as going around. Even though I was losing it to an older guy in an unconventional setting, the act itself fit my older sister’s prediction: two minutes long and kind of annoying. The only thing she missed was the part where I got a free shower cap at the end of it. I hoped she was right about sex getting better the more you did it. If not, those porn stars in Swank should be given acting awards. Despite my months of imagining what it would feel like, I was glad that it didn’t hurt, but other than the sensation of two bodies rhythmically slapping against each other, I didn’t feel much of anything. Emotionally, it was a different story. My nonchalance turned into fear and embarrassment the moment he pulled out and began peeling off the condom. I became anxious about cleaning myself up, convinced that some renegade sperm was trying to crawl into my vagina.

  He left the bathroom and I looked in the mirror. I did lose my virginity, right? Should I ask him? How would that go? We did that, right? So it’s done. Right? I’m good? Cool. Thanks.

  Goose returned with a couple of pillows, a sheet, and a blanket and tossed them on the floor. I guess it would be awkward if we slept in the double bed beside our friends. We exchanged quick smiles as he smoothed out the sheet.

  “You can have the pillow,” he said.

  So that’s what you have to do to get the pillow.

 
I wanted to run out and share notes with Cheryl, but at the same time, I didn’t want to interrupt her “expanding horizons,” so I fell asleep, curled up on our bathroom-floor bed with Goose beside me. In a twisted way, it was kind of sweet.

  He asked, “Are you sure you’re eighteen, Jasmin van Brunswick?”

  “Yup” was the last thing I said before we passed out.

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, I woke up to Maverick trying to step over us, asking if he could use the bathroom. You mean the deflower room? I thought, suddenly feeling self-conscious in the morning glare of the previous night’s adventure. It didn’t help that I was mildly hungover, or maybe still drunk. Cheryl stood near the door, already dressed, waiting for me so we could leave. There was an air of uneasiness among the four of us. I asked Goose if they wanted to grab some breakfast, thinking maybe if we all sat down and ate pancakes, things would feel a little more normal and familiar, but he said they had some very special training to get to ASAP, and we had to leave. In wrinkled miniskirts and smudged makeup, Cheryl and I took our very short walk of shame across the street to our shitbag hotel. I was ready to burst.

  Finally I blurted, “So . . . how was ‘expanding your horizons?!’”

  “What do you mean?” she asked defensively. “I didn’t ‘expand my horizons.’ We just made out a lot.”

  Alarm bells began to sound in my head, heart, and gut.

  “What? I thought you were into it! You said yes when I said the code phrase!”

  “No! I thought you were asking if I was okay. I wasn’t really into that guy. Plus, I figured you wouldn’t go all the way with a strange man in a hotel bathroom!”

  Wow. She had higher standards for me than I did.

  Little did I know this was the beginning of a pattern.