When Life Turned Purple (3 page)

“You need to stop dating frat boys,” said Russ.

Now Lia gave him a big grin with a little laugh and leaned her head against the headrest as she gazed at him. “They weren’t always frat boys.”

“Someone should have told you in high school not to date the college prep crowd—especially the community college rats.”

She laughed again and it came more easily this time. “What’s wrong? Do you have something against higher education?”

Just like that, she changed the subject. But Russ went with it. He rested one arm on the steering wheel and said, “Look, if somebody wants to make a career of something that they actually need college for—like a doctor or something—then that’s cool. But this whole thing of staying in extended high school just to stay on Daddy’s insurance? Or to look like you’re trying to make something of yourself? Or just to waste your time and your parents’ money paying a bloated salary to some phlegm-spewing professor? And then thinking you’re the cat’s patootie? Well, that’s just feeding into all the mind control. And the community college zombies are the worst.”

Lia’s face was bright with amusement. “Patootie?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I try to watch my language when I’m with you.”

Lia cocked her head to one side as she looked at him. “I guess we’re both kind of old-fashioned in that way,” she said.

We?
Russ thought.
She’s clicking with me—finally!
But all he said was, “Yeah.”

“It’s in different areas,” said Lia. “But it’s still there.”

Russ leaned on the steering wheel, his face still turned toward her. “Right.”

“You know,” she said, “I never thought before about how you just described college. I’d always been brought up that you
need
to go, that all successful people went. I’ve been inundated with stats about how college-educated people earn more money, do better in life, and blah, blah, blah. But when you said what you said just now…well, I was like,
touché
. That’s it.” She nodded her head. “You know the truth when you hear it. College really is mostly just a big money-making scheme that leaves its alumni with a huge debt for the rest of their lives—indentured students, so to speak.” She tapped her lips with her finger. “But on the other hand, you need college. A lot of jobs won’t hire you without some sort of degree. Or you’re forced to start off at a lower salary without a degree.”

“So go indie,” he said. “Like I did. Get your stuff up on your own website or Facebook page. I mean, look at all the people working from home, running their own business and all that. A lot of the really successful people didn’t go to college—or didn’t finish college anyway. They just went to work on their own innovation. Look at the two Steves who started Apple.”

“Or Mark Zuckerberg,” said Lia. “And how could any 206er leave out Bill Gates?”

Russ laughed, then said, “So, are you going to drop out of college now?”

“Probably not,” Lia said, wrinkling her nose. “Anyway, I have a scholarship and I’m getting a good deal with my space art.”

“Yeah. You’re really good at it.”

She gazed up at him and smiled again.

“So...what were we saying?” said Russ in an attempt to get to the bottom of Lia’s main issue. “They weren’t always frat boys, eh?”

With a half-hearted laugh, Lia grimaced and said, “No.”

Russ swallowed, then ducked his head to catch her eye, but she only gave him a wry laugh and looked down again. Leaning on the wheel with both hands, he watched her.

“How old were you?” he asked, then wanted to kick himself.

“When?” she said, looking up.

“Um—never mind. I don’t even know why I asked. It just popped out.”

“Oh.” She reddened and licked her lips. Then, cocking her head to one side, she said, “You mean my first time?”

Russ drummed his knuckles on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why that popped out.”

“I was fourteen,” she said.

Russ felt his eyes widen as he said, “Fourteen?”

“Yeah. It was the beginning of ninth grade.”

Russ blinked. “
Ho
-ly—who was the guy?”

“Just this senior. He was eighteen already. I think he’d been held back in kindergarten.”

Russ frowned. “Fourteen is young.”

She raised her head to look at him. “Why? How old were you your first time?”

“Well…fifteen. It was the summer between ninth and tenth grade. But fourteen-year-old girls—a lot of them look real little. I mean, when I was eighteen, I wouldn’t have—”

“I looked older. People who didn’t know me usually thought I was sixteen.”

“Huh.” He pursed his lips.

“But anyway, you were also really young.”

“Not really. I had a huge growth spurt that year and I was working out tons. She was seventeen and it was when we were spending summer vacation in Eastern Washington.” He gave a chuckle. “I learned to drive a tractor before I learned to drive a car.”

Lia smiled. “Were you her first?”

“Nah. She was a total—well, she was a lot of fun. Especially when she was drunk. She did this kind of thing every summer—I found that out later from the guy who’d been with her summer before.”

“But you liked it.”

He laughed. “Sure! I mean, who wouldn’t?”

The smile disappeared from Lia’s face.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s different for guys,” he said. “I know that. It’s not always like that for girls.”

She nodded.

“So….it wasn’t so great for you, yeah?”

She shook her head.

“Well, you know, the first time for girls is always—”

“I didn’t do it just once, but I still never liked it.”

Russ’s eyebrows went up and he chewed his bottom lip as he contemplated her. “Why not?” he said.

“Well….” Lia shifted in her seat, “I mean, with that first guy—my first boyfriend—I kind of wanted to do it because everyone was always talking doing it and on TV and novels and stuff, it sounded so great. And I wanted to get into all that. But he was just using me. He wasn’t actually so into me at all. I didn’t realize that then. I mean, even just fooling around wasn’t so enjoyable. Like, he was a good kisser, but he just didn’t know how to touch me. Like, he’d grab at me a bit and then ask me if I was ready. It was like he was just fulfilling some kind of prerequisite to get to the good part—well, the good part for him, anyway.”

Russ frowned. That didn’t sound normal.

“I found out later that he was gay,” she continued. “I mean, a couple of years after he graduated, I heard about it from other people. Like his sister.”

Russ’s frown deepened.

Lia squirmed as she spoke, her eyes cast downward. “I feel bad for him,” she said. “I mean, I feel bad for gay guys because until they come out and learn to accept themselves, they have all this pressure to ‘be normal’ and ‘act normal’ and they feel like they have to make themselves hook up with girls when they don’t really want to. But they can’t really tell the girls, either. And they’ve got a lot of fear—what?”

Russ was staring at her with wide eyes.

Lia’s shoulders hunched as she squeezed her hands together. “It wasn’t
my
fault,” she said, squirming. “I mean, it’s not like being with me was so bad that he had to turn to guys—”

Russ held up his palm as if to halt her words. “Oh, no, baby,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, no, no, no.” His shoulders and chest tightened like before a fight again and he turned his head away from her and blew out some of the tension through pursed lips. Then before he could stop himself, he jerked back toward her, thrusting his finger in her face. “You do
not
need to feel sorry for
any
guy because he
screwed
you, okay? You got that?”

Lia sat back as if pasted to her chair, staring at him round-eyed and open-mouthed.

Russ wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. “Do
not
freakin’ feel sorry for him. Okay?” He slammed his fists down on his thighs. “I mean, for crying out loud—”

“No,” said Lia. “But he wasn’t really attracted to me. He was just forcing himself—”

Russ thrust himself forward and again, he saw his finger in her face. “NO,” he said. “You listen to
me
, baby.” He lowered his voice and spoke through a clenched jaw. “I. Know. Guys. And I don’t care if you’re talking gay, straight, or amoeba. If he screwed you, he deserves no pity.
Believe
me—he enjoyed himself just fine. Maybe he’d have preferred a dude, but just trust me on this one—he was perfectly okay with doing
you
.”

Lia’s mouth shut and she blinked.

Russ shifted around in his seat and rammed his fingers through his hair, blowing out his breath again. At times like this, Emma used to tell him, “Whoa there, Russ. I think somebody needs to caaaaaalm down here. You’re getting a
little
bit too worked up, okay? So let’s work on getting that testosterone into balance, ya think? I mean, you’re coming off as reeeeeal aggressive now.” And not just Emma, either. He cursed softly to himself. Lia was so delicate, she probably wanted to take off now. Damn. He’d ruined everything.

But when he looked over at Lia, she just sat there with her chin in her hand, gazing out the front window. Then she looked at him as if he hadn’t been scary at all and said, “You know…I never really liked it. You know? I mean, there were parts that I really liked—parts that I really liked a lot. But the actual act—it could really hurt. Or at best, was just kind of uncomfortable.” She paused. “I didn’t do it so much. And just with a few guys.” She sighed. “I just didn’t like it. They were always pressuring me and telling me how the other girls they’d dated did this or had done that, and I’d feel like ‘Oh, then I’d better do this, too’ because I didn’t want to be abnormal or something. Or I didn’t want him secretly missing the other girls just because I wasn’t giving it to him. Or just in general, I hated feeling like I simply wasn’t measuring up. And listening to all the other girls talk, they really did seem fine with everything and I didn’t want there to be something wrong with me.” She slid her hand to the side of her neck and cocked her to that side as she looked at him. “But maybe there is. What do you think?” Her eyes were liquid as she gazed up at him. They winced a little as she asked, “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

His eyes widened. “No,” he said. Then without thinking, he blurted out, “Nothing that I couldn’t fix—if you’d let me.”

Her eyes popped, then she burst out laughing, her hands dropping to her lap, her body leaning forward and shaking with laughter.

But it didn’t seem like jeering laughter, so Russ relaxed enough to smile along with her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But you’re so funny! And there’s something very likable about you. I feel like you understand me—or maybe you don’t. But either way, I definitely feel like you’re on my side.” Then she leaned her elbow on the door and rested her cheek on her fist. Her other hand rested on her knee, her fingers tapping it. “You know, I tried to be like everyone else and have fun with it and all that, but then I realized that I was fragmenting inside. Like, guys are so nice when they want you, but then somewhere in the middle of everything, you start feeling like you’re not enough. Like you don’t measure up to the girls who came before you—or to their favorite porn is probably more like it. So I stopped. But that feeling like maybe I’m defective somehow? It doesn’t ever go away.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Russ repeated.

“How do you know?”

“Because. Like I told you. I know guys. It’s the guys who were the problem, not you.”

Her eyes were large and dark as she looked at him and the hint of a smile hovered around her lips.

Russ felt like he’d won some kind of victory. He straightened up, twisted the key in the ignition and said, “I guess we’d better start heading back. But we can keep talking.”

He glanced at Lia as he pulled out and she was still gazing at him in the same luminous way.

They rode together along the shiny black road and Russ was feeling warmer and more settled inside than he had in a long time. He knew he had a temper—well, except that to him, it wasn’t a temper so much as a kind of strength that a lot of other people found intimidating—but Lia didn’t seem thrown off by it. It was as if she listened to his actual words—or even to his heart—and not his tone of voice. He’d never met a girl quite like her.

He glanced at Lia again, who now gazed out the window, and Russ knew what he had to do. There were no other cars on this road and the only thing he could see—other than trees—was a sign warning of deer crossing.

Russ pressed down on the brakes.

Lia’s eyes widened. “What happened?” she asked as she stretched forward to look out the windshield. “Did you see a deer?”

He swallowed, then took a breath and said, “Lia—will you marry me?”

She froze for a moment, then swung around to face him. “What?”

“You heard right. Will you—will you marry me?”