This Is a Story That Ends with Almost-Naked Guys Drinking Beer in a Pool They Aren't Supposed to Be In

Yesterday the girls and I climbed the stairs of the lodge at a local campground, where our 10 year high school reunion was being held, and presented ourselves as a united front. We gripped each other for support and crossed the threshold, and there we were, the class of 1999--well, 28 of us anyway; the turnout was dismal--and we had all grown up. Not surprisingly, most people were married and popping out pictures of babies and weddings. When a new person broke into our circle and started asking after our situations--"Relationships?" he or she would ask--we would go around with rapid-fire responses. It went like this: Engaged. Engaged. Dating. Married. Then it came to me. "I've got nothing," I said.

Beyond that, it was boys in jeans and girls in too much makeup. It was a DJ playing songs like "Mmm Bop" and "No Diggity." It was a buffet line of chicken wings, chicken wing dip, and vats of bleu cheese. It was a whole lot of whispering about a person's skinniness or fatness.

I couldn't take too much of it. It made me claustrophobic. And I knew that down the road there was another reunion--this one at the restaurant where I spent three years waitressing--and that reunion would be populated by absolutely no one who would remember when I was still the only girl in the fifth grade whose mother wouldn't let her shave her legs. Instead, the reunion would be populated by Josh and his class, who were celebrating their six year high school reunion because they missed their fifth.

So I left my reunion after putting in a few good hours, after shoveling a few scoops of chicken wing dip into my mouth, and I drove down to my old restaurant. I went in through the door flanked with balloons that were school colors very different from my own. Inside, it was dark and most everyone was drunk. They were wearing considerably nicer clothes than most the people at my own reunion, and taken as a whole they looked like a much more successful and put-together class. They might have been drunk and loud, but they were crisp and good-looking.
Josh was in the corner near the bar. He had a crowd around him, and he was telling a story that involved very large arm movements. Very dramatic arm movements. Everyone around him was laughing.

"JESS!" he said when he saw me. He hugged me so hard he lifted me off the ground. "You came!"
And then he started introducing me to his friends. There was a boy there called Fweep, so named because in high school his farts--and here's where Katy Clay just got invested in this story--sounded exactly like that. Fweep. Fweep. Fweep.

Then another guy turned around. This one was drunk in the way that some guys get--a way that makes them secrete a slick coat of grease, a way that makes their eyes go loopy in their sockets, a way that makes them too confident for their own good.

"Watch out for this one," Josh said.

"Did you go to this school?" the guy asked. He was having trouble focusing his eyes, so his question could have been more than an inquisition at an unfamiliar face; it might have been him not being able to see who was standing in front of him.

"Of course," I said.

"You got a boyfriend?" he asked.

"Yes," I lied.

"Where is he?"

I pointed in the general area of the bar.

"Okay," the guy said. "All right. But that means he's not right here." He leaned in closer and somehow managed to plant a kiss right on my cheek. When he did it, he opened his mouth a little and let his tongue leave a wet mark behind. I didn't want to wipe it off while he was still staring at me--I don't like to be rude, even to drunk idiots--so the kiss dried to a crusty film, which I later wiped on Josh's shoulder while he was trying to find pictures of his younger self on the collages standing around the room.

A few minutes later, I heard a girl's voice shrieking my name, or something close to it. I heard, "Jessie? Jessie! JESSIE!"

I turned and found myself face to face with my "cousin," a girl I'm related to by marriage--my grandmother's, to this girl's grandfather. This is the girl, of course, who once, at a Christmas party, informed me I was wearing the same color mascara a hooker would wear. And now she was standing in front of me.

"Oh, hi!" I said.

"It IS you!" she said. "I saw you walk in the door a few minutes ago, and I thought to myself, 'That girl looks a lot like Jessie!' And then I saw you close-up over here, and I realized it was you! It was Jessie!"

I smiled as brightly as I could manage. She was calling me by the name my grandmother--and no one else--calls me.

"Are you here with Josh?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "I mean, no. I mean, not like that. I'm here because I know him, not because we're together-together."

"I was going to say!" she chirped. "I hadn't heard that you were together."

"We're not." I lifted my drink to my mouth, wondering what we could talk about now that we got that out of the way. She was the type of girl everyone knew of. I'd always worked in restaurants in the town where she went to school, and if ever anyone found out we were marginally related, they would roll their eyes to the ceiling or make the sign of the cross and say they were pretty sorry about the way things had shaken out for me.

I tried to talk my way to the end of the interaction. "Are you here with a boyfriend?" I asked, nodding encouragingly, as if my vigorous head movements might divine a man who would then come to her side and take her away, back to the bar, to refresh her drink.

Her smile fell away from her face. "What?"

"Well," I said, "I mean, I thought maybe you still had that boyfriend you had... well, I don't know... when is the last time we saw each other?"

"Jessie," she said, raising her voice so everyone around us could hear, "I haven't had a boyfriend since the one who was physically abusive to me in college."

I stared. I stared some more. I wasn't exactly sure where to go after that. I am not skilled in the art of wheeling a conversation back to normal after someone reveals--loudly--that her boyfriend used to smack her around.

"Uhm," I said. "I'm sorry to hear that. I didn't know."

"Grandma didn't tell you?" she asked, genuinely surprised.

"Grandma and I don't talk like that," I said, and it was true. We really don't talk like that--mainly because my grandmother thinks I'm a lesbian.

"Really?" my cousin asked. "We talk like that." She paused and then smiled. "I know things about you," she said. "She's told me."

I looked down at my glass of vodka. It was almost empty.

"She thought the Boy From Work was way too young for you," she said. "She thought the way the old restaurant was run reflected poorly on him. Did you know she and Grandpa once went there and waited for ice cream while the couple who got sat after them got their full dinners before they even ordered their sundaes?"

I poured the rest of my vodka into my throat. My cousin went on, and I kept smiling and nodding and drinking until one of her friends called her away, and I turned immediately to find Josh.

"Do not leave me alone with her," I said. "You know the rules."

Josh and his girlfriend and his friends had balloons in their hands. They were going to walk over to the restaurant's regular bar. On the way over, they were going to pop the balloons and fill their lungs with helium.

"What should I say?" Josh asked.

His friend Kristen--the girl who got air-humped by Josh's step-father at the beer tent last week--stood on her toes and whispered in his ear. Josh gulped from the balloon and then started chanting the words to "Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear."

After his helium wore off, Josh put an arm around my shoulders. "Do you remember that time," he said, "when I won that gift certificate from the raffle drawing?"

"The one that took place five minutes ago?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "That one. Do you remember it?"

Inside, the bar was what it usually is on a Saturday night: filled with sweaty people looking to get drunk and laid. The DJ was starting to play the usual songs to get people on the dance floor.

"Oh!" Josh said. "Do you think he'll play some Bone Thugs?" He looked at the DJ and then back at me. "What do you think, Jessie-Bone? Do you think he will if I request it?"

Just then a tall blond girl floated by me, beer in hand. She looked me up and down, her eyes narrowing. It seemed possible she was about to reach out and pluck my head off my neck as easily as if she were popping a daisy off its stem.

"Jesus," I said.

"Woah," Josh said.

"She wanted to cut me."

"I'm fairly certain," Josh said, "that you're right about that."

We got our drinks then and played darts (which we won) and erotic photo hunt (first babes, then hunks). Then, after Josh had declared to me for the fifth time that he was really drunk, I leaned over to tell his friend John--the one who could be Adam Levine's twin brother--that we should go outside, where he could smoke a cigarette and tell me about his MFA program because I missed mine, because I was curious, and because there are still mornings I wake up wishing I were in my bedroom in Minnesota, getting ready to go off to workshop.

We were out on the porch talking about our MFAs when Kristen came outside with her boyfriend in tow. She almost fell as she came through the doorway, but she quickly righted herself.

"John," she said. "We're going home. Do you want a ride?"

"Back to your place?" John said.

"Yeah."

"But then I'd be at your place."

And then I took a drink and jerked my head toward Kristen's tall boyfriend. "Going home for the lovemaking?" I asked because it sure looked like a possibility.

Kristen made a face. "I've got my period," she said, "and no one's getting their red wings tonight."

It was her boyfriend's turn to make a face. "I don't trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn't die," he said.

"No red wings," Kristen said. She put her arm through his. "No way."

A few minutes later--after Kristen and her boyfriend had conducted a long discussion about his truck, sex in his truck, if he'd had sex with his ex-girlfriend in his truck, and if he'd had sex with Kristen in his truck--they left, and a few minutes after that another of Josh's friends came outside and announced that everyone was leaving and they were going to go to his girlfriend's house, where they could use the pool and the hot tub.

Everyone seemed happy about that. They seemed prepared, like they'd known where this was where the night was going to take them.

At that point, though, I just felt old. I was sober and fresh from my ten year reunion. I was standing next to a twenty-two year old girl in a short dress I'd never in a million years look good in and it seemed like everyone in the world was younger and more fun than I was.

"You're coming, right?" Josh's friend asked. "You should come. Come."

Josh's girlfriend--the twenty-two year old in the short dress, a sweet girl--cuddled up to me and said, "Please? Please, Jess. Come with us."

"I'm old," I announced. "I'm very old."

"Please?" she tried again.

"John," Josh said, knowing full well the words would pull more weight if they came from the mouth of a cute boy, "tell Jess she should come."

"You should come," John said.

"Okay," I said.

And so we went. We went straight to the house with the pool and the hot tub. And it seemed like it should have been simple. We should've gotten into the hot tub without problem because I'd stood on the deck of the bar and watched Josh's friend place the call to his girlfriend, who'd said, yeah, come over, let's go. And we were over, and we were ready to go. But the girlfriend arrived on her deck, wet--she'd just been in the hot tub--and sour-faced.

"No," she announced. "No one's going in."

Josh's friend handed out beer. "We're going in," he said. "Come on. We're going in the hot tub."

The rest of us just stood there, looking at each other, and trying to avoid the couple that was--you could see it--on the verge of an argument.

"Please, Tiffany," Josh pleaded. "Just for a little bit."

She stormed off into the other room, and her boyfriend followed. The rest of us went out onto the deck and stood next to the hot tub, looking down at it longingly. On the ride over, I hadn't been exactly sure how I was going to pull off getting into the hot tub--the underwear I was wearing was sort of scandalous because a girl going to her 10 year reunion needs to have as much oomph and confidence as she can get--but now I didn't even care, and all I wanted was to sit in the very big hot tub and listen to those boys say stupid, drunk things.

Inside, the fight went on. Outside, Josh's girlfriend was freezing. "I want to go home," she said. "Can't we go home?"

"I know!" Josh said. He raised his beer can up to the sky. "We could climb the fence at the town park!"

"No," I said automatically because I am old, un-fun, and a girl who remembers what happened the last time Josh tried to casually make his way into a place he wasn't supposed to be. I stared at him and wondered if I should announce in front of his new girlfriend that the last time he'd done something like that he'd gotten his name in the police blotter, and because he was shamed and feeling like an ass, we drove around town and stopped to have a drink with the townies that inhabited each tiny bar. This could be my life, Josh had said. Maybe I'll turn out like one of these guys.

"Okay," John said.

"Yes!" Josh said. "We'll hop the fence and go for a swim! It'll be great!"

"I'm cold," his girlfriend said. "They're fighting. This isn't going to happen. Please, let's just go."

And she was right. It wasn't going to happen, no matter how promising it used to look and would look again. The girlfriend eventually came outside--angry, huffy, stomping--and began rolling the cover off the hot tub.

John started taking his clothes off.

Then the girl stopped. "No," she said. "No, I don't think so."

"That's it," Josh said. "Come on. The park. Let's go."

It was a horrible idea. Horrible. But Josh's girlfriend said she'd ride with me, that we could just follow the boys, drive the getaway car, retrieve them when they were done.

"Come on," she said, dancing on the tips of her toes, trying to stay warm in her short dress. "Let's go."

"I don't think anyone realizes how old I am," I said, "and how uncool I am. I am a good girl. I never did things like this in high school."

"We used to hang out car windows and slam trash cans into mailboxes," Josh's girlfriend said. "Let's go."

I went. I followed the other car--the car holding the boys and their beer--and even pulled in behind it when it turned into the cemetery next to the park.

Josh's girlfriend launched out of the car--she had to pee; she was going to pee somewhere in the graveyard; she didn't want to pee on anyone's grave; she ran for the line of trees at its back--and the boys opened the door to their car, talking about the logistics. How were they going to get through the field? Who was bringing the beer?

"Do you have an exit strategy?" I asked.

"An exit strategy," Josh repeated. "Well, no."

"Where are you going to go when you get out?" I asked. "Do you want us to sit here--in a cemetery, in the middle of the night, and wait for you while you jump into the pool?"

Josh seemed confident that was a good plan. "Uhm, yes?"

"No," I said. "No way."

"Will you drop us off at the pool then?" he asked. "I don't want to walk through the field."

"I'm going to end up going to jail tonight," I said. "I know it."

"You will not," he said. "Come on."

And I said fine, okay, all right, and we drove the cars down to the gate--which was open--and up to the pool, where we turned off the lights and engines and watched as the boys went straight for the fence. They shed their clothes and started climbing the fence that surrounded the pool--built tall to discourage just these types of events.

"Is that a hot tub?" Josh's girlfriend asked, tugging on my sleeve. She pointed to the shallow pool that was separated from the bigger, deeper pool.

"That," I said, "is the kiddie pool."

She frowned. "Oh."

Josh's friend--the one who'd first promised us a night in a hot tub--handed us the case of beer. "Hang on to this," he said.

Josh and John were already over the fence and into the pool. The noise their splashes made almost gave me a heart attack. I looked back over my shoulder, at the entrance to the park, and thought about the excuses I could possibly make if a cop car just happened to turn in toward us.

Josh's friend started climbing the fence. He slipped. He steadied himself. He got himself up near the top and then reached down. "Okay," he said, taking a deep, serious breath. "Now, the beer."

It was passed up to him, and he finished his descent and went into the pool, where the boys floated, drinking, splashing.

Meanwhile, I was picturing life in the big house, eating gruel, becoming someone's bitch.

"I'm a good girl," I told Josh's girlfriend. "I swear. I am very uncool. I'm nervous."

Luckily, I wasn't the only one feeling nervous--all us girls seemed a little panicked by the amount of splashing and laughing going on, by the way the three piles of rumpled clothes glinted in the moonlight--so I told Josh that was it, we were getting in our cars and taking them down the street, where we would park in a lot and wait for him to call us.

And that's exactly what we did. We drove the two cars down to the church on the corner--the church where I took Sunday school and attended Confirmation classes--and we sat outside the rectory for ten minutes, five of which I used to continue to inform the two other girls of how old and uncool I was.

"We better not go to jail," I said. "Do you think I'll still be able to teach after I get out of the big house, after they lock me up?"

They were should that I would.

The boys called soon after, and we went to get them. I drove back up that gravel driveway--each crunch of tire a small death inside my heart, each crunch one more sound that would surely rouse someone and make them call the police to the park, where we would be busted for good--and I parked, let the girls out, and made sure the boys--and their beer--had made it up and over the fence safely. Everything and everyone was intact. And there were no cops lurking in the shadows. And everyone was suddenly freezing and tired and ready to go.

Which is what we did. We said our goodbyes, and then we pulled back down the driveway and out onto the roads that would take us home--Josh's car one way, mine the other--and I drove the road I used to drive on my way home from the restaurant at night, after working another Friday fish fry shift with Josh as my bus-boy, with Josh following me around and reminding me that he loved me. It was the tenth anniversary of my graduating high school, and as I parked my car and crept back into my house and snuck down the hallway quietly so I wouldn't wake my father, I felt about as young as I had in a pretty long time.

I Smelled It. I Always Smelled It.

In eighth grade, we had a science teacher who was a little crazier than the rest--and that's saying something. Science teachers are a rare breed of crazy, made that way, probably, by their intense love for subjects most people take for granted (genetics, wind patterns, chemical reactions, etc.).

But our eighth grade science teacher was really a hard type of crazy: frazzled, stressed, unhinged. It was rumored he'd been a Navy man in some war--which war was indeterminable since we couldn't suss out his age--and that he'd come under heavy fire, which--again, rumors, rumors--had left him with some pretty drastic shell-shock.

This made the girls sad and made the boys intrigued. It never failed: the day we had a test, some boy walking to class could be counted on to suggest that he was going to whistle out the sound of a falling bomb so our teacher would yell, "TAKE COVER!" and, of course, put the test on hold.

No one ever did this, and we always ended up in class, taking the test that none of us wanted to take.

And when I was in class--ninth period, the last class of the day--I sat behind a popular and beautiful boy. Let's call him Bill. He had dark skin and deep brown eyes. He had thick hair that was always combed neatly into place, even after gym, even after wrestling matches.

Our science teacher had put us in assigned seats, otherwise this boy would have never chosen to sit in front of me. But because that was his lot, he decided to make the best of it, and he talked to me. Incessantly.

He got me in trouble with our science teacher all the time. There I would be, trying diligently to listen to Mr. Thompson talk about atoms, and Bill would turn around and say something to me. He might be talking about how much he hated science or about those gristly cheeseburgers that had been served for lunch or about the girl he had a crush on--guys always liked to confide relationship problems in me--but no matter what he was talking about, I'd always try to listen in a covert way. Mr. Thompson was a bit of a control freak, and he got mad when people broke the rules--like no talking--in class. And it wasn't that he screamed and yelled when he got mad; it was worse than that. He just stared at you, dead-on, and shamed you straight to the core with his sad, tired eyes.

So, to avoid the shaming, I tried to nod along to whatever Bill was saying so that I didn't actually have to open my mouth to speak. But as much as I wished that would work, it didn't, and Bill would needle me with questions that required an honest-to-God answer instead of some sort of head nod. So, because he was cute and because he was actually nice--a surprise to me--I always sighed and opened my mouth to whisper some sort of answer. We got caught a lot. I was embarrassed--after all, I was a good girl; I didn't get shamed by teachers--but there was little I could do about it. I'd explained to him one day that I didn't want to make Mr. Thompson upset anymore, and Bill said he'd be good, he'd be better, he'd stop, but that lasted only for a day, and the next he was back to chattering my ear off until the bell rang.

But talking wasn't the only thing Bill did. He also farted. He farted a lot. And whenever he farted, he'd immediately turn around, paste on a giant grin, and say, "Hey, Jess. Do you smell that?"

Of course I smelled that. It was hard not to. The boy was rank. Always. Every day. Rank. But I was so embarrassed by his willingness to fart and share that fart with other people that I often pretended I couldn't smell it. I held my breath and pretended I was a girl with a severely damaged sense of smell.

"What are you talking about?" I'd say. "I can't smell anything."

So he'd try harder. "Hang on a second," he'd say and then he squinched his face up, trying to squeeze out another round.

It just wasn't right. He was a popular boy. Popular boys were beautiful and pristine. They were little gods. They weren't supposed to walk around farting everywhere they went and then asking people if they smelled something. That was what unpopular boys did. The ones who didn't wash or wore sweatpants to school. They were the farters, and that fit. But the popular boys? It just seemed wrong. Somehow they'd risen to their famed status, and I felt it was only fair that they should be held to a higher standard.

But even though I blushed and tried to ignore Bill's farts, it didn't dissuade him from trying again every single day. If I said I didn't smell them, he would get disappointed for a split second, but then he'd shrug, inhale deeply, and smile.

"Smells good to me," he'd say. "Real good."

Enter the First Boyfriend

It was fifth grade. It was lunch time. We were lined up and ready to walk back down the hallway to our classrooms after we'd had our fill of breaded chicken cutlets. I was feeling pretty good about myself that day. I was wearing a cute outfit--stretch pants and a long, black cardigan--and my hair was permed into tight curls. The only worry I had was that later I might accidentally manage to lean against the chalkboard and get that unfortunate chalk line across my butt.

But I was about to find new worries, and fast.

Standing across from me was a boy named Pat. Even as a fifth grader he was cocky. He was tough. He had attitude. And suddenly he was talking to me.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, Jess."

I looked up.

"Want to be my girlfriend?" he asked.

My face burned. I was not the type of girl boys paid attention to--especially in so public a place, with all our classmates standing around us. Because of this, I was certain he was making fun of me.

"Stop it," I said. I looked down at my feet.

"Why?" he said. "I mean it. Want to be my girlfriend?"

I was so embarrassed. I wanted to melt, to turn to liquid and spread--puddle-like--across the floor, so people would just leave me alone, step around me, and move on without another thought.

"I don't like to be teased," I said.

"I'm not teasing," he insisted.

I moved my gaze from the floor to the ceiling. I definitely didn't want to look at him, and I definitely didn't want to look at everyone else. I was sure they'd all be pinching the corners of their smiles together, trying to keep from laughing at me, at Pat, who was making a big joke out of asking this not-so-popular, not-so-pretty girl to be his girlfriend.

"I like you," he said.

"Would you be quiet?"

"I really like you," he said. "I think you're fun. Be my girlfriend. Come on."

Finally, I looked at him. I needed to. I needed to see how far he was willing to take this, and if I should do something to get myself out of the situation before the entire class burst into synchronized laughter. I could run to the nurse's office or the bathroom or anywhere that was far from where he was.

But no one was laughing. A few people around us were watching, interested but not quaking with laughter. Everyone else was bored, shifting their weight, looking around, wondering if we were going to play Around-the-World during math.

"You're serious?" I asked.

He nodded. He grinned. "Don't you want to be my girlfriend?" he said. "Don't you like me?"

I liked him fine, and all I ever thought about was a boyfriend--wanting one, getting one, keeping one. At ten years old, I was already woefully behind the popular and pretty girls, the ones who traded popular boyfriends around like collectible cards. Really what I wanted was Ryan as a boyfriend, but there was no way that was going to happen. None. He was dating the most beautiful girl in our class. She had perfect acid-wash jeans and long, permed hair and a stunning collection of scrunchies. I was just the weird girl who liked funny earrings. I had a pair that was pigs fashioned out of small balls and googly eyes. I had a pair that formed a cat--her front paws dangled from the front of my lobe, and the back paws connected in the back of my lobe, so it looked like she was actually crawling through my pierced ear. I had pairs that were shaped like hearts, like moons, like planets, like monkeys. It was my thing. And it was not a thing boys found very appealing.

"Come on," Pat insisted again. "It'll be nice."

I was getting nervous with him talking like that, being so insisting. I didn't really see a way out of it. And while I hadn't woken up that morning longing to make him my boyfriend, the thought of it wasn't the worst thing in the world, so I figured it would be okay to try it. Especially if that made him stop insisting there, in the hall, out in front of everyone.

"Okay," I said. "Fine."

"Okay!" he said. "Now you have to give me your phone number. Because I'm your boyfriend, I have to call you."

So when we got back to class, I scribbled my phone number on a piece of scrap paper and shoved it at him, hoping he'd go away fast. I was still embarrassed. Unlike the popular girls, who marched up and down the halls next to their boyfriends, chatting away like it was the easiest thing in the world to find things to say to them, I didn't know how to act around boys. I didn't know what they wanted to talk about or even what they cared about. And the thought of trying to have a conversation with him in front of my friends seemed horrific.

But I didn't have to worry. He slipped that piece of paper in his pocket and went away. He was my boyfriend, and I wished he would never, ever, ever call me.

The next day was a Saturday, and after I had cleaned my room to my parents' satisfaction--I had to present it for an official review after I thought I was done--I sat down to play Barbies. I was listening to the radio and brewing up some sort of sordid affair between Western Barbie, Malibu Ken, and Meiko, Barbie's Hawaiian friend, when the phone rang. My mother answered in her bedroom, right next door. You could hear the sudden change in her voice. It was surprised.

"Hold on," she said. "I'll get her."

It was for me. My mother leaned around the corner and peered into my room. "There's a boy on the phone for you," she said, opening her eyes wide.

I was combing Western Barbie's hair at that exact moment, and when those words fell from my mother's mouth, I dropped the Barbie like she was diseased.

There was a boy. On the phone. For me. And I was playing Barbies, like some baby, like some infant. I was already embarrassed.

I picked up my phone--see-through; neon--and placed it to my ear. I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to do this. I thought my heart was going to explode.

"Hello?" I said.

"Hi," Pat said. And then he carried on like a boy who was practiced in the art of dating. He asked me how I was--I said I was fine--and what I was doing--I lied and said I was watching TV--and what my plans were for the weekend. We talked a little about school and about some people from our class and about our teachers. And then it was over.

I hung up the phone and sat on my bed, staring down at my bedspread. I felt like an idiot. Like a baby. Like a nerd. I had a boyfriend now, and what was I doing when he called? Playing Barbies. Girls who had boyfriends didn't play Barbies. That wasn't very mature. You could never tell your boyfriend, Hey, listen. Can I call you back? I'm playing Barbies right now. You would be a laughingstock. You would be a freak.

It was in that moment that I realized that I wasn't ready for a boyfriend. There was too much pressure. They were too much work. I thought I'd wanted one--I really did--but there were too many consequences. I knew it would mean I'd have to grow up, stop playing Barbies, start becoming more cool and poised, more like those beautiful popular girls with their acid-wash and scrunchies. And that didn't exactly feel possible.

I was shaking by this point. My mother poked her head in my room and wanted to know who that was. "Was that your boyfriend?" she asked.

And I nodded. I moved back down to the floor and started picking up my Barbies, one by one, and putting them back in their carrying case. I couldn't do it. Not right now. I couldn't go back to playing like nothing had changed. I slid the case away from me, and I sat there for a long time, wondering how I could get myself out of this mess.

How I got myself out of it was easy, eventually. I told Pat I wasn't ready for a boyfriend. I actually said that. I stood in a corner with him and explained that I didn't feel like I was old enough to have a boyfriend. I told him I thought he was real nice, very sweet, but it just wasn't for me yet.

And that was that. There was no scene, no harsh words. Not then at least. Everything went on like normal after our talk, and I eventually could pick up my Barbies again, although I now recognized that my days with them were winding down. And a few months later, when we were in gym class, Pat called me a dog, told me I was disgusting, told me I had hairy, gross legs, and that was the official end of our love affair.

A Brief History of Things I Have Stolen: Part Two

Part Two: The Purple-Glazed Clay Castle --- Middle School

I'm not proud of it now, and I wasn't back then. As I was doing it--as I was stealing the purple-glazed clay castle that didn't belong to me--I hated myself, but I was too embarrassed about the state of my own castle to do what was right and fess up to my caper.

It was in art class. It was the first time they'd let us do something of substance. Instead of drawing houses or learning about perspective, our teacher was letting us shape small blocks of clay into castle towers that would then get glazed and fired and handed back to us as a shining example of our artistic talent.

My castle sucked. My castle sucked big time. At the end of the first day, my castle was a squat, lopsided thing with very few castle-y qualities. It looked like a melted tower.

At the end of that first day, our art teacher asked us to put our initials on the bottom so we would have no trouble identifying ours the next day. She was going to put them all on one shelf, and when we came in next we'd be able to add detail to our castle--maybe some brick patterns, some spiral staircases, some drawbridges.

I did what was asked. I etched the initials J.S. on the bottom of my fat-bottomed tower and handed it in. I hated it. I was embarrassed by it, especially after seeing it sitting next to all the other castles my classmates had been working on. Some people had done really cool things with their lumps of clay, and it made me jealous. Very jealous.

That's a feeling that hasn't really gone away over the years. I can write, and I am so happy that I can--I'm very, very grateful--but there are some times when I am overwhelmed with jealousy because I see someone who can paint, draw, or play an instrument--anything in a genre of art that is outside my own--and I want to be able to do that so bad I can taste it. Well, on that day in fourth grade, I wanted to be a good sculptor. And I obviously wasn't.

The next day when we came in, our art teacher told us to just go ahead and grab our castles and get to work. She gave us more clay and more etching tools and more supplies for us to make these things really grand.

Well, I marched right over to the shelf where she'd lined our castles up, and I started turning castles over, looking for initials. There were three girls in our class who shared the initials J.S. and I knew I was bound to like one of theirs more than mine.

I knew it was wrong. Of course I did. But--and this is one of my worst, most ugliest character flaws--I like to present myself as a girl who is overly capable, who can do anything you could ever ask her to do. I don't like to show weakness, and I don't like to be anything but the best.

(Here's a good example of my lunacy: I kind of biffed a part of my major comp exams in grad school; I didn't get to finish developing my major arguments because I was distracted. I wasn't watching the time. I had other things on my mind--after all, the Wily Republican had called up only hours before and broke it to me that even though we'd spent that really lovely night together at the beginning of the week, and even though I was one of his favorite people, and even though I was his Girl Friday, he was going to start dating another girl, a little Republican doctor-to-be. From that point on, I had real trouble putting together coherent sentences. And because of that, I didn't come even close to showing my best stuff on my comps. And now, years later, I sometimes bolt awake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and thinking, Jesus! Maybe they'll let me retake them so I can write them the way I really meant to! The sickest part of that? I've had this degree for three years now. I think it's time for me to let it go.)

So, back in the art room, I looked at every castle until I found the other two marked J.S. I decided which I liked more. The one I selected was tall, skinny, elegant. It had a nice base and a fancy fluted top. I took it back to my seat.

But my art teacher was less than sure about my selection. "Are you sure that's yours?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, and I felt the lie wrap its arms around my neck.

"I seem to remember yours being a little more--" she tried to be diplomatic, and she searched for the right words. "I remember it being a little shorter and rounder."

"Well," I said, "I worked on it a lot last time. Right before class ended. I worked on it a lot."

Meanwhile, another of the J.S. girls had picked up my fat castle and was taking it back to her desk, happy and clueless.

"Are you sure?" my art teacher asked. "It's very important to be honest about this."

I was caught. She knew everything. She was hip to my heist. But since I was already in it, I figured there was no other choice than to keep playing along.

"I worked so hard," I said. "I know it was a mess, but I fixed it. Doesn't it look better?"

And the art teacher frowned at me, but she nodded. "Okay," she said.

"Okay," I said, and then I went to work making a spiral staircase to climb the side of my castle tower. Now no one would make fun of me. No one would look at my work and think, God--she really stinks! Instead, they'd look at my tall, vaulting tower and nod their heads and smile. They'd think, Now there's a girl who knows her stuff. She's good at everything!

And that's exactly what I've always wanted.

Of course, I haven't yet mentioned the worst part of this story. The worst part is that the two other J.S. girls were two of my best friends. I stole one of their castles--which was lovely--and made it my own, not caring what that would do to them. So that means somewhere at their parents' houses, somewhere deep in the basement where those moldy boxes of archived school work are stored, there is one girl who's stored away a fat clay castle that isn't hers. It's mine. And it's been buried.

The one I stole is in my bedroom at home. I fished it out and put it on my bedside table to be a reminder to me that whole year I was back in Buffalo after grad school--the year I couldn't find a full-time teaching job and spent the year adjuncting. I centered it on that table and said to myself, Don't do this kind of shit ever again.

I didn't mean stealing. I'm fairly confident that I'm not ever going to feel the urge to steal an art project that is superior to mine--even if I am thinking of enrolling in a pottery class this summer, even if I am desperately afraid I am going to suck--but I am afraid I will get too caught up inside my own head and start caring about things that just don't matter. If something I do or say or make isn't perfect, so be it. I've got to learn to live with that. I can't exhaust myself any more with obsessing over all the things I've done that have been just a little bit off. Not everything I do can be perfect, and it's high time I started recognizing that.

So maybe what I need to do this summer--which is the summer of my ten-year high school reunion, our first since graduating--is make amends. Maybe I need to walk up to the other J.S. girls and say, "Listen, Julie. Listen, Jane. I stole something from one of you in middle school, and I'm really sorry about it. But let's just chalk it up to this: I am a control freak, and I am crazy."

And maybe--just maybe--they will forgive me.

What Happens When I Listen to Toad The Wet Sprocket

Today I was driving back from Portland when Good Intentions by Toad the Wet Sprocket came on the radio. And suddenly it was 1995 in my head. I was fourteen years-old. I was on the bus to a field trip and sitting behind Tammy--my best, best friend--and she was making out with the boy that would eventually take down our friendship.

This happens every time I come across "Good Intentions." There can be long stretches--months, years--where I completely forget that song even exists, but when those first few notes come over the radio and I do remember, things get foggy inside my head. Something in those notes has the ability to steal into my heart and twist it backward, all the way back to eighth and ninth grade, to the years where I was desperately trying to be my best friend, to the years where she was desperately trying to become anything but who she already was.

But it's not Tammy I'm thinking about when Toad the Wet Sprocket gets a courtesy play during the 90s hour on local radio. It's the boy--the one who's pressing her up against the reinforced bus windows, the one who has been pressing so close for so long it's possible that their skin might grow together, might root them to that spot. They have been making out for the last thirty minutes straight, which I, up until that point, had thought physically impossible. At fourteen, I didn't know much about kissing--I was still two years away from getting my first--but what little I did know seemed to support the fact that it involved a lot of mouth action and would, I assumed, impede the breathing process. I figured you had to come up for air every now and again. But Tammy and--well, let's call him David--so proved me wrong.

Tammy and David kissed in a way that I haven't really seen since. Their methods were what I based all my knowledge of kissing on. Which possibly explains why I was so terrified at the prospect of putting my lips on someone else's for the first time--I was sort of afraid I was going to choke or gasp or run out of air and prove to be a complete novice. When Tammy and David kissed, they sucked their mouths together and--I can only assume--tangled tongues the entire time. There was no gentle pecking, no together-apart-together-apart-together-apart the way normal human beings kiss. There was just sucking. Sucking, sucking, sucking. For, like, an hour. And whenever they separated, there was a moist unlocking sound, and Tammy always had to wipe at the corners of her mouth. She just looked so practiced and smooth and cool about the whole thing, and I knew I was going to completely screw it up if ever I got to try it.

And you know the most horrible thing? The person I wanted to try it with the most was David. After all, I was the one who liked him first. It was a strange thing, me liking David, because I was a very good girl--nerdy, brainy, quiet--and David was none of those things. First of all, he'd failed a grade. All his best friends had facial hair and talked about getting cars. He seemed worldly and interesting and misunderstood. He played the drums and always carried a spare set of drumsticks around with him, which he would tap on books and desks and radiators--usually at inappropriate moments, like when Mr. Weaver was talking about the beauty of Mark Twain's prose.

I didn't fully understand why I liked him. He was everything I didn't want. He was everything that would've put my parents into cardiac arrest. He was everything that a girl like me never, ever, ever got. Was he cute? No, not really. He was skinny. He had knobby knees. He wore a lot of ratty blue plaid. He had that hair that was popular in the 90s--parted in the middle, long down each side, greasy. His best feature? His eyes. They were a blue that you very rarely ever see--pure and clear, striking, icy. Looking into those eyes, a girl could forget an awful lot. She could forget the list of detentions on a boy's record. She could forget the smart-mouthed way he talked to teachers. She could forget that he smoked. She could forget how to breathe.

When I first developed my vague interest in David and his eyes, I mentioned it to my best friend, and she didn't seem all that impressed. But a few months later the two of them were dating.

I didn't mind all that much. It wasn't like I was going to get him for a boyfriend. Ever. But this way--with my best friend dating him--I was able to be close to him without being rejected. I was their third wheel. I was their lookout girl. For months I kept my eyes peeled, scanning dances for chaperones, scanning hallways for teachers, scanning our seats at the racetrack for her family. But even though I was looking out, I always had one eye on him.

David liked me. I knew he did. He thought I was funny, in a nerdy sort of way. He thought I was nice and good to talk to. He thought I was fun to hang out with. But I knew that's where it stopped. He never looked at me and thought, Gee, I wish I was kissing Jess instead of Tammy.

But that didn't mean I wouldn't get my chance. Because I would. Because I did.

When we moved up to high school, Tammy went through a brief upheaval. She suddenly realized there was a whole other world out there, with new boys and new social groups and new opportunities for coolness. She wanted to be mature and sophisticated. She wanted to run with the wild crowd. She accomplished that in a two-step process. First, she cut off ties with our old friends. Second, she developed a crush on David's best friend--one of the ones with facial hair and a car--and then cheated with him.

David, who had spent the better part of a year half-breathing through marathon makeout sessions and giving hickeys, was crushed. He suffered through the breakup in a very poetic way. He was, after all, a musician, and he grieved in a very rockstar kind of way. There were a lot of dramatics. There was talk of suicide. There was talk of kicking the shit out of everyone involved in the situation. There was talk of drugs and alcohol. And I know this because I was the one hearing this talk. I had tried the best I could to talk Tammy out of going off with David's best friend, the boy whose only redeeming quality was a potentially large penis that the older girls whispered about. After a year with David, I knew there was more to him than all the badass bad-boy stuff. He was--honest to God--a really nice boy. But Tammy would have none of it, and she went off and did what she wanted to. And afterward, in a desperate attempt to win her back, David started calling me to make his case.

At first I tried to explain to Tammy just how bad David had it, just how bad he was suffering. But she was content with her decisions. There was no changing her heart. So I kept on taking David's phone calls. I kept talking him through it.

Tammy and I were yanked apart shortly after the breakup. There was bad blood. I didn't like how she was suddenly living her life, and she didn't like that I was taking David's side, that I was talking to him every night. There was a big fight, which threw me into the exact same position as David. Suddenly I was telling him how much it hurt, how much I wanted her back. And so we did the only thing left to do: we dated each other to try to fix the things she had broken in our hearts. And to get a little bit of revenge.

It didn't really work. The revenge or the relationship. By this point, David had been transported to another school district and, since neither of us had cars, we never saw each other. We talked every night and said that we loved each other, but it was mostly a charade. Still, he was my first boyfriend that lasted beyond a weekend. And there was one day where our relationship suddenly became very, very real to me.

We'd somehow both fixed it so that we would be at the mall at the same time. I was there with one of my oldest friends--a girl who grew up down the road from me--and he was there by himself. The three of us had a short window of time to wander the mall before our parents came again to claim us. We had to make the most of that time. And I knew this meant David would want to kiss me. He would want to kiss me a lot. He was used to that. He would expect that.

And me? Well, back then I was scared of everything. And topping my list of fears was my first kiss. There was such potential for disaster. After all, there was no way in hell that I was going to admit to him that I'd never been kissed before. Did I want him to think I was a mutant? A prude? A freak? I wanted him to think I was capable of everything Tammy had been capable of, even if that was impossible.

But, oh, did he ever try his best. He had his hands in the back pockets of my jeans the whole time. He pinched me and poked me. He nuzzled into my neck. He slipped his hand up under the back of my shirt. He drew a finger down my spine.

I loved every minute of it, even if each move he made chiseled another worry, another fear into my heart. I liked the feeling of being chased, of being wanted. I liked the feeling of a boy trying so hard just to get me to turn toward him, to give him a little bit of tenderness.

And so I did something a little reckless. In the middle of Claire's--that chain jewelry store in every mall ever built--I turned into David and kissed his neck. Then I kissed his nose. Then I kissed his lips. But once my lips touched his, I realized my mistake. He would certainly make the move to take more than just a peck. I pulled away before he could even open his lips. I wanted nothing to do with complicated kissing. I wanted nothing to do with teeth and tongues and the mechanics I didn't yet understand. He pulled me back to him, but I squirmed away. I would keep squirming away for the rest of the day. He would lean in, and I would lean away. I would twist my way out of the cage of his arms and dodge behind a rack of clothes, a stack of books, a bench.

We both left unsatisfied. I'd wanted to kiss him--to really kiss him--but I just didn't have it in me. I wasn't Tammy, no matter how hard I tried. There was too much I didn't understand, and I wasn't sure I even really wanted to understand yet. And that was the day David realized that dating Tammy's best friend wasn't anything close to dating Tammy. It wasn't the healing thing he'd wished it to be. I wasn't going to rescue him. I wasn't going to be that good story he told to his friends years later--the story that started with him dating one girl, falling hard for her, then realizing the one he really wanted to be with was his girlfriend's mousy best friend. Neither of us were going to come away from this having fixed our broken hearts.

We broke up shortly thereafter. It was the sweetest, kindest, easiest breakup in the history of breakups. During our nightly phone call, David casually mentioned he thought it might be better for both of us if we went our separate ways because, well, he'd met someone at his new school, and it was so hard to date someone in another school district anyway. We didn't even have cars. He could tell he wasn't what I wanted or needed. He asked me if that was right, if he'd guessed correctly. And he had. I wanted Tammy. I didn't want him. But I wanted him to be free and happy, and it was a relief that he was saying what I'd been wanting to say for weeks. I told him a breakup was fine with me. And so we told each other how much we liked each other, how much we wanted to stay in each other's lives, and that was that.

Then I didn't have Tammy and I didn't have him. I never had either of them again.

But there are times--like when Toad the Wet Sprocket comes on the radio--that I like to think about David and those few strange months we were together. Way back in the beginning--before he and Tammy took up together--I'd thought of him in a way that wasn't entirely fair or flattering. I thought he was bad news, no good, and trouble. I figured he had very few redeeming qualities. But he proved to be one of the biggest surprises of my teen years. He was sensitive and kind and funny. I loved to come home from school to hear him talk about his day. There was an easiness between us. There was friendship. I would've never expected it.

Not that long ago I saw David again. As luck would have it, after high school he ended up in a relationship with another girl from my group of friends. The two of them had a baby together, and they and the baby showed up to a wedding of yet another of our high school friends. David and I said approximately ten words to each other the whole time ("Hi" and "How are you" rank high on the list), and I spent the whole time feeling just so incredibly weird. I marveled at how two people can go through such drama together and then, years later, be complete strangers. But it didn't matter. When I watched him tussling on the floor with his baby--his baby who is a miniature version of him, with the same eyes and sly look--I was so thankful that we'd had each other for a short period in our lives. And I was so happy that both of us were able to shake all of that ugliness off our shoulders and move on, even if it felt in those moments like we were never going to be able to breathe right again.

So I'll take all of that. I'll turn up Toad the Wet Sprocket whenever they come on the radio, and I'll let my heart sing its old songs, and I'll sit very, very still for three minutes so I can live in my old life, my old body and be thankful for Tammy, thankful for David, thankful for those years where nothing and everything in the world made sense.

My Brother Is Horrifying

My brother's first girlfriend was a little whippet named Amy. Amy was from South Buffalo, and girls from South Buffalo are generally foul-mouthed tough-chicks with bad hair and lipstick tinted a color pink that hasn't been made since 1984. Amy was a few years away from that perpetual wet-haired kind of South Buffalo look when my brother met and wooed her, but she still had a little attitude and a little grit.

I kind of liked her.

I did not, however, like their mating rituals, which included making out in the backseat of my mother's car. Their brand of love also called for hours spent on the phone and some sort of physical contact every second they were together. Whenever she came around, Amy always managed to sit as close to my brother as she could without actually being on his lap.

It was disgusting.

Even more disgusting than their love, their general demeanor, and the fact that Amy could somehow love my gangly, awkward, grumpy brother, was their song. In fact, I wish my brother had never told me what their song was. I'd be a better person not knowing--mainly because every now and again that song will pop up on the radio as a part of a Flashback Friday, or I will find it on an old mix CD, like I did tonight as I mixed a new CD that will go out in a few Christmas packages in the coming week. And when that song comes on my body immediately reacts: my throat closes, my shoulders tense, my gag reflex threatens. Gross, I think. Gross, gross, gross.

Their song--the song they thought best represented their love--was a ditty by Ludacris. In it, Ludacris raps romantic phrases like I wanna lick you from your head to your toes and You could scratch my back and rule me. In short: vomit.

I don't really know what my brother was thinking back then. I mean, this was years before I noticed the wad of condoms in his bedroom, years before he waggled his eyebrows at me and said, "You know how many panties have been dropped on this floor, Jess? Huh? Huh?" As far as I know, he and Amy didn't have sex--for many reasons probably, but I have to think the most compelling was that at that point in his life my brother's back was covered with acne. Not very romantic. Not very this-is-what-I-want-to-remember-about-losing-my-virginity. For both of their sakes, I hope they waited.

But still, I don't understand why they chose that song. It's all about sex. Gross sex. It's about Ludacris naming places he wants to get it on: a football game, the library stacks, the VIP room at a club, and a classroom.

When I was in middle school and pining away for Ryan McLean, my fantasies weren't featuring songs about sex. My daydreams included all the best Monster Ballads: Every Rose Has Its Thorn, for example, or every Bon Jovi song ever written. (Speaking of which, can we just take a second to acknowledge Always, which is still one of my favorite videos of all time? Jon's hair is breathtaking.) All of those songs are good, classic love-is-pain ballads. Those seem appropriate for the dramatics of first love (or, in my case, first stalking). Rap songs that discuss the toppings the rapper wants to eat off his lady's private parts don't seem to have that same poignancy.

So, I wish I didn't remember these things. I wish I'd never known them in the first place. But instead I get to have these unpleasant flashbacks every time I hear that Ludacris song--all courtesy of my pimply-backed, puffy-nippled, too cheap to buy his own masturbatory lotion brother. He is, as always, a joy.

Prickly

I was one of the last girls in our grade to get the green light from her mother to go ahead and shave her legs.

If you are a guy reading this, chances are you probably just thought, So what? But if you're a girl reading this, chances are you just thought, I am so sorry.

The shaving ritual was not taken lightly in middle school, that turbulent time when everyone was sprouting hair and zits and strange new lumps and bumps everywhere on their body.

Somehow--and I'm not exactly sure how this works--but the popular girls were the first to shave. It's like they all got together after school at a meeting held specifically for girls with the cutest crocheted vests, the brightest scrunchies, and the most experience (they knew intimately, for example, the ways a kiss was made French). At these meetings the popular girls decided that it was high time they did away with the fur on their legs. They cleverly presented themselves as a united front to their parents.

Krista told her mother Laura's mother had let her, and Laura told her mother that Danielle's mother had let her, and Danielle told her mother that Krista had let her, and so the circle turned and turned and turned.

Soon after, Krista and Laura and Danielle and all their lip-glossed friends pranced into gym class with gleaming white legs that flashed smooth and clear from under their Umbros like mirrors--mirrors in which the rest of us girls could clearly see ourselves: less cool, less sophisticated, decidedly hairier versions of the popular girls. Oh, how it burned us. Oh, how we wanted that same thing. Oh, how we hated them for doing this to us. It was, after all, another shift, another thing we had to catch up on, another thing that set us apart from them. And it wasn't just us who was noticing it. It was the boys, too.

It wouldn't have been so bad for me if only Pat had never noticed. Pat was a boy who'd caused me considerable stress and strife a few months earlier when he'd asked, during our class's walk back from lunch, if I had any interest in being his girlfriend. I didn't know what to say, really. He was a mildly popular boy despite the fact that he had a condition that caused him to walk with a pronounced limp--a detail that, in other boys, could've been the nail in their popularity coffin. But Pat turned his limp into a charming little tic, something that made everyone else marvel because even with the bum leg, the kid could run. It was an interesting run, a loping run that seemed to defy the laws of both logic and physics, but he did it anyway, and for awhile there in middle school he was a very nice boy. It was during his nice period that he asked me to be his girlfriend.

I was flattered and terrified. I had to make up my mind and quick because we were almost back to our classroom, and once there we would be separated. I could see on his face he needed an answer immediately, that there was no room for waffling. I said yes, and the details of our brief fling are interesting but not immediately relevant to this story, so I'll save it for another time. Suffice it to say that Pat and I were boyfriend-girlfriend for a short period of time--short because, as always, I was a social moron incapable of normal boy-girl interaction. After I told him I could no longer be his girlfriend--because I wasn't ready to be anyone's girlfriend--Pat got a little angry. Pat got a little mean. Now, I'm not saying I was the person who created Beasty Mean Pat, but I probably didn't help matters any.

Shortly after I loosed myself from Pat's boyfriend-y grip, there was a particularly traumatic episode in gym class. It was during the volleyball unit--a co-ed volleyball unit, which was horrible. Anything co-ed was horrible, but this was really bad because the boys got angry when the girls wouldn't call anything in the air. Any time the ball came near a set of girls, chances were they'd both step backward, and when the ball thudded to the floor they would shoot accusatory glances at each other and shriek, "That was so yours!"

That stuff drove the boys nuts.

So they were already prickly at us to begin with, but after our parting of ways Pat had extra reasons to be prickly with me. And when the popular cheerleader types suddenly showed up to co-ed volleyball with hairless, glittering legs, Pat was the sudden beneficiary of a whole bunch of ammo.

One day, after a really rotten volleyball loss, Pat marched up to me as the class sorted itself out toward the appropriate locker room: the boys marched off with their whistle-toting, track suit-wearing gym teacher, and the girls marched off with their lesbian, engaged-to-the-music-teacher gym teacher. I started marching, but that's when Pat caught me with a quick blow to the self-esteem.

"Nice legs, Jess," he mumbled as he passed me, knocking into me like it was some big mistake.

I should've just kept going. I should've just trained my eyes to the floor and kept on walking, pretending like the world did not contain a limpy boy named Pat who was seconds away from destroying me.

But I didn't keep going. Like an idiot, like a moron, I stopped. I turned and glared at Pat. "What did you say?" I asked.

"Nice legs," he said. "You look like a dog down there."

Inside, I was boiling. I felt like maybe my body would split open then and there, in the middle of the gym, right at the top of the key, and all my molten insides would spill out onto the varnished floor. I wanted to wash onto Pat's own hairy legs, burn him straight up to his knees. I wanted him to cry and scream and try to run when his limbs were on fire.

None of that would happen, of course, so I turned to leave, and he laughed as I left. He kept laughing, and that's all I heard for the rest of the day: that boy's voice bouncing off the sides of my skull. I went straight home and asked my mother if I could shave my legs. Her answer came quick. Her answer was absolute. No. No, no, no. Absolutely not. No chance. Forget about it.

I did the whole But, Mom! routine. I did the crying and the whining and the stomping. I said Danielle and Krista and Laura and everyone was doing it. This did not impress my mother. In fact, she seemed even less moved to give me the okay when I told her about the popular girls. Maybe there was just something in her motherly sense that knew it was a bad idea to let me do anything that those girls were doing. Maybe she knew that in a few years those would be the girls who would be at the center of mini-sex scandals way before they should've even been having sex. Maybe she knew anything that got me closer to who they were could be dangerous, could change who I was, who I would become.

Still, I continued to beg because I continued to be taunted by Pat, by his friends, by other boys. My mother would not relent, and I had to show up to gym class each day with legs that were becoming more and more different from the other girls'. Slowly but surely each girl in my gym class shed her protective coating, learned the nuances of the razor, and came to school with bare, beautiful legs.

Eventually, eventually, long after the other girls had gotten to pass over into that next stage of their girlhood, I was granted access in the form of an electric razor because my mother thought I was too young for real razors. And even though I got that electric razor, I still had rules I needed to follow--mainly, I could not shave above the knee. I'm not sure why, and I'm not even sure my mother knew why she thought that was important. Maybe it had something to do with what she heard when she eavesdropped on my friends and I gossiping about the popular girl at school--how they were dashing around the bases like pros, dragging the cutest, most beautiful boys through the dirt with them. Maybe she thought that shaving above the knee would make me feel free, too free, and that I'd be likely to let a boy test his own base-hopping ability. But back then my wants were more simple than all that: I didn't want bases and naked skin and wet kisses falling down the length of my body; what I wanted was to play Barbies late into the night with my best friends, and I wanted Ryan McLean--the cutest, the most beautiful of all the boys--to maybe give me a call sometime just to see what I was up to. I also wanted Pat and his friends to stop squawking at me, teasing me, telling me why I wasn't good or pretty or interesting to them. Simple wants.

And yesterday when I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror at school--leaning in to make sure I hadn't snapped bubble gum all over my mouth in the moments before my class--a girl breezed into the room with impossibly high, impossibly naked-for-November legs. She was proud of them, that was for sure, and she was going to make sure everyone saw them, no matter how cold it was outside. As she disappeared into a stall, I fluffed at my hair and realized I probably knew her whole story. I knew why she was hanging on until snowfall, her legs peeking out from under short skirts and bermudas. I could see in her past a little boy who stood in the corner of the gym with his best friends, whispering, pointing, laughing, saying, Gross! Sick! Disgusting! I understood the girl and her cold, bare legs. I understood, and I was impressed by the both of us. How any of us ever make it out of middle school is beyond me. It really is.

Under the Table

When I was in middle school, I was somehow conned into dating a boy. I was not happy about this, which could be considered strange, especially when you remember how much whining I have done in my life about not having a boyfriend. But this boy wasn't the boy I wanted. He wasn't blond-haired Ryan McLean, football player, baggy jeans-wearer. Nope. The boy I was conned into dating was a spectacled half-nerd who, it was rumored, had once masturbated underneath a lunch table in the cafeteria. When he would walk by the popular boys during lunch, the popular boys would ball their hands into fists and sneak them under the table and make a big thumping racket. Oh! Oh! Oh! they would chant, rolling their eyes back into their heads, pretending to pitch toward ecstasy.

For a span of three days, this boy would become my boyfriend.

How it happened is still a little beyond me. Things just lined up that way. We were on the verge of a big dance that weekend, and I was, as usual, dateless. I was usually okay with that, but this dance was the Valentine's Day dance, and I was sick to death of being the girl who had to scoot to the sidelines after the DJ transitioned from House of Pain into Boyz II Men.

I also ended up with this boy because we knew him. A year before, he'd briefly dated one of our friends--this was prior to the whole masturbating under the table business--and she gave him a good recommendation. He'd been tested and approved. He was a good starter boyfriend because he was nice and non-threatening. Unlike the boys I had a crush on--the most popular, most beautiful boys at school--he wouldn't expect you to let him touch your chest on the first date, to put his hands down your pants on the third. Those were the things we heard the popular people were doing, but we weren't doing those things. We had no interest in doing those things for awhile. We had other things to worry about. We were busy wondering when was the first appropriate moment to hold hands and when our first kisses would happen.

Most of the dating business between me and this boy was conducted via notes written by my friends in the lunchroom. They lobbied for me, even if I wasn't yet sure it was exactly what I wanted. But by the end of the forty-minutes we had to swallow our bologna sandwiches and Little Debbie snacks, this boy and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. We were going to go to the dance together. I would finally have someone to hang on to during all the best slow songs.

But there was an awful, awful part of me that kept thinking This is a problem! This is a disaster! After all, I couldn't quite stop thinking about the popular kids taunting this boy as he walked past their table with his eyes facing forward, his hands holding onto his tray so tight his knuckles turned white. I couldn't get the noise of their pounding on the underside of the table to stop rattling around my head. There was a part of me that was very embarrassed for him and embarrassed for myself, because now I was his girl.

This embarrassment ate at me for the rest of Friday and all of Saturday, until it was time for the dance, which I went to with a heavy heart. My insides were awash with a complicated tonic of emotion. I was still embarrassed, yes, and on several levels, but now I was also terrified because I was a real-life girlfriend with a real-life date to go on that would have real-life consequences. I was worried that I would disappoint him. I thought maybe I'd be dull, that he'd spend most of his time wishing he were home watching old Star Trek episodes or some nature program about lemurs.

I wasn't sure how I was going to react to all the boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. I'd never been kissed, and I'd never had my hand held. I'd had a boyfriend once before, briefly, when I was in fifth grade, and that was just baby stuff. This, now, was something bigger than all that. Fifth graders weren't allowed to go to dances and worry about the things you needed to worry about at dances (Does my hair look okay? Is there something in my nose? Does my breath smell okay? Are my hands clammy?). But I had a few years on the girl I'd been back at the beginning of middle school, and now the stakes were so, so high. Impossibly high. So high that I freaked. I lost it. Completely lost it.

I was a wreck at the dance. I found it difficult to figure out the equation for how much time you were supposed to spend with your girl friends and how much time you were supposed to spend with your boyfriend. Was I expected to keep him company the whole time? If I wasn't, where would he go in the meantime? Who would he hang out with? Did I have to go get him when a slow song came on, or would he come get me? And where exactly were we going to dance? Did we dance by his group of friends or by mine? How did all of this get worked out?

When it came time to actually dance with him, I was the most uncomfortable that I'd ever been. More uncomfortable than those tenuous few moments before you're stuck with a needle at the doctor's office. Those moments are thick with awfulness--after all, you know you're about to be pinched with a sharp object, and there's nothing you can do but sit there and wait for the doctor to just get on with it. And as much as you prepare yourself, the sting still wells up when the metal bites through your skin. Dancing with a boy was somehow worse than all that. I knew what was expected of me--close contact and appropriate hand placement--but when it came time to demonstrate that I wasn't a social moron who didn't know what to do with a boy now that she had one, I failed miserably.

The boy seemed much more confident than I did. He had no problem with hand placement and close dancing. In fact, he seemed downright comfy with it, which I attributed to his past dating history with my friend. She had an older sister, after all, and that older sister had probably taught her how these things went and then my friend, through her example, taught her boyfriend who was now my boyfriend.

While we were dancing, I could see some of my friends standing along the edge of the gym, giving me thumbs-ups and sipping punch. I wanted nothing more than to be sipping punch with them, but I faked a smile and let the boy spin me in quick-quick circles. Stealthily, some of my other friends--the ones who were coupled up--nudged their dates closer and closer to me and my boyfriend so that now we were all dancing in close proximity. Every time our passes lined up and I could see their faces, they gave me eyebrow-spiked looks of expectation. Their looks seemed to say, Yeah? Yeah? See? Fun, isn't it?

I wanted to tell them no, it wasn't fun at all.

Things got complicated at the end of the dance. The assistant principal had announced pretty early on that we would be able to vote for the most popular couple at the dance. The names of all the couples in attendance had been written on construction paper hearts and stuck to the bleachers that wrapped around the perimeter of the gym. I knew there was no way my boyfriend and I were going to be voted Most Popular Couple because the award, of course, would go to someone popular, someone like The Love of My Life, Ryan McLean, but probably not even him. Most likely, it would go to someone older, one of the popular, sparkling, straight-toothed eighth grade couples. But I was okay with that. I was more than okay with that. Less attention that was being paid to me and my new boyfriend was for the best. The likelihood of masturbation jokes was nil if we flew under the radar.

But we didn't. A group of popular boys found our heart and, while we were dancing near the bleachers where the heart proclaiming our couplehood was taped, the popular boys started whistling and pointing at us, then our heart. "Ooooh!" they shrieked. "Oooooh, look at them!" They made obscene gestures with their hands. "Jesss!" they said. "Jess has a booooyfriend! Oooooh! Have you seen him do this, Jess?" And then there were more obscene hand gestures.

"Ignore them," my date said.

"I am," I said, but I wasn't. Instead, I was burning up inside--but for all the wrong reasons. I wasn't enraged for my boyfriend who, really, was just so nice and kind and sweet and didn't in any way deserve to be tortured the way they were torturing him, but because I was embarrassed to be seen with him and his dirty, dirty hands on my hips. I wanted to stop dancing and fling his hands off my body and then run out the doors into the night. I wanted to run the whole way home, along the dark country roads where no one would be able to see what a horrible, awful girl I was.

But I didn't do any of that. Instead, I stayed at my boyfriend's side and danced with him to all the slow songs. And some of the fast songs, too. He got particularly excited when the DJ played American Pie. He whirled me around in giant, loopy circles, and he twirled me until I was dizzy. It was clear he was having a good time with me. He enjoyed dancing with me. He wanted to keep me spinning until I was breathless and having as good a time as he was. And he was trying just so hard--smiling so big and so much. My heart broke in eighty different pieces as Don McLean scaled through the upbeat section of the song and then bottomed back into the syrupy-slow section. My boyfriend leaned against me, catching his breath. His heart beat a million miles a minute against mine, and that's when I knew I was a wretched girl because I would go home and not return his calls, because I would send someone to break up with him on Monday morning, because I couldn't be his girlfriend. I just cared too much about what other people would think.

Later, my boyfriend plucked our heart from the hall and handed it to me. He walked me to my father's station wagon and said goodnight. He said he'd call me tomorrow, and I said, "Okay." The next morning when I woke up I would instruct my parents to tell any boy that called--as if there were going to be many--that I wasn't feeling well and couldn't talk. For the rest of the day I sat around convincing myself I didn't feel well. I convinced myself so perfectly that I actually didn't feel well, and when I thought about going to school the next day I gagged and couldn't stop. The idea of having to go straight to art class, where he and I sat across from each other, and having to either pretend like nothing had happened (all while making plans for one of my friends to break the bad news to him later) or having to pretend like I didn't even know him broke my heart. And my stomach. And my head. I felt like hell.

Luckily, my parents were savvy enough to know that something was wrong with me--even if they didn't exactly believe I was sick-sick. When I woke up the next morning and asked them if I could stay home from school for the day--in the most pitiful and quivering of voices, of course--they ignored the fact that I looked fine and didn't have a fever or any other symptom of illness. They said yes, yes, I could stay home from school. They told me I should take it easy and relax and get better.

But I was convinced there was no better for me. I was convinced I was the world's worst girl, the most evil and foul thing that ever lived. And I continued to feel that even after I passed the boy a note in the next day's art class, a note which told him I thought we were better off as friends. The boy read that note quietly, then folded it in a precise square and stuck it in his pocket. And that was that. He didn't look at me for the rest of the class, the day, the week, the year. By the time we got to high school, he had moved away and was no longer in our class.

But I haven't forgotten him. In fact, the other day I couldn't help myself from slipping back into remembering our brief three day romance, the fling I fouled up from the start. "American Pie" came on the radio as I was driving to Topsham to shop for pillows and curtains and even some shoes for my new life. As the golden-golden leaves flashed by outside my window, I couldn't help but feel his warm and sure hands on my waist. He hadn't known that in a few days I would take him down easily, just by writing a few words on some notebook paper. But while my car cut through the fields and woods of Maine, I was spinning, spinning, spinning in my memory, spinning in his arms, spinning away from him more and more with each second.

Today I looked to see if there was some snippet of information about him on the internet, if there were some small anecdote that would tell me where he was, what he was doing, if he was okay. I found several people with his name, but nothing that could tell me definitively one of them was actually him. Guys who share his name are out there right now doing all sorts of jobs. They are owning asphalt companies and managing banks. They are fishing boat captains and architects. They are working at publishing houses and sub shops. And one of them could be him. I just hope that wherever he is and whatever he's done with himself--well, I hope it's all good, and--really--I hope that he doesn't remember me and what I did to him because it was mean, it was awful, it was ugly, it was everything I never wanted to be or do.

A Story That Ends with Me Breathing into a Paper Bag

This weekend our department is going on a hike. We're planning to scale the mountains around here.

I've never hiked before. I know nothing about hiking, except for what little I gathered from reading short fiction pieces written by one of my graduate school professors, and those didn't really paint the whole act of hiking in a "good" way. In fact, after reading those stories I had the suspicion that hiking trails were inhabited by perverts, the socially inept, and people who like to get naked.

Hiking, though, isn't the only athletic-ish thing that the department has discussed in the last few days. Just this morning one of the faculty members announced that he's one hundred percent sure that our department is the craftiest department, the most physically fit department, the most skilled department, and we could take on any other department at any sport and wipe the floors with them.

Not everyone looked convinced.

"What?" he asked. "Come on. Who are you afraid of? We can take them all. Tennis, golf, a mile run--we could beat them at any of that."

That's when I had to interject. I might look fairly tall and aerodynamic, but I'm really not. I also have a really bad track record with running miles. "Let me tell you about gym class in middle school," I said.

I told them about how we were forced to do the awful Mile Run/Walk twice a year, and I hated that more than anything. I wasn't a good runner, but most of my friends were. They wouldn't hang back to chug along at my dismal pace. Instead, they would power past me and run full-out from start to finish. Me, I was near the back huffing and puffing and trying not to notice when the really cute boys lapped me, the soles of their expensive sneakers smacking the ground of the soccer fields and saying, You'll never catch me. You won't, you won't, you won't.

My beautiful friends were glittering backs far in front of me. Their ponytails bounced in the afternoon sun. They couldn't turn around and worry about me or how I was staggering along in a half-run/half-walk. The fat girls, who didn't run at all and whose thighs chaffed from their casual mile-long jaunt, were right behind me. I was only a little better than the really fat girls.

And one time I sort of worked myself into a fit over it. I was in a horrible mindset. I didn't want to run, walk, or anything in between. I didn't want to participate. I hated gym, I hated that our severely overweight gym teacher (who was married to our severely overweight music teacher, both of them girls) got to stand by tapping a pen on her clipboard and consulting her stopwatch.

And so after she blew the whistle and everyone took off, I started off with a black lump of hate turning itself over and over in the pit of my stomach. With each stride I kept thinking of reasons I shouldn't have to put myself on display like this, and the best reason I could think of was I had a heart murmur. I couldn't get my teeth cleaned without taking special medicine because of the condition, and here I was being expected to dash up and down the soccer fields just because of some presidential council on physical fitness said I should? If the presidential council on physical fitness had gotten an eyeful of my gym teacher, they would've realized they had bigger problems on their hands than a bunch of not-obese twelve year-olds.

Well, my thinking about the heart murmur got me feeling the heart murmur. See? I was thinking to myself. My heart feels like it's going to thump its way out of my ribcage, and then what? I kept thinking that and thinking that and thinking that, and then I realized I was gasping for air. I was staggering over to my gym teacher and flapping my hands to indicate I couldn't breathe. Of course, my angry thinking got me out of nothing. I'd groused about it for all three giant laps and finally collapsed when I reached the finish line.

The gym teacher called to a group of my friends, who were resting underneath a shade tree. They'd been done for four or five minutes, and now they were fanning themselves and looking peachy-cheeked and fit as all get out.

When they reached me, bending over to try to talk to me, to see if I was okay, the gym teacher jerked her finger in the direction of the school. "Someone take her to the nurse's office," she said.
"I can't feel my fingers or toes," I said, and I couldn't--but probably not from any real affliction. I'm still fairly sure I talked myself into hysteria.

My friends, unaware of the serious psychoses that had driven me to near collapse, flanked me and brought me safely to the nurse. They volunteered to stay with me, even if that meant missing lunch, but the nurse dismissed them. She said she needed to examine me--and in her world, "examine" meant making me lean over and put my head between my knees, then sit back up and breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, and breathe out of a paper bag. Afterward, she told me to lie back on a cot. This would be the extent of her services. She didn't ask me about any pre-existing health conditions or what might have triggered such an odd reaction to running a mile. She just snapped the curtain shut on my cot cubicle and went about her business of filing paperwork.

A few minutes later the curtain hissed back against its metal rail. There, on the other side, was the assistant principal--a man we all hated, a man who was foul and cruel and evil, a man we would later nickname The Walking Penis.

He came in, zipped the curtain back up behind him. He sat on the end of my cot, where my feet were held aloft at a strange angle by a stack of blankets. He said hello to me, pretended he was really interested in what was happening to me, but he didn't even get my name right. "Jennifer," he said, looking me over. "You gave us all quite a scare, you know?"

Anyone could tell he was pleased I didn't die on his watch because he for sure would've been the one held accountable if the next day's headlines in the Buffalo News read Local Girl Dies During Gym Class.

"Your feet need to be higher," he said, and he added more blankets to the pile. He patted my shoulder awkwardly and then stood. "You're fine," he proclaimed. And then he was gone, leaving the curtain open behind him. Some of my friends were standing just outside it, though, and they'd smuggled me small snacks left over from lunch. They wanted to know just how long I thought I'd be down there, if I was going to get to go home, if I was going to get to miss math.

But nothing happened. Shortly thereafter the nurse also proclaimed my fine-ness and signed me back to class. I had to walk back down the hall and into class and face everyone after what had happened, and such a fast release made me look like a faker and a freak, but I suppose that was fair. I was probably a little bit of both. But I do remember there being a few minutes that day when I thought maybe--just maybe--this was a real problem, that something bad was going to happen, that I would never be able to find my breath, and the last memory I would have of life on earth would be the way the it felt to round the last curve and see everyone else except the fat girls sitting under trees and waiting for you to finish so they could go inside and eat a bologna sandwich.