And Then Things Fall Apart (6 page)

He.

Started.

To.

Read.

To.

Me.

A FREAKING SONNET.

Do I remember which one? Does it matter? There were thees and thous, enigmatic questions, and he had one knee on the bed, and then both, and then an elbow, and then we were rolling around on top of his sheets. My sundress, made of white cotton, became just another sheet, and off it came, so I was just lounging on his bed in my underwear, which was rather like a bikini.

How did I get practically naked? Your guess is as good
as mine. It's like he Googled “How to seduce an honors English virgin” and was testing his new romancing skills on me. I was lying there all ready to let Matt gather ye rosebuds. No, really. My body was on autopilot. My brain was in the back room with the dishwashers taking a smoke break, and the inner rubber band that usually kept my knees together had just snapped in two. Everything—every breath, kiss, eyelash flutter on my neck—felt so good that you could have taken a knife and sliced me from stem to stern and I would have loved it.

But then there was a knock on the door, and my dress was back on fairy-magic fast, desperately holding on to my shoulders with two pathetic spaghetti straps, and there was Earl the Squirrel, leaning in the doorway, holding a paper plate of artichoke dip and toast points, saying, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo, yo?”

Matt was all nonchalant, running a hand over his bangs and stretching in an obnoxious and over-the-top way to draw attention away from his RAGING ERECTION.

Am I glad that Earl showed up? I guess. I mean, yeah. But not really. The thing about my virginity is that I want it to be taken from me—like pick-pocketed from my purse on the bus. No. I don't want to be raped or anything sick like that, but I also don't want to have to mull it over and make a big conscious decision about my course of action. But if my virginity is snatched—tugged gently from my neck
like a diamond necklace by a handsome highwayman in the middle of the night—that would be great. I want to be in control and out of control at the same time. Which I know is irrational, a little gutless, and not really like me, but when it comes to the maidenhead, I am a big chickenshit.

Besides, Earl's
WTF?
face in the doorway, chewing with his mouth open, was never in one of the millions of virginity-losing scenarios I had imagined.

So I got up. Scrunched my hair up in my fingers for that bed-head look, slipped on my flip-flops, and went back out to the party, my insides all jittery and my pulse thumping through my ears like soldiers on the march. I made small talk with adults. I quoted Shakespeare. Once in a while I held Matt's hand and blushed because I wanted to kiss him with my entire body under the stars on that beautiful night.

Now Matt and I are very familiar with each other's houses. He knows where we keep the snacks and that the Cokes are in the back of the fridge. Coffee galumphs down the carpeted stairs when Matt comes over, falling all over herself, for a belly rub. But it is that first star-flecked night that I still think of before I fall asleep, the lazy nonchalance of it. No one ever told me that finding out about bodies and what I like and what I want from boys—men, what-ever—was supposed to be fun or that it was a moderately joyful process. It always seemed fraught with secrecy and shame. Pregnancy terrifies me. Betrayal terrifies me. And
how insane howl-at-the-moon lusty I get whenever Matt breathes on my neck is a little scary too. That night was the only time things felt different. And easier. Why do I make everything so complicated?

Still, when I see Matt tug off his ear guards after a wrestling match and his hair goes all spiky and he looks for me in the stands and winks, I remember the sheets and the fireflies and savor it like a butterscotch candy in my mouth, clicking it around my teeth. When I am old, I will probably remember that twinkling night more than other more naked and debauched nights that might never happen.

But that night was a year ago already. And although I get a little brazen once in a while and I have been expanding my comfort zone with Matt millimeter by millimeter every day, I still panic and freak-the-hell-out just when things get
really
interesting. When my bones go rubbery and my mind slows down with desire, I'm all “Later, alligator,” gone in a flash.

I'm making my (non)sex life up as I go along. That night in his room at the beginning of our relationship would have been the best possible time for Matt to reveal what he waited more than a year to tell me. If only he had told me
then
instead of
last week
. If I were writing the screenplay of my life, that is the place where I would have sofa king put it.

AMANDA THE TWO-FACED TRAMP

Unasked, you harvest
My weaknesses and wounds,
My anxieties and girlish blunders,
My teenage dread and virginal dreams,
Gingerly placing each one,
Hot, private, painful,
Into a Tupperware box.
A heartbreak snack
For later,
To launch at me in sopping, bloody chunks
Before you slink away
And fuck my father in the freezer.

I am too embarrassed to talk to anyone about my family. Except Matt, and for all I know, he has the hots for Amanda too. I wouldn't put it past him. See where my brain is? Why am I able to type my guts out without fatigue but hardly have the energy to drag myself to the bathroom or sit up to drink the tea that Gram brings me each afternoon? And when I finally fall asleep, I have nightmares about babies in jars. Or Amanda, ripping open my neck and filling a beer stein with my blood at a vampire bar on the North Side of Chicago. She invades my brain all the time, and I'm sick of it. I can't help but try to figure out when I should have started to mistrust her, to become suspicious. Why was I so addicted to her?

Amanda and I went shopping together, often. In malls. Like teenagers in John Hughes movies. (Nicola calls malls “mals,” as in French for “bad.”) My best-est in the west-est new pal Amanda and I bought stupid jewelry and T-shirts
with ironic sayings. Afterward she—real—and I—pretend—smoked in her car, listening to her iPod via the car lighter adapter.

Listening to Amanda's music was like being inside her brain. She always had it on shuffle, so it was like a trip through her entire life there in her crappy used hatchback, or whatever it was, with pennies all over the floor. There was corny musical music from
Guys and Dolls
(which she was in, in high school; a Hot Box girl, sofa king textbook), heavy-bass techno stuff, reggae, and some really old punk from her ex-boyfriend, who used to be in a mediocre band that supposedly played at the Double Door all the time.

Even though most of it was benign, every song made me think of sex. And not just sex in movies or ridiculous

Internet porn, but bodies in general. There in her car I remember thinking that people—and by “people” I mean me, Amanda, my parents, rock stars, baristas, CNN reporters, etc.—are free, for the most part, to do whatever they want. As long as no one gets hurt. How cool is that? AS LONG AS NO ONE GETS HURT.

Every time one song faded into the next, I fake inhaled and exhaled plumes of renegade smoke, thinking of Amanda dancing backstage in leather pants or emerging spectacularly from a pool in Las Vegas wearing a bikini, water cascading over her navel ring. This is probably how my father thought about her too as he delivered pizzas all
over the western suburbs. Ugh. Absolutely disgusting.

Matt's parents have a walnut-paneled basement with an upholstered white leather L-shaped couch. The corner of the
L
—well, let's just say I like the corner of the
L
and Matt loves the corner of the
L
. We are currently at a standoff about how much further we'll go in the corner of the
L
, because there is not really much further we can go without going through with it.

I'm an only child, okay? If I had a sister or something I would have talked about this with her instead of my parents' employee, who, unbeknownst to me, was about to embark on a covert plan of sleeping with my father and ruining my life and my mom's life and everything else in the process.

So imagine, talking with this very person about very intense, intimate things like the taste of a boy's penis (!) and orgasms (?) and what am I supposed to do, and basically revealing how, despite my smarts, wisdom, and cynical disregard for mundane behavior, I am so inexperienced with this real-world stuff that it's entirely embarrassing.

What the hell would Nic have contributed to this conversation? Probably a lot. Probably would have asked me what I thought was important. Asked me why I was so scared. Told me I should probably take a break if it was freaking me out so much, because I wasn't quite ready. Basically she would have made me feel like an absolute
CHILD
, which is why I didn't talk about it with her in the first place. So instead I
told that wise, empathetic, and loving dirtbag Amanda all this stuff with total trust, respect, and high regard, desperate to hear what she had to say about my sexual misadventures on Matt's L-shaped couch.

Amanda and I had this disturbingly intense friendship. It felt like there were no real barriers between us. We were both young women, we liked the same kind of music, she really knew my parents—and not in passing, like other friends. She worked with us—me, Jorge, and Sebastian—and knew things like how far to fill the soap dispenser in the men's room and how the one steamer wand on the cappuccino machine had to get really hot before it made enough steam for a cup, how my mom liked total silence in the restaurant for five minutes before it opened, to “gather her energy.”

We had our own slang for stuff. Amanda's the one who started saying “sofa king” all the time, and now I can't stop saying it or typing it. We were trying to figure out a way to swear without freaking out customers, and that was her genius idea. And I thought it was the most amazing play on words ever.

She even told me that she had read
The Bell Jar
when she was in high school and thought it was—are you ready?—“so rad.”
RAD?
As in neato? Gnarly? Peachy-freaking-keen?

How could I not see then that she did not take me as seriously as I took her? In
The Bell Jar
, Esther has this so-called friend Doreen, who is a tramp (in a bad way) and
whose breasts pop out of her strapless dress while she dances (drunk) with a singing cowboy, and she doesn't even notice. Doreen is also selfish and gossipy and mean and probably not nice to her mother. She is also unlike all of Esther's nice friends. The kindhearted, talented, Nicola-esque ones who are eager to please and nice to their parents.

How Esther felt with Doreen is how I felt being with Amanda: sarcastic and cool and more alive than other people. Amanda wanted to get really close to me right away, like best friends at first sight, just like Doreen was with Esther. And Doreen and Amanda are both truly hilarious. That's how Esther got reeled in. Although it is comforting to think that Esther went through this kind of thing too, it still makes me wonder:

Why, oh why, did I like Amanda so much?

Is this some kind of universal growing up/girl-on-girl crime rite of passage that all women go through? Seriously?

I didn't get the e-mail alert.

Dad's home.

Gotta keek.

Gram tripped over the typewriter cord last night when she came to check on me, and I thought for a second as she fell toward me that she was (a) trying to strangle me or (b) having a heart attack. She's not, like, old-old or anything, but I just wasn't expecting such a dramatic entrance. Gram is really quiet. She stares into space while she smokes, but she doesn't look French or heartbroken at all. She looks frozen, like someone pressed pause on the DVD player, except that the smoke is still moving. It's really creepy. Her husband (my grandpa) was sort of a grade-A nonorganic jerk and left her when she was young with a little kid (my dad) for a much younger woman. Do you see how my whole life is like an elaborately painted Russian nesting doll?

My pox are expanding, fattening with itch, then spreading and flattening, and then disappearing. Slowly. But then new ones pop up, and I feel like I will be in this calico-curtained bedroom beneath this typewriter for the rest of
my life. Illness makes you forget things. Like what day it is. I am, obviously, in my own little typing world while my body fights the pox. I'm not even watching TV, really. Well, last night I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and shuffled to the front room like the Creature from the Black Lagoon to watch the late rebroadcast of
Judge Judy
with Gram.

I think if my grandma could do it all over again, she would like to have ended up more like Judge Judy and a little less like herself. JJ is as tough as she can be but still have people like her. She is very fair. Her Honor doesn't like liars, cheats, or weak girls who let stupid men take advantage of them. She is a champion for children. And her dark brown eyes will burn you to a crisp if you mistakenly treat her like your run-of-the-mill sweet old lady. Which she is so not.

My grandma isn't like that at all. She doesn't look people square in the eye when they talk to her, even me sometimes. She worries a lot. About the battery in the smoke detector dying. What to make for dinner (which is actually rather important when caring for a pox-afflicted, and often hallucinating, teenager). Other worries—for example, her son living in her basement for the rest of his life; her only granddaughter, who is kind of fragile right now; her daughter-in-law, aka my mother, and their pending relation-ship—these don't seem to faze her. Gram even told me once before Dad's hideous infidelity, “I couldn't have asked for a better daughter.” (Note: She did not say daughter-
in-law
.)
So she is not only gaining a midlife adulterous, nonpaying tenant, she is also losing a daughter.