Like It Never Happened (6 page)

T
his was a typical conversation between my twelve-year-old campers after dark:

Peyton:
You're such a prude, Annelise.

Annelise:
[
defensively
] Excuse me, I've kissed three different boys.

Courtney:
With tongue or without?

Annelise:
With one time, twice without.

Margaret:
[
timidly
] What's better?

Annelise:
If I say with, will you call me a slut?

Peyton:
[
assertively
] I will.

Courtney:
Three boys is nothing. I've kissed more.

Peyton:
Rebecca, how many boys have you kissed?

Rebecca:
[
silently wishes for swift death
]

Courtney:
Have you done it?

Margaret:
Does it hurt?

Courtney:
Are you still a virgin if you just, um . . .

Peyton:
Oh, like, oh! My sister says yes, you're still a virgin.

Courtney:
But isn't that, I mean, how do you breathe?

Margaret:
Yeah, Rebecca, how do you breathe?

Like I was some kind of expert.

This could go on for hours, individual voices flickering out until only Peyton and Annelise were still whispering and giggling, and generally being cruel to each other.

My status as a slut had been secured in the seventh grade.

The local news had just aired that stupid commercial, filmed over the summer, right before I gained twenty pounds in all the most suggestive places. Intrigued by my sudden fame, the most popular girls—Jenna Farley, Larissa Waxman, and Tina Vasquez—had invited me to the Pioneer Place Mall. I had been wary, understanding the invitation as a kind of tryout.

My mother, however, was beyond enthused; group shopping trips were the kind of thing she remembered from her well-spent youth. When Jenna and co pulled into our driveway, Mom peered approvingly at the Farleys' red convertible. “They must be from California!” she chirped.

This was back when my sister still lived in New York, before my mother considered California the most sinister place on earth.

“How many bathrooms are in your house?” was the first thing Jenna's mother asked me, as I squeezed between Larissa and Tina in the backseat.

“Two,” I said. And then, like an idiot, “Do you need to use the bathroom?”

“No,” said Mrs. Farley firmly. “Just wondering how your family manages in such a small house, is all.”

On the escalator, when we were free of adult supervision, Jenna announced the plan. “We're going to Victoria's Secret to buy thongs.”

I felt Larissa's and Tina's eyes shift in my direction. Clearly they already knew about the plan.

“Why?” I asked. My underwear was usually cotton and full-sized.

“To know what they feel like,” said Jenna. “So we're prepared for high school.”

“The only thing is,” Tina said cautiously, “I'm not sure I'm even allowed.”

“Of course you're not
allowed
,” said Jenna. “None of us are
allowed
. That's why we're not going to wear our thongs until the school sleepover.”

The school sleepover was, for me, a massive source of anxiety. The teachers were billing it as a “mandatory girls-only evening of body positivity!” Meaning we had to wear our pajamas to school on a Saturday night, eat pizza off the gym floor, stop hating ourselves, and sleep on cots in the library. The sleeping part worried me the most. I didn't want anyone to draw on my face.

At Victoria's Secret, Jenna selected our thongs. For herself she picked plain and purple. She assigned polka dots to Larissa and nautical stripes to Tina. Of course, Jenna discovered my thong in the sales bin and, of course, it was leopard print.

As we left the store, pink bags hanging from our wrists, I attempted to make a joke. “So what
is
Victoria's secret?” I asked. “Like, do you think she killed a man?”

Jenna, Larissa, and Tina pretended not to hear me.

I stashed the leopard-print thong in the back of my drawer—behind old swimsuits and retired training bras—until the night of the school sleepover. On top of the thong I wore only a baggy pair of drawstring pajama pants.

At the sleepover, the guidance counselor explained to us that boys learn confidence through physical exertion and dominance—while girls are taught to hold still and take up as little space as possible, until we can hardly go down stairs without crumbling. Therefore, Mrs. Hoover somehow concluded, we needed to run a relay race.

The race required jumping rope and jumping jacks before climbing into a burlap sack and hopping to the finish line. I ended up racing against Jenna Farley. I almost won, but that's not the detail everyone remembered. Probably all of the hopping combined with the abrasion from the burlap sack loosened the drawstring of my pajama bottoms. When I pushed the sack to the floor, my pants fell down too.

Twelve-year-olds are not very creative, and could only interpret my leopard-print thong as evidence of my robust and indiscriminate sex life. Jenna Farley and co never spoke to me again.

The sleepover had been all girls, but ultimately it was the boys who took the slut rumor to heart—and who insisted it still applied, years after the incident. I wasn't sure how many people actually remembered the thong. Most likely, the anecdote had melted into a single hard fact. Like how we all knew that Charlie wanted to be a lawyer, or that Tim had a gluten allergy.

As a camp counselor, I realized quickly that modern-day twelve-year-olds were still obsessed with identifying the sluts and prudes among them. It was painful, listening to Peyton cast the other girls as she pleased. I wanted to tell her to knock it off, but I was supposed to be the adult—and from experience I knew adults usually let those things slide. Mostly I pulled my sleeping bag over my head and said nothing.

But after a few weeks of camp, my constant nearness passed for intimacy, and that's when my campers started dragging me into their dialogue.

“Which of the seventh-grade boys do you think is cutest?” asked Peyton from the bunk below mine.

“I don't think seventh-grade boys are cute,” I said. “I'm sixteen.”

“Yeah, but if you were our age, which one would you want to ask you out?” asked Courtney.

“I can't answer that.”

Maybe I could have looked at the seventh-grade boys objectively and figured it out. But I preferred not to do that. They were always scratching at their mesh shorts and shouting the names of body parts.

“Okay,” conceded Courtney. “Then which of the counselors do you think is cutest?”

In eerie unison, my campers chimed, “Char-lie!”

Camp had, unfortunately, only made Charlie more attractive. His skin had turned the color of milky coffee and his hair had grown into his eyes.

“He's one of my best friends,” I said. “We do the school plays together.”

“Have you ever kissed him?” asked Peyton.

“No.”

Annelise, who was smarter than any twelve-year-old had the right to be, asked, “Have you ever kissed him
in a play
?”

An awkward silence ensued.

“That means yes,” concluded Peyton.

While they lamented the lack of kissing in
Seussical the Musical,
I shoved my face into my stale pillow and mourned. Kissing Charlie was almost the last thing I wanted to remember. We hadn't spoken since the first Friday night of camp. Since then I had seen him periodically with a skinny, red-haired girl from Tacoma. At a campfire they sang a duet version of “Free Fallin',” awkwardly changing pronouns until the song didn't even make sense. Otherwise Charlie stuck to his loyal troupe of buzz-cut boys, messing around in canoes and calling everyone “bro.”

“Rebecca!” shrieked Annelise. “Did you fall asleep or something?”

“No,” I answered. Like it was even possible.

“Tell us how many boys you've kissed. Onstage or off. Doesn't matter.”

“Shh. I'm sleeping.”

The truth was that nobody had ever kissed me when it wasn't explicitly written into the script. Even last summer, the whole thing had been orchestrated not-so-masterfully by Tess. And it didn't even count, because after every kiss I had begged the boy to stop.

And
that
really
was
the
last
thing
I
wanted
to remember.

F
or reasons never made clear
,
counselors were not permitted to make calls from anywhere but the public office phone, and we were not allowed to check our e-mail. At all. For eight weeks. Count this restriction among the things Mr. McFadden did not tell me about the Shining Stars Summer Camp for Performing Arts.

Toward the end of August, with less than two weeks to endure, the rumor of Dylan Larsen caught up to me. Dylan was employed by an online forum for some video game. His job was to comb the forum for fights and suspend gamers for violating the website's code of conduct. Somehow, Dylan convinced the office staff that his position was so essential to the well-being of the gaming community, he required an hour of Internet access each evening.

The point was that Dylan could allegedly be bribed into checking your e-mail and printing off anything impor-tant. Once the possibility entered my mind, I couldn't think about anything else.

At camp, I was something of a loner. Other counselors had managed to sort themselves into spontaneous, precious friendships, but I had been too busy fuming over Charlie to get with the program. I longed to hear from Liane, or Tim, or even Tess. I was desperate for confirmation that I had a real life untainted by the miseries of summer camp. Maybe, on some irrational level, I believed Charlie's regular self was still in Portland, studying for standardized tests that weren't even mandatory and writing me the occasional flirtatious e-mail.

So I approached Dylan Larsen in the mess hall, temporarily leaving my campers without supervision. Dylan sat hunched over a plate of oily scrambled eggs, displaying the easy calm of a man with Internet access. I tapped his shoulder. On a sticky note I had written:

[email protected]

pw: diamondsforbreakfast

I figured I could change the password when I got home.

Dylan Larsen glanced at the note before peering up at me through tiny John Lennon glasses. His gaze landed on my chest. I was wearing a black bra beneath a white tank top.

“No problem.” Dylan took the note between two greasy fingers. His T-shirt bore the inexplicable phrase of
4CHAN
.

Reportedly, kids had been offering Dylan everything from candy bars to blow jobs. I was stunned.

“I said it's no problem.” He blinked at me.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.” His voice went syrupy cruel. “I'll read your personal e-mails for free.”

Somehow, it hadn't occurred to me that I might not be the one benefiting from our arrangement. My mouth popped open and closed, but I thanked him anyway.

It was my night off, so after the sing-along I walked to the far side of the lake to swim. Swimming was one of the few things I did pretty well. I had learned from my sister a long time ago.

I swam aimless loops until I was out of breath, then hoisted myself onto a sagging, moss-covered dock. Lying flat on my back, with my toes dipped into the lake, I stared at the stars for a second. I guess I should have pondered their beauty and realized the rarity of a sky unsaturated by city lights, or something. But it occurred to me that you could probably see stars from the vast majority of the earth. It was the city lights that were actually rare.

I heard the boys laughing before I could make out their silhouettes, adrift in a canoe and coming closer. They must have wrapped up their idiotic games for the evening; I could hear beer cans hissing and see cigarette ends lighting up like fireflies. I had missed my chance to gather my clothes and slip away unnoticed. As quietly as possible, I lowered myself into the water and clung to the dock.

“That shit's not symmetrical.”

It wasn't Charlie's voice. He never cared much about geometry.

“Which one was bigger?”

That was Charlie's voice. Apparently he cared a little.

After a long pause, the first kid said, “The left.”

Almost everybody's left breast is bigger. We learned that in eighth grade, in the girls-only portion of health class. The news had been something of a relief.

“You know who I'd like to get with?” asked a third voice.

“Who?” The first.

“Rebecca Rivers.”

I wasn't even surprised.

“Isn't she super-slutty?”

How had my reputation followed me to camp? Was it the white tank top, black bra thing? Was it something about my lower lip, roughly twice the size of the top one? Did I walk slutty? Talk slutty? Sneeze slutty? Sit in the mess hall eating my corn dogs and baked beans slutty? The label, which had been traumatizing when I was younger, was just getting annoying. Especially since I couldn't even seduce the boy I actually liked.

“Nah,” said Charlie, spitting into the lake and sounding like a parody of boyness. “Rebecca goes to my school. That's just a rumor.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“Really? Does she have a boyfriend?”

Like those were the options—rampant promiscuity or going steady. For a second, I missed Tess, who would have suggested we sneak through the water like torpedoes to dunk their boat, escaping into the woods as they mourned the loss of their smuggled Budweiser.

After a silence—during which I couldn't even guess Charlie's thoughts—he said, “Yeah, Rivers has a boyfriend.”

“What's his name?” I could no longer distinguish between the other two voices. They sounded exactly the same.

“Stephen.”

Which, incidentally, was Mr. McFadden's name. Was it just the first name that popped into Charlie's head?

“Well,” said one of them. “Stephen's not exactly keeping his eye on her, is he?”

Definitely not.

The next night at dinner, Dylan Larsen silently dropped a handful of pages in my lap. Before I could thank him he had disappeared into the crowd—all the discretion of a drug dealer.

“What's that?” Peyton stretched out her skinny arm and I promptly sat on the pages. My middle school reflexes were still intact.

“Paperwork,” I said.

My campers lost interest and turned to discussing the age of the guy who manned the zip-line. I figured it was safe to smooth the pages flat across my lap. The first few contained a thread between Tess, Tim, and Liane. They had actually copied me and Charlie on every message.

Dear Essentials—including Rebecca and Charlie, who are technically useless until August but who are always essential in our hearts, and so shall receive every official piece of E5 correspondence—hotcake house? Tomorrow night? Followed by
The Big Lebowski
at The Clinton Street Theater?

Tim

I kept reading as my friends made plans and shared stories that hadn't included me, but now kind of did. In some of her e-mails, Liane begged me to confirm that I hadn't been eaten alive by mountain lions. She did not express the same concern over Charlie, which made me grin. My life would resume in a matter of days. All I had to do was survive a few performances of
Seussical
the
Musical
and learn to pretend that Charlie had, by no definition, broken my heart.

I did a double take when I got to the last message and realized it was from my sister. I didn't think Mary had my e-mail address, let alone anything to say to me.

Dear Rebecca,

I have abandoned a lot of people in my life. (Just in case you thought you were special, rest assured, you're not.) And for the most part, I can't really go back and apologize. But you're my sister, and we share approximately 99% of our DNA, which might mean that when I send you an e-mail, you at least have to read it? Maybe?

After I moved from New York to California I started going to therapy. Don't judge me. Just wait and see: You will be old, you will either be in New York or California, and you will spontaneously leave one for the other and start going to therapy. It's the hero's journey of the white, upper-middle-class, sexually confused, formerly rebellious child. Anyway, the therapist—who looked exactly like Maude from
Harold and Maude
—told me to write a letter to my teenage self, at the precise age I was when I first fell in love. But I couldn't write a letter to my teenage self, because it turns out you never really stop being your teenage self, so I wrote a letter to you instead.

Girls your age always think they will be rewarded for destroying themselves. And if that's what you believe, it's not your fault. But it also isn't true. And you probably have some calm friend you cling to—because she provides the peace that Mom can't, one of those “everything will be okay” faces—and you need her but you secretly think you're superior to her, because she is unromantic and never loses control. But seriously, Rebecca. Stop thinking your own wild heart gives you power over her. Consider the fact that she is stronger than you.

And if you have to destroy yourself—no matter what your aging sister says—if you have to give away what might otherwise be stolen, and abuse your body and your heart, please have an exit strategy. Your actions will never be reversible, but make sure they don't define your life, or prevent you from becoming who you're supposed to be.

Do you remember that night Nadine and I got home so late? (Do you even remember Nadine? It kills me to think you might not.) You were six, and I'm sure you didn't know what it meant to be messed up. But you knew that dilated pupils and weak knees did not equal your sister. Somehow, a ray of consciousness filtered through my private oblivion. I recognized you standing in the hall.

Nadine left me lying in a heap so she could tuck you into bed and convince you it had been a dream. Then of course she did the same for me. She was my anchor.

Be kind to yours. That's all I wanted to say.

And I swear to god, I barely know you but I miss you so much. Do you think I'm crazy? I'm 99% sure you do.

Love,
Mary
(Your sister)

“I bet he has a girlfriend.”

“I bet she's super-pretty. Prettier than Rebecca, even. He could have anyone he wanted.”

“Rebecca, do I have to eat the carrots?”

The commotion of the mess hall swallowed my sister's voice.