Girl Meets Boy (2 page)

“How come?”

“Well, I mean, what’s in it for me? What do I get out of it? Look at you. You’re going to figure out how to have a good relationship with a girl and go off and find one. Where does that leave me?” She stood up. Tears rimmed her eyes. God, I hadn’t even thought this might be hard for her. Wanda Wickham traditionally went out with guys at least four years older. Guys in the army. Guys with kids. And wives. From a
heat
standpoint, she was so far out of my league we were playing a different sport.

I said, “Wait—”

“No,” she said back. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your fault. I didn’t think I’d … Fall in love.”

WHAM!

In a court of law on trial for my life, I couldn’t tell you what sequence of events took place in the following few minutes, but the next thing I remember we were kicking the windows out of my father’s 1979 Chevy pickup from the inside and I had passed up double-A ball and triple-A ball and landed in the
majors.

Wanda pulled her blouse back on and looked at me. Tears welled up. “Oh,” she said. “What have I done now?”

“What do you mean? I think—”

“I don’t give myself to a man unless I love him,” she said. “But I promised myself that next time I wouldn’t do it until he loved me back.”

“Well, uh—”

“Don’t,” she said, putting two fingers to my lips. “I know you don’t want to lie, and I don’t want to hear any more lies. This wasn’t your fault. I’ll deal with it.”

“But—”

“Shhh.”

She was out of the pickup and gone.

I didn’t see Wanda other than to pass her in the hall for almost a week. She would glance at me with a sad smile and turn away, and it scooped out my insides. The only thing I wanted more than a return engagement in the pickup was to make her feel better. Okay, maybe the pickup antics took over first place once in a while, but still, I had such a powerful urge to make her life better. Look what she had done for me. She’d befriended me, talked with me about my problems, even taken them to a professional. And she’d gone away feeling bad.

The only things I know that increased geometrically faster than my lies in an ill-fated relationship were my late-night and early-morning small-motor calisthenics before I was able to get close to Wanda again. I have heard it said that the adolescent male is in possession of two brains, and his capacity to be a decent human being is dependent on his capability to choose wisely when to use which. Well, that’s a lie. There is no which. There is one brain. It is a ventriloquist, which is the
only
reason it ever even appears to come from the cranium.

I called Wanda. I asked her to meet me at the Frosty Freeze. I only wanted to make her feel better, I lied. She said she didn’t trust herself to keep her hands off me. I lied again and said I would keep things under control. I wanted her to know she was cared about. I wanted her to know that all guys don’t just want sex. (And in the end, I should say, that wasn’t completely a lie. All guys don’t just want sex. But all guys want sex.)

We met. She wore jeans and a blouse with an open sweater over it. The blouse buttoned at the top, but had an open circle just below the top button. Not a very big one, just big enough to make me visually fill in the blanks. She looked beautiful, but worn out,
beaten. I ordered us both a Coke and sat staring, feeling cautious about how to start. She smiled weakly, but let me stew, figure it out for myself.

“I’m really sorry,” I started.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” she said. “It was my fault.”

“I’m not sorry about
that,
” I said. “I liked that. I liked it a lot. I’m just sorry you feel bad. I mean, I know you’ve had a hard life. The foster care and everything. Losing your parents and all.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I can’t even tell you.” And then she proceeded to tell me of drug-dealing biological parents who lived in a crack house and who were so strung out they let anyone who came and went have access to Wanda. Her dad went to jail, and her mom cleaned up three times before finally losing Wanda for good when she was seven. By then she’d already been in and out of foster care four times. She had attended thirteen schools total, had been sexually approached by teachers three different times. Three of her foster fathers had molested her, including the one she lived with now. Only she had threatened to kill this one in his sleep and he stopped. She just wanted the carnival to end, she said. She just wanted some peace. And she just wanted to be loved.

God, just hearing it made me love her, and I wanted to say that, but it seemed forced, like maybe it would feel like she was hurting too much, or looking for it. She smiled when I just sat there looking at her, not knowing what to say.

“Listen,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this, but I want you to promise me that if something happens, you won’t blame yourself.”

“Something happens,” I said. “Like what?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just promise me.”

“Something like what?” I said. My agitation grew. Like when my mom was desperate to have my dad pay attention to her after dinner sometimes. She would wash the dishes with tears dripping off her nose, her rum and coke hidden in the cupboard next to the sink while he snored through
Law and Order
on the couch.

If anything ever happens to me, don’t you blame yourself.

Anything happens? Like what?

Anything. Anything at all. And you make sure your father knows I love him.

“I said don’t worry about it,” Wanda said. “It isn’t about you.” She got up to leave.

I followed her out to her foster parents’ car. She got in, placed both hands on the wheel, and stared ahead. A tear trickled down the side of her cheek.

“I do love you, Wanda,” I said. “I mean, I think I really do. You haven’t been off my mind for five minutes since I saw you last.”

She turned her head and looked at me, smiling weakly. “You couldn’t love me, Johnny.” She’s the only person who’s ever called me Johnny. “Nobody could. There’s nothing to love.” She started the car and pulled out.

I jumped into the pickup and followed her, past my place, past hers, out to the river. She pulled into a wide spot hidden in the trees. I pulled in behind her, shut off the engine, walked over, and knocked on her window.

She rolled it down.

“I do love you, Wanda. I can prove it.”

Best sex I ever had.

Course, I only had that one other time to compare to.

It’s too late to make a long story short, but for a while, nothing could keep us apart. I picked her up for school and took her home.
I stopped going to intramural sports and dropped out of the music quartet I was practicing with to compete in the state music festival. I was able to give up those things that were once staples in my life as easily as a case of chicken pox so I could spend time with Wanda. Her foster mom thought I was the best thing in the world for her; she hadn’t skipped a class since we started going together. Her caseworker and teachers were ecstatic because of her grades.

But as any relatively sane person knows, you can only breathe rare air so long before you need it to be mixed with the toxins that everyone else breathes. Caviar is great, but so is a burger. I’m not talking about other relationships here, not other girls. I’m talking about the things any stable human needs in his life to provide balance. Friends. Activities. A night alone watching TV. Time to let your member heal. You want to remember that I was a guy who, before I turned into a sex fiend, relieved myself a couple of times in the morning, a couple of times at night and once a day on a restroom break from Pre-Calc. I thought I held records. But Wanda Wickham wore me out. Sometimes we’d get done and I’d think I needed stitches in my back. And just
try
saying I was too tired or that I had to get homework done or that body fluids were finite. “Okay,” she’d say. “I thought you loved me. I knew it would end. It always ends. Go ahead.” Forty-five minutes later, I’d be driving home hoping I’d crash into a paramedic truck.

Suddenly I was on twenty-four-hour call. Wanda’s panicked voice would breathe into my cell phone with increasing frequency. Fifteen-minute intervals, ten, five, three. Where was I? Had I been in a crash? Would I please call? Would I please call?

Then anger seeped in: What was I doing? Had I turned off my phone?
Why
had I turned off my phone? I was a lying son of a bitch. So it was going to end the way the others had.

The plain and simple truth, that I was sitting in my room, grabbing some minutes for myself, wondering who I was when I wasn’t running to put out one of Wanda Wickham’s fires, was not the answer she could tolerate, and I became a liar of Shakespearean status. My car broke down in an electronically dead place. My phone was lost, and I just found it. I
never
turned my phone off when I thought she might call. I didn’t know why it went straight to voicemail; probably some glitch in AT&T. I thought of no other girls or women, ever. How could I?

Truth was, I was as smitten as the day I met her.

Before it was over, I had broken half the Commandments. No one died, but I stole my parents’ pickup in the middle of the night to take her out to the river and hear the horrors of her foster father, who she always escaped, but who became more and more menacing. I had actually never met him because he worked long hours, and was never to even mention him to her foster mother, because Wanda could not afford to lose this placement. The last three times I snuck out after midnight it was to keep her from committing suicide. Nothing I did, no random act of kindness, no random act of desperation, made a dent.

So I went to see Rita the therapist.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m John Smith. Thanks for seeing me.”

Rita Crews had the same look on her face I always got the first time I said my name was John Smith.

“No, really,” I said. “John Smith. I think you’ve probably heard my name.”

She smiled. She was probably in her late fifties, smooth skin and shocking salt-and-pepper hair. “I’ve heard the name John Smith a lot,” she said, “but until now, never in relation to a specific person.”

I remembered. “You might know me as Johnny.”

She looked pensive, shook her head.

“Wanda Wickham?”

No expression whatsoever.

“She’s one of your clients.”

“Confidentiality keeps me from telling you whether she is or isn’t,” Rita Crews said, “but I can assure you no one’s mentioned your name in my office.”

Whoa!

“Your ad said you do one consultation free,” I said. “Is that a whole hour?”

“A whole hour,” Rita said. “And let me give you some direction. Instead of using people’s names and dates and times and places and all that, why don’t you give me a hypothetical. I think I could answer your questions better if you could give me a hypothetical.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s say there was this girl named Wendy Walkman … ”

At the end of our freebie session, Rita Crews just smiled and shook her head. “How about instead of asking you a million questions, I just tell you what to do, and you do it,” she said.

I’d have done anything.

“Turn your cell phone off and leave it with me. I promise not to answer it. Call your girlfriend, whoever she may be, and tell her you’re emotionally distraught and are calling off the relationship. Do not get into another one for one year. You can go out with friends, you can play sports and music, you can mix with boys and girls equally, but you cannot ‘go’ with anyone. Keep your offending member in your pants. Paste pictures of Britney and J.Lo on your ceiling and make passionate love to them to your heart’s content. Then buy yourself a catheter if you have to and duct tape
said offending member to your leg and padlock your zipper shut. Midnight to six in the privacy of your room is the
only
time it gets to breathe.”

Can you believe that sounded good?

“And one more thing; when you think you have even the tiniest inkling why trying to save your mother and trying to save the hypothetical Wendy Walkman felt exactly the same, you call me and we’ll go out for coffee. Okay?”

I thanked her as if she had led me to the Promised Land.

When I reached the door to her office, she said, “John?”

“Yeah.”

“My goodness, you are a good-looking boy.”

“I hate to say this,” I said, “but I know it. And I’m scheduling plastic surgery for early next week.”

I was thirteen when I decided to tell my neighbor Andy my dirty little secret. Nose to nose between my foster mom’s full-length rabbit coat and a thick row of her husband’s coveralls—dizzy from the stink of man sweat and beer—I stepped outside of the box and took on a boy practically my own age.

“Turn on the flashlight,” I whispered inside the overstuffed closet. “Cross your heart, swear to God you’ll never breathe a word of this—to ANYONE.” My blue polished nails made a cramped
X
across 34Cs. Andy Levine’s flashlight gradually followed the trail. We’re talking slow like the ice age; slow like Jim Carrey in
Dumb and Dumber;
slow like a really old geezer trying to get off.

“I swear on my mother’s
grave,
” he answered, his body bent, pinning the fur against the wall to keep from bumping his head.
“I’d swear on Jesus, if I thought it would get us out of this crappy closet. Why are we in here?”

“You’re Jewish,” I said, “Your
mommy
is next door, and I don’t want to be interrupted. So swear on Moses or Hanukkah—or something like that. I mean it, Andy. If you want to hear the secret, you have to swear. It’s totally juicy.”

“Juicy like Wanda Wickham?” he asked, leering as I nodded. “Sweet! Then I swear on the Bar Mitzvah I never had. I swear on Aunt Esther’s ugly black shoes. Just get on with it. Closets aren’t part of my contract, little girl.”

“Little girl?” I said, wedging my hips between Andy’s legs. “Do I look like a little girl to you?” It was a hypothetical question. I knew what he saw when he looked at me—and he looked at me a LOT. For Andy, hanging around was an excuse, not a chore. And protection from a sixteen-year-old was the last thing on my mind.

“I’ve been watching you,” I continued. “You park your Honda outside my bedroom window late at night, when you don’t want Mommy to see. Three girls in two weeks—wet kisses, your hands under their blouses? I think you’re a bad, bad boy.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Andy said, “or I’m outta here.”

“Wait,” I said, putting my hand against his pecs. I could feel his heart racing, a pierced nipple beneath the cloth. “That’s not the secret. I just wanted you to know I’d seen you. But, trust me, I totally understand.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, pulling back from my hand. “Like you’d know anything about that. You’ve got ten seconds, kid.”

Liar,
I thought.
You just closed your legs around my hips. You’re not going anywhere, until I say go.

“Ten seconds,” I said. “Now, how can I put this?” I pulled my hand back and slipped the tip of my finger inside my mouth,
biting softly. My fingers then fell to the open buttons of my garage sale shirt. Andy’s gaze went with it.
Good,
I thought. His eyes looked up. I let him see me smile.

“I’m not really a kid,” I said in a whisper. “I’m not even a virgin.” I let the second half of the statement slip to a nearly inaudible tone.

“Excuse me?” he said, watching my wet finger, now a vague sha-dow in the valley between my breasts. He leaned closer to hear me, to visually follow the finger. I felt the rhythm of his breath, warm and damp against the side of my face, and leaned past it.

“Men like to touch me,” I whispered in his ear, my lips brushing the folds of flesh as I spoke. “It started with this guy my mom was seeing. He was my babysitter, too.” I leaned back to see his face.
Yeah,
I thought,
I’ve got him.
“He made me take a bath, then toweled me off, real gentle like I was blown glass. He loved me, Andy. He said so. He said if I let him kiss me a little, he’d buy me a Malibu Barbie. And I
really
wanted that Barbie.” The flashlight beam tilted to one side.

“So you let some fossil kiss you?” Andy pretended he was disgusted. But I could tell by the way he watched my mouth, he wanted to be the guy.

“I did,” I said coyly. “Can you guess where he kissed me?” I pressed his free hand against my chest.

“Whoa,” he said. “That’s twisted.” But he didn’t try to pull away. If he had any resistance, it melted like a snowball against the flesh cupped in his palm. I pushed into him a little harder.

“You’re thinking I’m a liar,” I said, as I felt his hand close around my softness. “But it’s true—all of it. I swear.”

“All girls let guys cop a feel,” he said. “Big deal. You’ve got five seconds.”

I ignored him. “The guy couldn’t stop thinking about me,” I said. “But he wanted me to kiss him back. So the next time we were alone, he bought me a puppy and taught me something new.”

“Oh, man,” he said, laughing. His legs pulled me closer. “You’ve still got the dog, so tell me, where did you—”

I interrupted, pressing my mouth against his.

“Baby,” he whispered. Baby. The magic word, like victory flashing neon yellow. It says the game has shifted. Guy, nothing; Wanda, the whole enchilada. Anything else he had to say disappeared with the flashlight on the closet floor. His tongue was in my mouth before I could tell him the guys included my foster dads.

Andy was nobody. The poor jerk had nothing I wanted, other than a car. But messing with him taught me if I made all the moves, I kept all the marbles. I didn’t have to wait for some old guy to get an itch. I strung Andy along for rides to school until his
Mommy
caught me going down on him in the backyard. They had me shipped off to a new foster home. So what. They’re all the same—boys and foster homes.

Four years and hundreds of dark places later, I could sniff out hormones at a hundred paces. So when poor, heartbroken Johnny Smith tiptoed up to my locker talking about some bogus research project, the scent of sex was obvious.

“You’re doing a research project for
psychology
on me?” I said, my inner yellow neon flashing. “Sugar, I think you’re doing a research project on me—for
yourself.
” I was almost sorry this was going to be so easy. They say nothing lasts forever. I say some things never change.

But here’s the kicker. Johnny came clean. He said screwing around on his preppy girlfriends was messing him up and he
wanted a shrink to help him stop. He figured I knew plenty of therapists, and maybe I’d share one. No shit. I collected mental health workers like Johnny collected broken hearts. So we struck a deal, but it’s not like I hadn’t noticed him before.

Johnny was totally doable. Sexy runner’s body, dark hair, chocolate eyes. I got antsy just thinking about him, even if he and his ex, Nancy, did cost me my third suspension of the year. Nothing about
that
was my fault. Well, not
really.

It happened a couple of months ago. “Hey, Johnny,” I said during passing period. His locker was, like, two heartbeats from mine. Even in a crowd, he could almost hear me whisper. “Stand still so I can see how much you’ve grown,” I said, pressing my body against him, my hands reaching over his head at his shoulders.

“You’re a dwarf, Wanda,” he said, laughing. “How are you gonna gauge whether or not I’ve grown?”

“Five foot two isn’t short enough to be a dwarf,” I said, smiling, one hand still raised, the other moving gradually south. “If I were a little person,” I said as my fingers slid down his abs, “my twins would hit you about here.” I was about to flirt with his zipper when I felt an algebra book hit me from behind.

My fingers wrapped around a fistful of jealous girlfriend hair instead of Johnny’s package, but it was totally self-defense. Of course, that’s not the way Johnny told it. He said I took the first swing. His misguided loyalty cost me three days in bitched-out hell, but it was worth it. Because before she whacked me, Nancy’s bad boy was getting wood. And that lock of hair looked great with the Mardi Gras beads on my RAV4’s rearview.

Miss “Save It for Marriage” wasn’t good for Johnny anyway. I was all for his habit of self-recreation. In fact, imagining
Johnny’s hardware pushed me over the edge about a third of the time—when fantasies of Johnny Depp weren’t doing the job. But the boy had to be going blind. I figured there was no reason for him to bump it solo when I was primed for the ride.

“So tell me about your mother,” I said. “If you want Rita to help, she’ll need to know about your mom.” That wasn’t a lie. My therapist went ape shit whenever I talked about my mother. Go figure. I thought it was the string of “daddies” that got me where I was. But she was the expert.

“My mom is an alcoholic,” Johnny admitted, the solar-powered kind that slips into the arms of Jack Daniels when the sun goes down. I never figured Beaver Cleaver’s mom for a lush.

“Do your mom and dad sleep together, you know, get naked?” I asked wide-eyed.

“How would I know?” he said, as stunned and insulted as he would have been if I’d planked him with a two-by-four. God, he was so precious. I couldn’t resist taking it a step further.

“Does she sleep with you?” That was mean, I know, but he was so easy to mess with. He shot out of his seat like it was drenched in cat pee.

“Your therapist would want to know that?” he said in disbelief.

“Not on the first visit,” I said, calmly sipping my chocolate shake. He was about five seconds from a sprint when I eased back.

“Sit down,” I said, patting his seat. “Kidding.”

He shook his head as he sat down, the blush in his cheeks slowly fading. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“Oh, I’m going to help you,” I said, picturing him breathless for a much better reason. “I’m definitely going to show you the way.”

I had him eating out of my hand a couple of weeks later. You’d think no one ever listened to him babbling on about how
his father ignored his mother and how tough it was to be such a babe. He certainly got that part right. He was incredibly hot. And I was the attentive little friend, complete with visible cleavage and electric “accidents.” When my chest brushed his arm as I reached for a menu or my thigh pressed against his when we sat together in a booth, Johnny wanted Wanda Wickham’s physical therapy instead of Rita. So I decided it was time to set the hook.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I said the next time we met. “I mean, what’s in this for me? You’re getting the chance to build a great relationship. All I’m gonna get is left behind. It hurts to be invisible, Johnny.” I worked up a few tears for dramatic effect. “But it’s not your fault. You didn’t ask me to fall in love.”

Ding! Ding! Ding!
Johnny’s puppy-dog eyes said it all. I’d hit the perfect combination of hurt and lonely. We were horizontal in his father’s pickup before he had time to start the engine. That’s when things got a little twisted.

I decided to stack on the guilt while I put my bra back on, just like his mommy. “That’s okay, Johnny,” she’d say. “Run along and play with your friends. I’ll just sit alone in the dark until the rum makes me cross-eyed.” Should work for me, too.

“Oh, Johnny,” I said. “What have I done? I didn’t want to do that again unless the guy loved me. And you could never love a girl like me.” Then I pumped up a few more tears. But here’s the weird part. Once they started, I couldn’t make them stop. It was like the floodgates had opened and we were being washed away.

“Well, uh … “ he stumbled. But I couldn’t stop blubbering long enough to listen.

“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want you to lie.” I bolted for my car. For the first time since my eleventh birthday and my second foster father, I couldn’t tell what was real.

The waters receded two hours after I drove home and locked myself in my bedroom, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Johnny. As he’d peeled my shirt back, it had hit me. This wasn’t some old pothead slipping a finger into my
Sesame Street
panties. This was a guy that lied to protect his girlfriend. He was trying to do what was right, even if he didn’t have a clue about how to do it. His lips savored every inch of my skin, like a toddler with his first taste of ice cream.

Johnny was the real thing. And I wasn’t even a reasonable facsimile. For the first time in my life, that wasn’t how I wanted it to be.

For six days, I couldn’t look at him without going premenstrual. None of my normal scams—the sassy mouth, the sexual innuendo—got me past it. He’d smile and say he was sorry, and I’d puddle. I’d smell how much he wanted to touch me and hate myself for wanting it too. “That’s no way to stay in control,” I’d tell myself. But I guess I wasn’t listening.

“Meet me at the Frosty Freeze,” he said, when I gave up on not answering the phone. “I need to see you.”

I told him I didn’t trust myself not to touch him, so he promised to be strong enough for us both, but that wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted him to lie to me, the way he lied to the girls that really mattered. I wanted him to tell me he loved me so I could hate him when I found out it wasn’t true. I wanted the emotional power to play him. But things weren’t going my way.

“I’m really sorry,” he said, almost before the booth seat was warm. I sat across from him, trying to harness the reach of my legs. I didn’t want to accidentally brush against his jock shoes, or his ankle or his leg. That was virgin territory for me—trying NOT to touch a guy that was pressing my buttons.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I’m not sorry for
that,
” he said, putting his hand on top of mine. “Touching you was incredible. I liked that. I’m just sorry it made you feel bad. I know you haven’t had an easy life.”

Another floodgate opened. For the next couple of hours, I did something I never do. I told the truth. He’d seen the best of me, naked and orally fixated in his father’s Chevy. Now he’d seen my ugly parts too. He heard about every crack-blurred dealer my mother turned a blind eye to … every hand I let touch me after they were through. Every ache and sorrow I’d ever swallowed was on the table. When that was done, panic was all I had left.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m gonna drive away now, but I want you to promise me that if something happens, you won’t blame yourself.”

“Something happens?” Johnny said, worried sick. I hated him for being so sincere. “Something like what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Just promise.”

“Something like what?” he said again, more loudly.