by Liz Miles
She’s the director. She’s the artist.
And then I think, why should I wait for Ms. Tea’s order?
This was my monologue.
This was my creation. If anything, I am its monster.
So I bent over in the most outlandish Shakespearean bow—Falstaff at his finest—and in my ears rang the most delicious round of applause. An applause so thick and rich it rivaled the curtains that hung behind me.
When I arched back to standing, a swan-like grace infiltrated my body, Jesse ran up on stage with a dozen roses pledging his undying love and …
Okay, who am I kidding. Truth is, I almost fell over backward, caught myself just before falling on my ass and after mumbling a most self-deprecating Elvis-style “Thank ya, thankya verry much,” I flop back into my seat awash in a sea of “Good job”/“nice going”/“That was awesome.”
The standing ovation part?
Totally true.
Never Have I Ever
BY COURTNEY GILLETTE
THE TRICK WAS to get out. So when Mrs. Robinson suggested Alfred, I went. Mrs. Robinson was the Junior Honors English teacher. She was always piling fliers on our desks—literary magazines, contests for young adults, calls for high school poets, writing camps, seminars. Things that made us feel older than we were. On my own, I had sent two stories and four poems to literary magazines, and all of them had been rejected. When I told Mrs. Robinson this, she frowned.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said, “Really, it happens to the best of us. Maybe instead of a contest you’d like to take some classes?”
“What kind of classes?”
“College classes,” she smiled, then dug around on her desk for a purple and gray brochure. “Here. This is a weekend retreat upstate. I’ve never had a student go, but maybe you’d be interested?”
I thumbed through the brochure. Academic classes for advanced high school students, in disciplines of creative writing and literature.
“Really?” I said. It was exciting. To be told to do something as a writer. So far, I only knew I was a writer because I wrote. I was seventeen. I wrote poems and stories in long rambling documents on our computer. I made collages from magazines and concert stubs, scraps of poetry or novels smeared across the pictures. My boyfriend Tommy was in art school. The closest I got to being an adult was going to visit him, spending days in the city walking around.
I sent in the application before telling Mom. This is how I did things with her. I told her what I was doing, and then waited for her to say, “no.” When she said “no” I did it anyway.
She was at the computer when I told her. I had made dinner. I had enough money to pay for the weekend from my job at the bookstore at the mall. I figured this was like a responsible teenager’s version of running away.
“I have something I want to do, the second weekend in July,” I told her. I was hanging on the door jamb that separated the kitchen and the living room. Our computer was wedged on to an old night table, next to the couch.
“Yeah,” she answered, not looking at me. “Is it with Tommy?”
“No, it’s upstate. At a college. It’s a writing thing.”
I could see her furrow her brow, then lower her head to rub her hand against it.
“Okay.”
“I already applied,” I said quickly. “It’s $375 for the weekend. I can pay for it.”
“A writing thing?”
Last winter, Mom had found my journal—the biggest breach of trust being that she had gone looking for it—where I had written poems about wanting to have sex with my best friend, Rebecca. I wrote stories about what it would be like, in so many different ways: if we were both vampires, if we were both college students with our own apartments in the city; if we were living in the eighteenth century and were being courted by men who we had to hide our affair from. Mom flipped out, lectured me on how dirty it was to write about sex and to write about sex with a girl, and was I a lesbian? And why did I have a boyfriend? And were we having sex? And she couldn’t handle this right now, she said, not with Dad gone, I just had to stop, and it didn’t matter that she had found my journal—it didn’t matter, it was already done—and she was going to talk to the guidance counselor at my school. And take down those posters of girls, and no you can’t go to that show in Philadelphia. And why, Amber, why why why why why?
Mom turned from the computer and looked at me.
“It’s academic,” I said. “A poetry class. A fiction class. A literary criticism class.”
She shook her head. “How did you learn about it?”
“Mrs. Robinson.”
These were the golden words. Mrs. Robinson was the kind of teacher who, even though it was our junior year, and even though by this point parent-teacher conferences only happened when kids were failing, Mrs. Robinson called at your house when you did something well. When I was the only student to get a B on our first essay—a critical look at epiphanies in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (I had gone through eighteen drafts of it, having been warned by Tommy that she was the most harsh on your first paper)—she called my Mom to tell her.
Mom and I hadn’t talked about writing since the sex poems. She never told me that Mrs. Robinson called. Mrs. Robinson had told me when she handed the papers back to us.
“I can’t pay for it,” Mom added.
“I can, I know.”
“When is it?”
I told her.
“How would you get there?”
I shrugged. This I hadn’t thought of. We shared one car between the two of us—her driving to work, then after school when she came home, I drove myself to work on the nights I had to be at the bookstore. No way would she let me drive up there.
“I’ll take the train.”
She snorted. On the screen was her email account. Emails from my father with subjects like Money, Money again, Money for dental. “That’s too far.”
“It’s like four hours.”
I had no idea where it was. It was a guess. I just knew it wasn’t here.
She looked at me, then turned back to the computer. “We’ll talk about it.”
I went to the bank and sent them a money order the next day.
• • •
I could take the train there, but then I had to take a taxicab to the school, which was about twenty minutes away. Mom called the college to ask if there were any other students taking the train that I could split a cab with, but the coordinator said there wasn’t.
“How else are they all getting up there?” Mom demanded.
“Their parents,” the coordinator responded.
Mom didn’t ask me about it again. She gave me fifty dollars for an emergency and told me to call when I arrived, and call before I got on to the train back home.
• • •
Alfred was a hamlet, too small to even be called a village. They were hosting about fifty high school students that weekend for various academic things. Astronomy. Political Science. Fine Art. Writing. There were only eight of us in the writing group—all girls—and I was the first to arrive.
“Your roommate’s name is Katie. She’s from Buffalo.” My warden, a chunky girl named Kelly, told me this in a chipper voice. She placed big, long “annnnnnd”s between her sentences and rarely made eye contact. I kept a permanent smile on my face, not sure how to address her otherwise.
When Kelly left, I poked around the dormitory. The closet, the matching desks, the squat bureaus. It was so plain, yet all I ever wanted. I ached to leave home. An hour or so went by as I lay on the bed, reading. When I got bored, I took out my iPod, turning the volume all the way up so that I could hear it through the tinny speakers, which I propped up on the bureau by the door. I was opening and closing all the drawers, just to snoop, when someone appeared in the doorway.
“Is that Sleater-Kinney?”
I whipped around. A tall girl with short black hair was peeking in. She held herself almost perpendicular to the door jamb before slinking into
the room.
“Yeah,” I smiled. “It’s Dig Me Out.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, flopping on the bed where I had left my book. “I love that album.”
“Are you Katie?”
“Mira Albany,” she smiled, extending her hand. I shoved a drawer shut with my hip and leaned forward to shake.
“Amber.”
“Pleasure,” she grinned, holding my gaze. A thudding sound from the stairs interrupted us. A girl wearing a blue bandana popped in the doorway, throwing a heavy duffel bag in front of her steps. A mess of dreadlocks peeked out from under the bandana.
“I thought my parents would never leave,” she huffed. “Do you guys smoke?”
“Yeah,” answered Mira.
“Kinda,” I said.
The girl was rummaging in a purple bag on her hip. “I saw kids outside. We can smoke here cause they don’t know who’s eighteen or not.”
Mira sat up. “Are you joking?”
The girl smiled. She had pulled a box of Marlboro Lights and a small blue lighter from her bag. “For serious. I guess it makes sense. This is college, right?”
Mira ran down the hall for her cigarettes, and while we waited, the girl in the bandana pointed a finger at me.
“Amber?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool. Katie. We’re roommates.”
“Oh,” I smiled. “From Buffalo?”
She rolled her eyes. “The one and only.”
Mira waved from the stairway and we went to join her. Outside, two girls were sitting on the porch smoking. One girl had long brown hair, and the other one wore huge gold hoop earrings and her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. They were loud and laughed in giant whoops. When we walked by them, they went quiet and stared us down. Later we would find out that they were Kiana and Jackie. They were both from New York City, one from Manhattan and one from the Bronx. To me, being raised in New York had to be the urban equivalent of being raised by wolves.
Just as Mira and Katie lit up their cigarettes, a blonde girl wearing the telltale purple sweatshirt of a warden appeared.
“The orientation is in fifteen minutes in Gould Hall. Do you need directions?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Mira quipped. The warden sniffed, then looked at Katie and I.
“It’s the red building behind the cafeteria,” she stated. “Don’t be late.”
As she walked away, Katie made a face at Mira. From a few feet away, the girls on the porch guffawed.
“Who pissed in her yogurt?” Mira scoffed. “God.”
Katie gave me a cigarette, and as I puffed on it, I looked up at the trees that lined the one side of the campus. I’m not at home, I thought happily. It was ecstasy.
They crammed a lot into our first day, after orientation and lunch. Everything was printed on lavender paper—our schedule, our assignments, the rules. The writing group became an awkward clique that traveled from class to class: a literature class where we read Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, a poetry class where the professor insisted we call him Steven and cursed liberally. Kiana and Jackie kept to themselves, scowling at anyone who tried to talk to them; Joan was Mira’s roommate and kind of a suck-up; Lindsey chewed gum loudly; and Terry took notes in a tiny red notebook that I thought made her look like a real writer.
That night, the warden reminded us of the curfew rule—everyone could stay up late, but you had to stay in your room after 11 p.m. I had put on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt and was thinking about writing in my journal when Katie came back from the bathroom and got her cigarettes.
“Are you going to bed?”
I froze, looking at her quizzically. She laughed. “Everyone’s hanging out in Lindsey and Terry’s room. C’mon.”
We snuck quietly in our socked feet down the hall to where a bit of light spilled out from the crack of the door. The building was old, with big wood hallways that reminded us of Girl, Interrupted. We all wanted to be beautiful, suicidal Angelina Jolie when she was single and wild. In their room they had started playing Never Have I Ever. My insides clenched immediately, knowing that I was a virgin who would probably pale in comparison to their experiences. Mira looked particularly cool, leaning back in a pair of tiny gym shorts, the kind from the seventies, and a white tank top. Her shoulders were dotted with freckles. She looks hot, my mind reeled, and I gulped, wanting to shake off my own thoughts. She smiled broadly at me when I came in with Katie, clicking the door behind us. Then she patted the floor next to her by the bed, and I sat down, my heart beating wildly.
The game was simple: everyone holds up both hands, fingers splayed. One girl proclaims something she’s never, ever done (kissed her friend’s boyfriend, given a blow job), and the other girls who have done this thing, they put down a finger. The peer pressure, the confessions, the hollering and laughter—it quickly escalated, and we were in a fast kinship, the kind of immediate bond that only girls can build. When Katie said, “Never have I ever had sex,” we all sat quietly watching the girls who could fold down a confident finger: Kiana, Jackie, Mira and Lindsey. In the gossip that followed, it came out that Jackie had lost her virginity when she was eleven. The boy was twelve.
“What?” Terry gasped. Most of us were wide-eyed.
Jackie shrugged half a shoulder, tanned and peeking out from the oversized Tweety bird shirt she used as a nightgown. “It doesn’t matter what age we were,” she sneered. “We were in love. I loved him so much. Everyone in my neighborhood had sex like that.”
“But you were eleven,” Lindsey announced.
There was a slight flinch, but then she jutted her chin out. “So?”
The look of scorn plastered on Kiana’s face as she glowered at Lindsey made it seem like she might have lost her virginity when she was really young, too.
My fingers hadn’t moved during this question. Sex was something that I told Tommy I just didn’t want to do. In and out, up and down—it looked boring to me. Couldn’t we do everything else? Couldn’t he eat me out, and couldn’t I pour chocolate syrup on his dick before going down on him? Tommy was happy to fool around in so many ways, not minding that I wasn’t interested in straight-up sex. I didn’t want anyone to ask me about it, though. As the game continued, I focused on the few things I could: French kissed, sucked dick, gotten drunk. Check, check, check, I let my fingers drop with an anxious pride. Yes, I had done these things. Only Joan was more prudish than me. She sat in the middle of us and pouted, lamenting her abundance of “never evers.”
“Here,” I told her, shifting so that I could put my legs out in front of me. “Never have I ever shaved my legs more than twice.”
“What?” Katie laughed.
“No fucking way,” Mira said, crawling forward to look.
“It’s true,” I said. My leg hair—light brown and soft, barely grown in some places. I had shaved a handful of times before deciding it was a waste of time. I was seventeen, I had a boyfriend, I was a feminist, why bother?
“That’s gross,” Kiana said, shaking her head. Joan was grinning, her index finger folded down in her happy palm.
Meanwhile, I was dying to say it, I was dying for someone to say it. Never have I ever kissed a girl. Maybe it was said, but the want, the need was just so deep that I don’t remember it, that I mentally hyperventilated over such a moment of coming of age. I didn’t care about giving blow jobs, or losing it, or the gross places girls had gone to fuck their boyfriends. I wanted to talk about girls. I wanted to say that I had kissed my best friend, slipped my tongue in her mouth. That I loved her so much. More than Tommy, I thought. But different. But yes.
No one asked. I didn’t ask. It hurt, like holding your breath until your lungs felt scarred.
Only when Joan had fallen asleep on a stray pillow, and Terry was getting anxious about how early we had to get up for class, did Mira turn to me and ask quietly, “How long have you been with your boyfriend?”
“Seven months.”
She nodded, then gave me a sid
eways smirk. “Have you guys had sex?”
I blushed hard, making her laugh. “No,” I said, “No, I just … we do other things. But sex, I just … I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to?”
“I can think of better things to do than the whole insert tab A into slot B,” I gushed, and she buried her head in my shoulder, laughing.
“Girl,” she cried, “You are crazy.”
Peals of laughter erupted from Kiana and Jackie. “I’m serious!” Lindsey was saying. “He looks just like Johnny Depp!”
“Who?” Mira demanded.
“The boy from the Astrology group. Who sat at our table at dinner.”
“You mean Astronomy?” Katie smirked.
“Whatever.”
“He’s okay,” Kiana conceded. “I’ve got my eyes on that fly boy who had on the Knicks hat.” Here she fanned herself with her hand.
“He is fine,” Jackie agreed.
“Where do you think their dorms are?”Mira asked, leaning forward with a glint in her eye.
Katie laughed. “You wanna go for a visit?”
“You know,”Mira shrugged, “it’s a long weekend. And that boy with the Knicks hat was hot.”
Jackie and Kiana cackled, leaning forward to give Mira a high five. I laughed along, I did. I was trying to picture the face of the boy in the Knicks hat, but I couldn’t place it. My mind swam with the faces of the other boys who had been in the cafeteria—just boys.
“Who do you think is cute?” Katie asked me. I rolled my eyes.
“I’ve got a boyfriend,” I said. Mira shoved my arm playfully.
“Yeah, we know. But still. Who’s your crush?”
I was trying not to look, I realize, but I could see her nipples underneath her shirt. She had no idea, I thought. I was stuck in the isolation I always felt when I checked out girls.
Just then, the door swung open. Jackie screamed, and Lindsey scrambled up to her feet.
