It's Okay to Laugh (10 page)

I
didn't know what the word meant, I just knew I didn't want to be one.

Although I wasn't in much danger of that, since I looked like the little brother from
Who's the Boss?
and my preferred look was a turtleneck under a Champion sweatshirt. But it was sixth grade, you just never knew.

The slut issue had come out of nowhere. In fifth grade, boyfriends were just boys who passed us notes and sometimes held our hands on the playground. But middle school was a different game, we learned. For one, we got to trade our babyish plaid jumpers for plaid skirts, which we rolled at the waist until the box pleats puffed out like tutus, revealing our Umbro shorts beneath. We started shaving our legs and mimicking the older girls, who seemed so sophisticated, like they probably had their own kids outside of school, when they weren't busy being eighth graders. We knew from whispers in the hallway that our friend's big sister had done
something
with one of the eighth-grade boys who looked
like Leonardo DiCaprio, and that now she was a slut. Just like that! It could happen to anyone. As long as you were a girl.

My friend Erica was just a geek like me, with puffy bangs and a dorky bob, and then one day she and Joey Larson French-kissed in her basement after watching
Hard Copy.
Now we were all pretty sure
she
was a slut. Other girls in our sixth-grade class had also kissed boys, and one had let Tyler put his hand under her uniform shirt, but over her training bra. I didn't even have a training bra. I occasionally wore a camisole under my school uniform, but I didn't even really need to. My chest was as smooth and strong as the boys' on my swim team. I'd pierced my ears just to cut down on the number of people who confused me for a boy, but it still happened, probably because I was five foot seven and wore tearaway pants as a fashion item, like I never knew when I'd be called into the big game.

But I was experiencing an awakening. I'd recently discovered some feelings in my swimsuit zone after Devon Sawa's portrayal of Casper the Friendly Ghost, where he somehow comes back to life and kisses Christina Ricci on the lips. I'd blushed in the movie theater, and then replayed the scene in my head endlessly for weeks.

My first kiss was going to be like that: just like Christina Ricci kissing a dead boy who came back to life after haunting her house. It was all very romantic, probably because I didn't have any other sexual or romantic references besides that movie and
The Little Mermaid,
which really wasn't that enticing except for the parts where Eric was washed ashore and his shirt was all wet.
Hot
.

Instead, my first kiss happened under the bridge where my friends and I had recently accidentally killed a muskrat while mindlessly throwing rocks into the creek. I spent every day after school with Justin and Andrew, boys from my neighborhood who went to my Catholic grade school and didn't acknowledge me at all
during the school day, but spent every afternoon with me building forts and climbing into tree houses and doing the shit you aren't supposed to want to do anymore once you're old enough to get a boner. Other guys our age spent the afternoons trying to rent softcore porn from the Mister Movies across from school, but Justin and Andrew and I had other plans, like walking through the sewer or accidentally killing a small mammal while throwing rocks into the creek and then burying the body because we were afraid a muskrat corpse would be discovered by the police and lead to our immediate arrest.

After school, we'd go home to change out of our school uniforms, then meet up on our bikes and ride for hours around the creek and lakes around which south Minneapolis is built. The sexual tension was somewhere between nonexistent and low, but one day Justin dared Andrew to kiss me, and I felt my stomach flip around with a combination of excitement and dread. Suddenly, Andrew looked different to me. He had ridiculously long eyelashes and pink, pouty lips. Kind of like Devon Sawa, I decided.

I expected Andrew to tell Justin he was being stupid, but instead he just shrugged and said, “Okay,” and then pressed his mouth to mine. I jumped back when I felt a warm slug work its way between my lips, then realized it was his tongue.

“You don't know how to kiss?” he asked, disappointed, and I felt my stomach drop. I had just been a normal girl when I woke up, but suddenly I didn't know who I was anymore, standing by the creek letting boys put their dumb tongues in my mouth? I assumed Andrew's question was rhetorical, and got on my bike, hands sweating and heart racing. It was only a matter of time before everyone knew what we'd done under that bridge, and I needed to process it for myself. I was relieved that neither of my parents' cars was in the garage when I opened the door and parked my bike. Certainly
they'd notice that something was different about me when they got home, that something monumental had happened in the eight hours since they'd last seen me. I never had anything exciting to journal about, but today, I did.

Kissed Andrew today.

Am I a slut?

B
ritney Spears had her famous meltdown in 2007, and while I now hold that version of her up as a symbol of the resilience of the human spirit, at the time it was pretty uninteresting to me because every girl I knew was losing her damn mind. Maybe we weren't shaving our heads and assaulting people with umbrellas, or maybe we
were
but nobody was there to capture it on film. Two thousand seven was the year I moved in with a bunch of girls in a two-story apartment in a South Slope, Brooklyn, row house that tilted to the right so extremely that my dresser drawers were always sliding open on their own free will. We spent Thursday through Saturday nights bouncing from bars to clubs, stopping for pizza at 4:00
A.M
., and sleeping away our weekend days. I started really committing to my smoking habit, and I got a tattoo because one of my roommates, who I was scared of but wanted to like me, was getting one and I wanted her to think I was cool. “Nora,” my friend Guy told me after he woke me up with a phone call at 1:00
P.M
. on a Sunday, “you're like one bad night away
from an
E! True Hollywood Story.
” I didn't think it was fair for a guy who once pooped his pants in a Blockbuster to be throwing around judgments like that, but I told him I would let him play himself in any dramatic reenactments.

Two thousand seven was a very popular time for a really shitty book called
The Game,
which taught terrible men how to treat women terribly in order to con them into having sex. It was a really beautiful time to be a beautiful, single girl in a big city.

The premise of
The Game
was basically that if you treated a girl poorly, she'd come crawling to you. It was recommended you use a tactic called “negging,” where you work a subtle insult into the conversation. Nothing too offensive, just something to knock a girl's confidence a bit. You know, like, “You have such an interesting nose,” or “I've never heard of that college.”

In between sifting through losers like that, I met a guy my friends and I later nicknamed the Falcon, because if you besmirch my honor my friends will try to make me laugh at your expense and because he truly did bear a resemblance to the world's fastest bird.

I was interested in him because I was interested in anyone, like that sad little bird in the old children's book walking around, asking after his mother. I was tapping any and every single New York City man on the shoulder asking, “Are you my boyfriend?” The answer was an unreturned text or, if I was lucky, a drunken make-out session in the back of the cab after which I paid the fare.

You know the part in
Gone Girl
where the crazy wife goes crazy from the pressures of being a “cool girl”? Minus faking my own death to screw over my husband, I FEEL HER. Actually, even watching that movie, I sympathized with her. That sentence alone should be a big red flag to any man who ever wants to date me, because that character is supposed to be completely insane, but I found her to be, overall, a fairly reasonable and resourceful woman.

It's
exhausting
to be a cool girl.

After weeks of flirting, which was basically me just trying to get the Falcon to laugh at my jokes while he stood around the bar with our friends, being disinterested in me, he asked me on a date. No, he asked me to hang out. Specifically, he invited me over to “watch
Arrested Development
” and “play with his kitten” (not a euphemism) and I arrived surprised to find he'd bought a bottle of Riesling and made pasta carbonara, two sure signs that a twenty-five-year-old boy is interested in you. After eating approximately three thousand calories and splitting a bottle of syrupy-sweet wine, he began to kiss me, and my lonely soul rejoiced even though he was wearing sweatpants and the size of our noses made it nearly impossible to breathe.

We never “hung out” again, but we ran into each other when our roommates, who made up the majority of my small social circle, all met up at the bar between our two apartments. “Hey,” he said, tugging at my sleeve, “do you have a minute?”

“Of course!” I chirped, slamming the rest of my beer and following him out into the cold, where he told me he wasn't interested in being my boyfriend.

“I didn't even
want
a boyfriend!” I told him, shivering in my American Apparel T-shirt and cardigan combo.

I don't know where the Falcon got the idea I wanted to be Mrs. Falcon. Was it because I wanted him to chat online with me all day? Because I wanted him to be delighted by the kitten videos I emailed him at work? Was it that I sometimes texted him every day after work just to see how his day had been? Because I'd imagined our future kids' faces and then estimated the budgets for their nose jobs? Well, excuse me, buddy!

What I want to tell this girl, this sad version of myself who is walking back to a bar she hates next to a guy who looks like a very
fast bird and who does not want to be her boyfriend, is that she is actually not very cool at all.

A cool girl doesn't chase boys who have secret girlfriends on the side. She doesn't follow a guy when he gets drunk, accuses her of flirting with the cabdriver, and leaps from a moving vehicle to run back to his apartment in the rain. She doesn't forgive a dude when he goes upstate to do peyote with some girls from college and forgets he's made plans with her.

A cool girl doesn't reply to a “sup” text sent at 1:00
A.M
. Nothing good happens after midnight, okay? A cool girl doesn't
have
to want a boyfriend, but if she does want one, she's damn well going to get one. And it's not going to be a game.

I
wouldn't say I was obsessed with Karen—I just knew a lot about her, considering she was a total stranger. We hadn't met personally, but I knew I hated her. I also knew her eye color, her brother's name, the last vacation she took, the names of her college roommates, and where she graduated from college.

Most of my friendships don't start with this level of research, but then again, most of my friends weren't dating my ex-boyfriend when we met. Karen was my successor, the girl I thought about while running to Beyoncé's “Ring the Alarm,” even though she had met Jacob months after we broke up, when he was totally fair, single, handsome game.

Oh, like you didn't do this when you found out your ex-boyfriend was seeing someone new?

I said I didn't care who Jacob was seeing after we broke up. But of course I cared. Not because I wanted him back, but because part
of me expected him to pine for me forever, probably because
The Notebook
had recently risen to the peak of its popularity, taking with it all my expectations for romantic love. But I cared who he was seeing. I cared a lot. I was jealous as hell, because she was a more natural blonde, she had bigger boobs, and she seemed to make Jacob the kind of happy boyfriend who goes apple picking, which I'd never accomplished in our eight years together.

When a mutual friend of ours mentioned that Jacob was seeing someone, I pretended to be very happy for him and not at all self-conscious about the amount of time I spent on the couch with my roommates watching
Rock of Love.
And then I locked myself in my bedroom and performed intricate Facebook forensics, clicking on friends of friends of friends to see if there were untagged photos of her that I could save to my desktop and examine to see just how much better than me she was. I was really into
Law & Order: SVU
and
The Wire
at the time, so I approached my new side project with professionalism and enthusiasm. I stopped just short of having her phone tapped and bringing in a team to enhance all her photos to look for new clues about her. But don't think I didn't consider it.

By the time I ran into Jacob at a Brooklyn bar between our apartments, I had to pretend to be surprised when he told me he was dating someone, even though I already knew that her name was Karen and that her parents were divorced and that she had gone to a much better college but had the same Hunter boots and H&M dresses I did.

After we ran into each other, Jacob emailed me to say that Karen would like to invite me out to brunch. I was stunned. What is a good detective to do when her mark invites her out for a meal? Had I been made? Had Facebook alerted her to how much time I was spending flipping through her photo albums?

I had, of course, imagined all sorts of scenarios where I would casually run into Karen and Jacob. I would, in these fantasies, be on my way to somewhere cool. A secret show by a band they hadn't heard of, or a party on a rooftop in a neighborhood they'd never go to. “How are you?” I'd ask Jacob, hugging him nonchalantly like a long-lost friend. “Oh!” I'd say, turning my warmest smile to Karen. “You must be Karen!” I would be dressed in a way that implied I looked good without trying. My blond hair would be tousled and imperfect. I wouldn't have much time to talk, of course, but I'd leave them both with the impression that I definitely had my life together, and that I was very cool. All I had to do was live out the bizarre fantasies I'd already constructed in my head. I just had to wake up, put together a decent outfit, be funny and charming, and knock both of their socks off.

Instead, I was brutally hungover from the night before. It had been a typical Friday evening spent at a neighborhood bar with my roommate Lauren, lamenting how gross it was when guys who were over thirty would try to talk to us when we were clearly just there to play skee-ball and pound beers while sharing a Parliament Light. I crossed that tender threshold between “well, I'm pretty drunk” and “holy shit, why won't my left eye open?” I'd managed to wake up early enough to put on makeup and attempt to cover the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke with Febreze, cheap perfume, and deodorant.

Karen looked just like I thought she would look: clear-skinned and WASPy. She was definitely not hungover and had definitely showered in the past forty-eight hours. I found that as long as I sat very still, I could keep the dining room from spinning around me. For his part, Jacob spent the entire meal sweating and laughing politely while Karen and I got right down to business and started to fall in love.

In between feeling that I might vomit into my purse, I began to feel that tight knot of ugly envy inside of me loosen up and turn into the giddy butterflies you get when you're connecting with a human who you genuinely like. Karen and I both talked quickly and nervously, our life stories pouring out of our mouths in between mimosas. We both talked louder than necessary for two people who were at the same table on the same planet. We laughed at each other's jokes. We had read the same books. We liked the same music. It was like having brunch with an old friend from grammar school, picking up where you left off even though it has been years since you've seen each other. In this case, Karen and I had never met and I'd spent the better part of a fiscal quarter carefully tracking her online, but you get the point I'm trying to make.

The feminist in me cringes at the girl I was, but life is a journey, and that journey sometimes includes pit stops in Crazytown. I have yet to meet another woman who didn't take a similar detour at some point, who
doesn
'
t
know intimate, personal details about the woman her ex-boyfriend is currently getting naked with. Or personal details about the woman her current boyfriend used to get naked with. You for sure have creeped on your ex's new lady's Instagram pics, and Britney Spears probably picks up
Us Weekly
to check on photos of Justin and Jessica and their baby. We want to know who these women are, who are so enchanting to the people we love or have loved. We want to know if they are smarter than us or more successful, or if they have a better sense of style. And the Internet, God bless it, is happy to answer those questions for us. There is a reason we clear our search history and live in fear of the day when we confuse the Facebook search area with the status area. There is a reason we have disabled the LinkedIn function that shows us who looks at our profile and lets other people
see when we check on theirs: because we are checking up on one another more than we are comfortable admitting to the public or to ourselves.

Somewhere out there, there is another woman who has been naked with some of the same men you've been naked with, and you know more about her than you should. It's not your fault. Okay, some of it is. Nobody forced you to make a secret Instagram account, befriend her, and screen cap all of her pictures. That's on you.

We're conditioned to be jealous of women who come before and after us; we give them special powers and invent mythology to support how they are clearly inferior to us while harboring a fear that they are better than us in every measurable way. I pined over my boyfriends' exes more than they did, certain there was some quality they all had that would always make them bewitching and irresistible, sirens who could call my boyfriend away from me at any moment. This happened exactly zero times, by the way.

I didn't think, ever, that any of my exes' girlfriends were furiously Googling me, though I was courteous enough to leave them a healthy digital bread crumb trail of abandoned blogs and narcissistic Tumblr accounts filled with terrible writing and artistic photography to make it worth their while, just in case.

But of course they were Googling me. Admit it, ladies. You were.

Jealousy is amazing because it allows us to build fantastical worlds based purely on our own imaginations. The objects of our jealousy are almost always like an alternate-universe version of ourselves: They have something we could have, if only they didn't get to it first. We don't get jealous—really, truly, Google jealous—of people like Beyoncé or Gwyneth Paltrow. Sure, we're a little envious, but we're not lying in bed at night wondering if we'll ever measure up to them. We save that for the people we may run into at
the grocery store while we're not wearing makeup. I'm not saying that it makes sense. Feelings don't make a lot of sense, which is why Taylor Swift and Katy Perry could both fall for John Mayer. Ick, right?

But like dating John Mayer, jealousy is a waste. On the other side of that boiling envy is someone who is basically just like you. Unless your exes' tastes vary wildly, you're going to find you have a lot in common with whoever got there before or after you. John Mayer only dates hot, successful women who are out of his league, and I bet any guy you've been with is the same way, so the person you're so sure you'd hate is likely just as smart and hot and successful as you are. She might, like me and Karen, probably like the same things and, more important, hate the same things as you. She might turn out to be someone who will surprise you and your husband with care packages in the mail, and help send you on a belated honeymoon when his brain tumor comes back. That probably won't happen to you, actually. But it happened to me, because that's the kind of friend Karen is. The point is, you'll find the object of your Grinch-like obsession is someone who is probably Googling you as much as you Google her, because at heart we are all just scared, insecure little humans wrapped up in Forever 21 outfits.

Jacob and Karen broke up, and he wiped us both from his life. But Karen and I? We stayed together. I have a long-distance friendship with a woman I love and cherish across many years and miles. She was there for me through my husband's chemo and radiation and death, and let me in while she went through her own double mastectomy and lung cancer diagnosis. I started out trying to learn about my enemy, and instead I found a friend. It's a goddamn buddy comedy waiting to happen. And I have my jealousy to thank for it.