by Tawni Waters
“Your fucking cheeseburger, milady.” Dean’s voice snaps me out of my memory.
I open my eyes as he sets a food-laden tray on the table. I poke at the paper-wrapped hockey puck masquerading as a burger. “Do I dare?” I ask.
“You’d better dare.” Dean slides into the booth beside me. “I spent my life savings on this baby. Got you fries too.” He steals a fry and shoves it in his mouth.
Slowly, I unwrap the burger, trying not to picture that story that went around online, the one about how McDonald’s cheeseburgers don’t decay. “You know this isn’t actually edible, right?” I say. And then I take a bite.
“Edible means ‘able to be eaten.’ You’re eating it right now, so clearly, it’s edible.”
Glaring, I think about busting out my iPhone and giving him the dictionary.com definition of “edible,” which I am sure will say something like, “able to be eaten without causing cancer, death, or both,” but the cheeseburger is too damn good. I don’t want to put it down. As I chew, Dean watches me eagerly. “Who are you, fucking Sam I Am?” I say after I swallow.
“Am I who?” Dean asks.
“You know, Sam I Am, from the children’s book? Sam I Am chases the yellow dude around, forcing green eggs and ham down his throat, asking everyone if they like green eggs and ham?’”
“In my defense, I really didn’t force anything down your throat,” Dean says. “You asked me to buy you the cheeseburger.”
“Well, you’re staring at me, like you’re dying to find out what I think.”
“I can’t lie. I am dying to find out.” Dean steals another fry.
I plop the burger on the tray. “It’s terrible.”
Dean looks so disappointed, I decide to tell the truth. “I’m kidding. This burger is the shit.” I pick it up and take another bite. But it doesn’t keep me from reciting Dr. Seuss to him or remembering why I have that book memorized. I can still hear Mom squealing gleefully while she read to me, using different voices for the different characters.
Dean grins. “For the record, you are my favorite life-form ever.”
“Why do you talk about me like I’m a scene project?” I take another bite of the burger. No wonder people get addicted to fast food. Sure, I can feel the bleach or whatever they wash the meat in corroding my intestines, but it tastes like salt and fat, and how can that be bad?
Dean looks out the window. “Because if I talked about you the way I want to talk about you, you’d bolt.”
I know I shouldn’t ask him to explain, but I do anyway, trying to sound nonchalant. “How do you want to talk about me?”
He looks at me. No, he looks through me. His eyes are that intense. “Harley,” he says, “I think I love you.”
I don’t know what to think or say. Every emotion in the book washes over me. I’m stunned. I’m elated. I’m pissed. I’m scared. And I want to cry. I go with the last one. I burst into tears at our table.
You know what they say. Third time’s a charm.
• • •
The ride to the next campground feels like sex. In spite of the wind, I’m profoundly conscious of Dean’s breath on the back of my neck. I can tell the difference between regular air and Dean air. Every molecule in my body is tuned into him. His legs wrapped around me might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I feel alive. My blood pounds. My skin is electric. My eyes take in all the details. The sky is the kind of blue I saw that one time I smoked pot with Amy, a deep blue that doesn’t exist in the regular world. The heat from the pavement burns me, and even though I don’t believe in god, I think cheesy thoughts about divine breath rising from the ground. The voice-over in my head sounds like bad poetry. I keep hearing Dean say, “I think I love you,” and all of this, the heat and the vivid blues and the poems in my head, makes me wonder if I love him back. Is this what love feels like? Hell if I know. Not like I’ve ever been in love before. All I know is whatever this is scares the crap out of me. Still, I can’t back away from it. It’s like a potentially deadly ocean I want to jump into, never mind the sharks.
When we finally pull over at a campground, Dean gets off, and then I do. I can barely stand, and it has nothing to do with being sore from riding the motorcycle. As I turn toward Dean, his eyes have that hungry look he had at the ocean. I want to jump into them and drown, just like that day. And now, I can’t even blame it on the bourbon.
“Harley.” Dean raises his hand toward my face and stops halfway, like he isn’t sure I’ll let him touch me.
“Dean,” I whisper back, because I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to say. I want to make jokes, pretend I don’t feel what I do, but all of the sassy has left me. I can’t look at Dean and mock him. Not when looking at him makes me want to lick him. Did I just say that? Okay, it’s out then. I want to lick Dean like he is a Popsicle. The cherry kind. The best kind. The kind I would have beaten a neighbor kid to death for when I was six. Mom’s cartoon sex book sure as hell didn’t warn me about this intense emotion.
Dean finishes raising his hand. Tentatively, he runs his thumb over my cheek. This is the part of the story where I turn into a slutty sex fiend, like I did that day at the beach. Before Dean can do anything else, I lunge him and plant one on him. His lips taste so good. Better than a cherry Popsicle. Better than anything. I am the one who yanks a sleeping bag off the bike and unrolls it. I am the one who pushes Dean down and straddles him. I am the one who rips off his shirt, who unbuttons his jeans, who licks his belly like it is that Popsicle.
He doesn’t ask me if it’s okay this time. And later, when he’s inside me, I look up at him. Loose curls frame his face. His skin is smooth, brown, shining. He watches me like I am an alien or a baby triceratops or a ticket to see John Lennon live, a strange, impossible, never-seen-before wonder. A miracle. The moon rises behind him, and because my mind is always stuck in a book, I think about the scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls where the earth moves. It’s like that. The earth moves. And I don’t have to wonder if I am in love with Dean anymore.
I know.
• • •
I wake up, and all of me hurts. I don’t mean my body. Maybe that does ache. Maybe my back is sore. Maybe my neck is kinked. But it’s what’s happening inside me that makes me press my lips together. Only an act of sheer will keeps me from screaming. What have I done? Dean lies next to me, snoring softly. My head rests on his arm. He’s naked. Above us, the sun is starting to rise, but it’s already hot. Too hot. This is probably a gift because no one else is camping for fear of the heat. Smart people are huddled in their air-conditioned houses binging on Netflix. As far as I know, no unsuspecting hikers have stumbled onto our sex fest. But here we are, naked in the desert. A hawk watches from his perch atop a cactus a few feet away. His yellow eyes judge me.
I study Dean, the curve of his lips, the dent in his throat, the little tattoo next to his left nipple that says unbroken. I wonder what made him feel so defeated that he tattooed a permanent inspirational poster on his body. Inspirational posters tell you that everything is surmountable, that no matter what happens, you can come back from it, bigger and better than ever. But I’m not so sure about that. I wonder if someday Dean will regret that tattoo because it isn’t true anymore. A person cannot remain unbroken forever.
Suddenly, I feel all the little cracks in me. A heart can shatter only so many times before it stops coming together again. I can tell you this for sure because I feel the fragility of mine. Mom’s death has left me walking the dizzy edge of a precipice I don’t dare contemplate. Sometimes, when I’m riding through LA, I see people on street corners mumbling to others who aren’t there, and I think for a second that I’m inches away from understanding exactly what it’s like to be them. I get how certainty disappears. I know how it is to scramble for solid ground and never find it. I look over at Dean. He smiles in his sleep like a kid, and I love him for it. Terror grips me. I know tha
t if I keep loving Dean, eventually, he is going to break my heart. And then, it will explode like a vase dropped from a window.
Then I will never be okay again.
This is when I decide to end things with Dean. It’s not a head decision. I’m not even sure I allow myself to think it straight out. But below my consciousness, the part of me that is like a rat trying to gnaw its way out of a cage knows it’s going to do whatever it takes to get rid of him. Because deep down, all men are assholes. If my own father’s absence didn’t teach me that, my first sex partner did.
• • •
So let’s talk about the Asshole. No, this isn’t an anatomy lesson. The Asshole is the name I gave the fucker who took my virginity. I was going to call him the Phony, but I don’t want my sexual confession to sound like some female Holden Caulfield rip-off. So I settled for the Asshole. Neat. Clean. To the point.
I was still in the throes of recovering from the Asshole’s betrayal when Mom met her untimely demise. The pain of that experience kinda got put on the back burner (no pun intended) after the fire. But it was still there, the broken limb that got overshadowed by a sucking chest wound. The agony generated by the potentially fatal injury took predominance, but that didn’t mean the cracked bones didn’t ache too from time to time.
I met the Asshole in fifth period geometry when he asked if he could copy my test answers. This should have been a red flag, but I’m notoriously bad at heeding warning signs. (Do not leave candle burning while sleeping, for instance.) Also, the Asshole had these crazy brown eyes and like twenty-four dimples. Okay, I may be exaggerating on the dimple count, but seriously, when he smiled, his face made this sweet, “Oh, my god, I’m so cute. Don’t you want to do me?” expression. My answer to this silent question was a resounding yes. Not that I knew what doing someone felt like. I’d never done it. But after the Asshole smiled at me and asked if he could copy my test answers, I knew what it felt like to want to do someone. Did I mention that he ran his hand over the small of my back as he posed his questions, the verbal one about the Geometry, and the silent one about sex? ’Cause he did.
Not only did I let him copy my test answers, I also agreed to meet him to study at Lean Beans after school. Lean Beans was the coffee shop where all the cool kids hung out when they couldn’t get their hands on illegal alcohol. They mainlined lattes and talked about bands mostly. I’d gone in there once, felt like a pariah, and never gone back. But if I went with the Asshole, I’d be accepted. It was a given. The Asshole was the hottest guy in the eleventh grade, if not in the entire school. He played in a band, Suck Pile Sauna, which got regular gigs in local bars, which meant he often could score illegal alcohol, which added to the already considerable adoration directed his way due to his dimples.
It turned out what the Asshole meant by “study” was “grope under the table,” which for some reason was okay with me. Or I tried to be okay with it. At the time, I was very aware of the fact that I was definitively not popular and while I pretended not to care, I did. A lot. To have this god among acne-prone mortals interested in me made my head spin. I thought it was love. It looked like love looks in the movies, you know the bad ones from the eighties, like The Breakfast Club, where the hot guy falls for the weird girl, and they all live happily ever after in their castle on the football field? I thought it was going to be like that. I’d gone around for so long thinking I wasn’t enough, I felt like a walking fraction. And since pretty much everything I’d ever seen, read, or listened to said the way to fix feeling like a half-of-something was to find your other half and fuck it, I was pretty much ready and willing to shove any boy who was interested into the empty space beside me. Or should I say inside me? I’d never expected someone like the Asshole to stumble into that role though. Not in a million years. And when he stuck his hand under the table and started to caress my thigh, I thought (this isn’t an exact translation): Holy crap! This kinda feels creepy, but so what, I’m going to be whole now!
I’d like to say I made him wait a few weeks, or even a few days, but I didn’t. I’d like to say I told him I was a virgin first, but I didn’t do that either. What I did was invite him over for a “study date” the next day while Mom was off at her second job. I made a few pathetic attempts at resisting his concerted efforts to shove his hands up my shirt, after which he whispered, “But, baby, I love you.”
My first response to his unexpected declaration was incredulity. How could he love me? He didn’t know me. But my second response was elation. Of course he loved me! Wasn’t I perfectly weird and lovable? Didn’t that guy in The Breakfast Club love Ally Sheedy after only one day? So I decided to believe him. Fatal error, man. Didn’t I learn anything from reading Les Miserables in that honors class I took? In that book, the cad tells poor, dumb Fantine that he loves her. He’s lying (shocker), and she ends up pregnant and cast out of her home, begging for coal and bread. So I should have seen it coming. But I didn’t, mostly because I didn’t want to.
I wanted to be in a movie from the eighties, not a drama about the plight of fallen women. And I definitely didn’t want to star in an educational short on how to avoid contracting the herp. Which is exactly what the Asshole and my short-lived love story turned out to be.
Long story short, I can thank the Asshole for teaching me that sex ain’t all it’s cracked up to be in the movies. It hurt, and it lasted less than a minute. He didn’t even look at me while he did it. I was not one for all of that religious guilt, since I was decidedly agnostic, but still, as he rolled away from me, I couldn’t help feeling dirty. Used. Which made me desperate. Which made me say, in this tinny, wussy-ass voice I’d never heard come out of my mouth before: “Call me in the morning.” Also, as he was getting up, I may or may not have clutched at him in a not so subtle “Oh, for the love of Jesus, don’t leave me” way. Which is sexy.
I don’t even have to tell you that he didn’t call me in the morning or ever again. I did, however, call him. Twenty-two times. I counted. While I was calling him obsessively, he was apparently wooing the leggy star of the track team who looked a hell of a lot like Angelina Jolie. Within a week of our “study date,” my paramour was making out in the hallways with his new girlfriend. I spent months after that wondering what was wrong with me, comparing myself to every leggy, busty, lippy girl I saw. I seriously considered breast implants. And lip injections. I ran a Google search for “leg extensions” to see if it was a thing.
At first, I fantasized the Asshole would come crawling back to me. In my early fantasies, I forgave him. As time went by, I invented other scenarios. Him begging. Me scoffing. “What? You thought you were the only guy I was fucking? Get a grip.” I imagined walking away after that, my head held high, my dignity restored. But I never got to say those words because the Asshole never so much as glanced my way again.
My attempts at restoring contact with my long lost love may have contributed to my new nickname around school: Psycho-Stalker Girl. So I guess sleeping with the Asshole did gain me notoriety, though not the brand I was after.
Truth be told, I was up for a new beginning after my run-in with the Asshole. Maybe the move to Los Angeles would have been well timed, had Mom come with me, but she didn’t. And I’m not sure moving to a new school where you are completely invisible is necessarily a step in the right direction when you take the step with an urn full of dead Mom in tow.
In addition to the new nickname, the Asshole gave me the gift that kept on giving—chlamydia—which added a whole new level of “dirty” to an experience that had left me feeling like a walking toilet bowl. And that bit about him making me feel whole? Didn’t happen.
Au contraire, mon ami.
He left me utterly shattered.
After the Asshole, I promised myself I’d never act like that about a guy again. I promised myself I’d be cool, aloof, and bulletproof. Anything but Psycho-Stalker Girl. And I was. You can ask Dean.
Religious people say
we get punished for our sins, but I don’t think that’s always the case. I bet if you asked Dean, he’d tell you that sometimes, you get punished for other people’s sins too.
Five
I can picture my mom singing some song from the seventies about sex. She was two or three glasses of wine in, dancing around the kitchen in her nightgown, using our Chihuahua’s paw for a microphone. The Chihuahua in question (Darwin, may he rest in peace) was extremely put out, being held and whirled. I must have been fourteen or fifteen when that happened, because before that, Mom never drank in front of me. Imagine my surprise when I hit my teens and discovered my mom was a closet lush. Not an AA-style lush. Once or twice a week, she’d have a few glasses of wine, let her hair down, two-step with the dog, and sing about sex. I have yet to follow in my mother’s footsteps and bust out my best moves while singing about sex, but I think about it all the time. Not just about having it, but about what it means.
There are people who say sex is just another biological urge, no more emotionally significant than eating or drinking or peeing. They sleep with anyone they want, and they walk away, feeling nothing.
Then there are those who say sex is the most important thing a person can do. They think it has mysterious powers. They save themselves for marriage. They believe if they do it with the wrong person, they’ll burn in hell forever.
I fall somewhere in the middle of these two camps. If there is a god, I can’t imagine him or her or it being all worked up about people voluntarily bumping uglies when there are things like rape, war, and starvation in the world. I would think a god who prioritized policing people’s consensual sex lives over saving babies from bombs might have a serious problem with his/her/its priorities. But I can’t quite subscribe to the “sex means nothing” ideology either. I mean, how can you share the most secret parts of yourself with another person and not be changed in some way? Admittedly, under all of my leather and bravado, I’m kinda sappy, like Mom. I’ve felt eternally bonded to a person over the fact that we drank from the same cup. So sharing bodily fluids, the fluids that have the potential to make babies, feels like a big deal to me.
