Firsts

by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

  I’m surprised that of all the things Zach and I have done in this bed, just lying here together isn’t one of them. And it feels better than anything else. He wraps the other arm around me and kisses the top of my head.

  Is this what I gave up for the virgins?

  But when I start tracing circles on his chest with my finger, he pulls away and his face is hard. “I didn’t believe it when I first found out,” he mumbles. “I didn’t believe you could lie to me all that time when all I wanted to do was make you my girlfriend. I felt like a fool.” He clenches his jaw. “I watched the video a hundred times and still couldn’t believe it. All those guys, and I had no idea.”

  I reach out to touch him, but he waves away my hand.

  “You didn’t even write about me in that journal,” he says, averting his eyes. “You wrote about everyone else. I felt like I was nothing to you.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. Zach sounds like he’s about to cry. Hearing his voice like that is the worst feeling in the world. “I’m sorry, Zach,” I say. “I really am. You weren’t nothing.”

  “I know,” he says, his voice breaking slightly. “But part of me, this pissed-off part, wanted to be done with you. All this time I thought I had a chance with you, that you’d finally come around. Now I know it’s never going to happen.”

  I sit up, hanging my head between my knees and gripping the sheets underneath me. My body is made up of air, and I will float away unless I anchor myself here. I will float away without Zach.

  “Hey,” he says, running his finger along my arm. “That was just a little part of me. I’m not done with you.”

  My chest shakes when I take a breath. Everything hurts. I deserve it for hurting Zach.

  “I’d do anything for you,” he says, squeezing my shoulder gently. “Anything. Just let me be your friend, okay? You can tell me stuff. Whatever is in your head.”

  “What’s in my head right now is that I got what I deserved,” I say quietly. “I deserved what I got.”

  “Never say that,” he says. “Don’t ever say that. You hear me?” He cups my face in his hands.

  “Why do you even like me?” I say. “I’m selfish and dishonest and all I do is push people away. I wouldn’t even want to be my friend.”

  Zach’s eyes darken. “You’re also real. You tell it like it is. You don’t let me get away with anything. And I love that about you.”

  “I don’t see how you can like me after all this,” I say. “I wouldn’t have held it against you if you decided I was a big, dirty slut and joined the angry mob in the hallway. You probably had more right than anyone.”

  He sets his mouth in a firm line. “Remember all the times you told me no? All the times you brushed me off when I tried to make you my girlfriend? I stuck around after that. And I’m sticking around now. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

  I let my lips press against his so lightly that our mouths are barely touching. When I pull away, his eyes are still closed. I stare at his face, the mouth I have kissed a thousand times. For some reason the MIT acceptance letter flits into my head again, but this time it fills me with dread. In Massachusetts, I will be another number. I won’t be important to anybody. I won’t be around people like Zach who stand by me no matter what. People I can’t get rid of. People I don’t want to get rid of, not ever.

  Zach opens his eyes slowly and wipes a tear away from under my eye. “Penny for your thoughts,” he says. “I told you mine.”

  “I got into MIT,” I blurt out. “I haven’t told anybody yet.”

  I wasn’t planning on blurting it out. The words from the acceptance letter race through my head. Your commitment to personal excellence and principled goals has convinced us that you will both contribute to our diverse community and thrive within our academic environment. The words that mean less to me than all the ones Zach just said.

  He squeezes my hand and gives me a lopsided half smile. “I didn’t even know you had applied there,” he says. “Congratulations. You deserve everything you want, and I know how hard you work at school.”

  I know he’s proud of me, but I also know he’s hurt. He’s drifting away again. Friends tell friends what schools they apply to. Friends cheer friends on. I know Zach would have cheered me on if I had given him the chance.

  We sit there in silence until Zach says he has to go, that he has someplace to be. I don’t ask him where because it’s none of my business, but for some reason I’m insatiably curious. I have no right to be insatiably curious, but I am anyway.

  “You should heat up that soup,” he says. “My mom says it cures everything.”

  I smile weakly. I wish it would cure everything that’s wrong with me.

  Before he leaves, he opens his backpack and takes out a binder. He rummages around in it and pulls out what looks like an essay and places it beside me on the bed.

  “This is for you,” he says. “I did your home economics assignment from the other day. You wrote yours on the woman’s changing role in the workforce. And you did a pretty damned good job.”

  “Why?” I ask. “Why would you do that for me?”

  He shrugs. “I figure I owe you one. You know, for all the chemistry you’ve done for me.”

  And then he’s gone, with a wave and a smile I haven’t seen before.

  I’m left feeling like somebody I don’t even know.

  35

  Before school on Friday, I do what I have been avoiding for the last several days.

  I watch the video.

  It’s not hard to find. It’s embedded on some website that looks like it was thrown together without a lot of effort. It doesn’t look at all like something Charlie would create, and I’m sure that was exactly his intention.

  The picture quality is grainy, but you can definitely tell it’s me. Charlie spliced it together masterfully, cutting out all the discussions that surrounded the sexual encounters so that it’s basically pure pornography. My stomach churns when I think about how many times he has seen this footage and how many times he probably jerked off to it. The entire student body of Milton High has seen every inch of my body. They have seen me on my back, on my stomach, on all fours, on my side, and even—with that idiotic mole Juan Marco Antonio—standing up.

  Seeing myself doing that with so many different people makes me physically ill, like vomit could come up at any moment. I let them into my bedroom, let them into me, like it was no big deal. It’s like I’m watching somebody else entirely on that screen, somebody who doesn’t value herself at all. I thought I was in control, but I wasn’t. It was him the whole time, first Luke then every other guy I let into my bed to make up for him.

  I remember talking to Angela about the staying power of video and text messaging. “Once something’s out there, you never get it back,” she had whispered to me with wide eyes when one of the girls in our grade-ten homeroom sent a naked photo of herself to some guy she was seeing, who in turn sent it to all of his friends. Angela couldn’t believe somebody would be so stupid. “Seriously. That photo will follow her everywhere. To college. To job interviews. Her future husband will probably see it.” I wanted to tell her to loosen her chastity belt and stop judging people, but she was right.

  And if that girl’s photo made it to, say, 20 people, mine has made it to 1,601, at least if the obnoxious “visitor counter” Charlie installed at the bottom of the page can be believed. I wonder how many of them are perfect strangers, maybe some Internet perverts looking for new material to wank off to. It’s a truly sickening thought.

  Even worse is seeing my journal pages up there and feeling what I felt when I wrote them, all over again. It’s physically painful, like being stabbed with needles from the inside. I think about the people I wrote about, if it’s like that for them, too. They must be humiliated, pissed off, regretful. At least I had a choice. I could have not written anything down and spared a lot of people a lot of grief.

  I read every comment people left even though I don’t want to. They dig i
nto my skin, burrow into all the parts of me I never wanted people to see.

  Poor little bitch girl. She didn’t want to sleep with him? Sure didn’t seem that way.

  THIS GIRL IS A HEARTLESS WHORE.

  She thinks he’d make a good boyfriend? They deserve each other.

  Dear diary, I am a fucked-up slut who deserves everything I get.

  My phone starts to vibrate on the desk beside me. I jump, expecting it to be yet another nasty message, but luckily it’s Faye.

  “You just about ready for your fifteen minutes of notoriety to be over?” she says, sounding much too chipper for seven a.m.

  “Feels more like fifteen years,” I say. “But I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.” My throat feels like it’s closing up. Faye read those comments, too. Zach read them. Angela read them.

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” Faye says. “All you need to do is show up at today’s assembly.”

  “No, thanks,” I say. “I was planning on skipping that. Having everybody who hates me clustered into the gym just seems like a bad idea.”

  “Be there,” Faye says. “Trust me.”

  I do trust her, but she doesn’t give me the chance to say so. She keeps talking. “But there’s something I need you to know, before this goes down. There’s going to be fallout from this, and it’s going to seem like I threw a lot away. But I don’t care about the things a lot of people care about. I don’t want to go to college like you. What I really want is to go to beauty school.”

  I bolt upright. “Why are you talking about all this? What exactly are you planning here? Should I be worried?”

  She doesn’t answer any of these questions. “Just be at the assembly today. You’ll see.”

  I guess I don’t have much of a choice anyway. Everyone goes to our assemblies. Even the kids who normally cut class—the pot-smoking slackers who take off to ride their skateboards in the park and the garden-variety slackers who take off to destinations unknown—are forced to go. Principal Goldfarb has teachers do a sweep of the school. More than once, kids have been caught when they’re already in the parking lot. They get corralled back in with resigned expressions and detention slips. Although that sounds more appealing than more public ridicule, I’m not going to let Faye down.

  I spot Angela and Charlie on the bleachers. My breath catches in my throat. He hasn’t seen me, but just being in the same room with him makes my chest throb in terror. I almost talk myself out of the assembly, Principal Goldfarb’s punishment notwithstanding, until I see the way Charlie’s hand is resting in Angela’s lap, with his fingers pressed into her skin. It’s a simple gesture to somebody else, but not to me. He thinks he owns her. She’s pulling her skirt down so the sliver of skin between her knee sock and her skirt isn’t exposed. A typical Angela move, one that probably would have made me roll my eyes a few weeks ago but today makes me want to hug her and be alone with her and tell her everything. The letter I wrote is in my backpack, but I don’t know if I’ll ever have the chance to give it to her without her doing the same thing to it that Faye did to the piece of paper in Mrs. Hill’s classroom.

  Faye and Zach are notably absent, which leaves me to sit by myself until thirty seconds before the assembly, when they both sneak in and slide into the seats beside me, which are not surprisingly vacant.

  “Sorry,” Faye whispers. “Technical problems.” She grips my hand.

  Zach stares straight ahead with his jaw clenched. I know that face well. That’s the face he makes during chemistry tests, when he freezes up. It’s his nervous face. But what does he have to be nervous about?

  “Ahem,” Principal Goldfarb says from his podium. He taps the microphone with his index finger, leaving the room with the truly horrifying sound of feedback. Most people cover their ears. I relish the screeching, because it’s the first time at school since the video came out that I have heard something besides whispers about me.

  “Sorry about that. Now, we have a lot of material to cover, so I’m going to get started right away. One of the topics we’re going to talk about today is sexual harassment.”

  A wave of hushed voices crackles through the room. I can only imagine what they’re saying. I resist the urge to hide my head between my knees and curl into a ball.

  “I ask that you please kindly keep your thoughts to yourself. If you have questions, our guest speaker will be more than happy to answer them.”

  The guest speaker, a fat little man whose hands are probably much sweatier than my own, drones on about appropriate conduct, the importance of respecting each other, and how achieving personal space within an environment helps it to run smoothly for everyone. It’s Common Sense 101.

  “Now, we have a video that we would like you to watch. It’s only a few minutes long, but I think it gets the point across.” He awkwardly steps out of the way of the projector. I stifle a yawn. The only thing worse than speakers at school assemblies are speakers who insist on playing dated videos from the eighties, featuring actors with horrible hair and even worse wardrobes spouting some bullshit we already know.

  For a few seconds there’s no picture on the big screen. It’s just white.

  “Terrible fucking video!” someone yells out, taking advantage of the fact that we’re in the dark.

  A couple other people start talking, egged on by whoever had the nerve to shout at one of Principal Goldfarb’s assemblies. Until an image comes on the screen that shuts everybody up.

  Faye, blowing a kiss and waving at the camera, same as she did to me yesterday after school. But that’s where the similarities end. Because when the camera pans out from her face, she’s wearing nothing but lacy panties, with her hair covering her breasts.

  “Are you sure nobody’s going to see this? Because I don’t want to ruin my reputation and all. It’s a new school. I really want people to like me.”

  “This is the best way to get people to like you.” I hear Zach’s voice before I see him come up behind Faye on the screen. He puts his hands on her hips and pushes her hair to the side.

  I stop breathing and dig my nails into Faye’s hand.

  “I’m just a nice virgin,” she says. “Go easy on me.” She puts her elbows on a table, probably the same table the camera is on. Her facial expression changes from a smile to shock, and the picture rattles a bit. Zach presses against her from behind, pushing her head almost against the camera.

  The room erupts into yells and cheers and shouts. Shoes scuff on the gym floor. I can only imagine Principal Goldfarb and the other teachers groping in the dark, trying to find their way to the audio-video room to turn off the equipment. Somebody in the crowd screams.

  “What are you doing?” I say, dropping Faye’s hand. “That can’t be real. You two aren’t a couple. You said nothing was going on.” I trusted her that nothing was going on.

  Faye picks my hand up and drags it into her lap. She makes my fingers stop moving, makes my hand stay pressed against hers.

  “Trust me—we’re not a couple,” she whispers in my ear. “But for that moment in time, we were something more.”

  I know my jaw is hanging open, but I don’t care. I shouldn’t be angry—I have no right to be angry—but I want it to stop. I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to see this, not after the way Zach held me in my bed last night. I know they did this for me, to take the attention away from me—to make an even bigger scandal. I think back to what I told Faye yesterday. How many words is a video worth? I guess she took it literally.

  But watching Faye and Zach on that screen, doing a very convincing job of pretending to like each other, I wish they hadn’t done this. They should have just left me for the wolves.

  I take a deep breath to steady myself. I wonder if this is how Jeremy Roth’s girlfriend felt when she saw me wrapped around her boyfriend. I imagine her reaction. She probably checked her e-mail that morning, expecting nothing that would ruin her life, and got the link to the website instead. Maybe she clicked on it out of curiosity. Maybe sh
e even had plans with Jeremy that night. Plans that I ruined.

  Faye on screen is wrapping her knees around Zach’s chest. His hands are behind her back, pulling her against him. I want to turn away, but I keep watching, transfixed. This must be a joke. This can’t be happening. I try to squeeze my eyes shut, but they stay open, like anyone’s would when something truly terrible happens.

  “You’re blocking the money shot, man!” A guy in the crowd yells, followed by a chorus of boos.

  And just like that, the screen goes blank again. Somebody flips on a light switch. And with the lights comes complete silence.

  “Oh my God,” I mutter under my breath, afraid if I say it too loud it might become too real. “You guys made a sex tape.”

  Faye clutches my hand. “I know it was drastic,” she says. “But it had to be. And now your fifteen minutes are over.”

  36

  I wait for Faye and Zach after school, but after an hour and a half of pacing back and forth down the hallway in front of Principal Goldfarb’s office, it’s obvious they might never come out. Questions race through my mind like ticker tape. What were they thinking? What if they get suspended, or worse, expelled? What if they ruined their lives, all because they wanted to do me a solid? And, more selfishly, what does it mean that they slept together?

  Eventually I get in the Jeep and drive toward home by myself, after leaving them each about ten texts, which they may or may not ever get to read, depending on what exquisite forms of torture Principal Goldfarb has in store for them. I plan to go straight home with no detours, but I find myself driving past Angela’s house instead. Maybe I’m emboldened by Faye and Zach’s very public display of bravery. Maybe I just miss my best friend. Maybe both. I still can’t stop thinking about her, about how Charlie plans to spend this very weekend with her. Time is running out.

  I don’t work up the courage to knock on her door, but I do leave the envelope in her mailbox. It’s addressed simply—Angela Hirsch in blocky capitals. It doesn’t look like my printing, which was the whole point. I don’t want Charlie to find it and rip it up, or worse, read it himself. I never want Charlie to see the insides of that envelope. I never want anyone except Angela to see what I wrote.