Why was it that our only place to hide had to be so disgusting?
“What’s wrong with me?” I said.
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” said Corvis, just as Susan and Heather burst in.
“What’s wrong with you?” Heather demanded, her hands on her hips. She was wearing flared jeans and a tiny shirt. “Why did you leave Mike there like that?”
“He’s really embarrassed,” said Susan. She wore a baby-doll dress with a white cotton T-shirt underneath, her black hair braided.
Corvis stepped in front of me. “Taylor is really embarrassed too.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Mike just smells like cheese puffs.”
Corvis shot me a look. Heather and Susan started laughing, and from that point on, Mike O’Malley was known as Cheese Puff Boy.
The following Monday at school was when Corvis passed me the note.
We were sitting in study hall—Corvis had already been put in accelerated, so this was our only period together other than lunch.
Brad was there too. His math book was open on the desk in front of him—a desk too small to hold him already. His legs stretched out in all directions, the laces on his Pumas untied. He looked at the book like it was written in Chinese.
PJ elbowed me—I’d been staring at Brad, wondering what it would be like to have such long legs—and handed me the note.
I unwrapped it—it was folded into an origami fortune-teller, a disguise—and it read, Do you think about girls the way Susan thinks about Brad?—C
Underneath, she’d drawn three boxes, for me to check one: Yes, No, or Maybe.
I felt my cheeks burning.
I knew the answer, but I shoved the note into my pocket.
I made eye contact with Corvis for a millisecond, then looked away.
What I did afterward was unforgivable, yet I felt I had no choice. Notes were supposed to be sacred. I was about to break the girl code.
* * *
—
“I don’t really see the point,” Corvis said now, wrapping me in toilet paper. I spun around, to make it easier for her, and lifted my arms so she could reach my armpits.
“The point is that I deserve to be punished,” I said.
“Yeah, but you seem to be enjoying this,” said Corvis. She stood back, frowning and assessing her work.
We stood on the faded Turkish rug in her bedroom, our feet surrounded by books, pencils, and glassblown pipes filled with charred remnants of weed. The names on the spines of Corvis’s books were unrecognizable to me, but enticing: Maya Angelou, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, which wasn’t capitalized for some reason. I liked all of their names better than mine.
“Maybe we need to add eggs to this equation,” I said.
“What are you trying to do?” she asked. “What do you want?”
I looked at her face, noticed that her skin was blotchy in certain places and pale in others, and had a passing thought that Heather would suggest a toner to clear it up. Corvis’s pale, almost nonexistent eyebrows needed plucking. Loose, wild hairs escaped her ponytail.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
She sighed.
“I’m just really sorry,” I said, “and it won’t be any good if I don’t go out in public like this. Let’s go to the grocery store and buy some eggs, and you can crack them over my head.”
I moved toward the doorway, but she grabbed my arm and looked at me, hard.
“My car, then?” I asked. “Do you want to throw them at my car instead?”
“Taylor,” she said, exasperated. “You’re being pathetic.”
I sighed.
“I keep meaning to be a different person,” I said.
“Come into the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll make us hot chocolate, but don’t tell anyone about this. Kristen would make so much fun of me if she knew we were hanging out.”
The Lacrosse Helmet
As soon as I told Sandra that Brad was officially my boyfriend, she took me to get birth control.
The gynecologist was cool enough not to let on that she’d seen me before, and I left with a plastic case full of little circles, one for each day. I would take them every morning at seven o’clock, just before I left for school.
If I was going to have sex with Brad, at least I wouldn’t get pregnant.
I still couldn’t really understand sex, or how people just had it. I mean, obviously I knew what it was, because Sandra told me in kindergarten. What I couldn’t understand was how people could bring themselves to just be naked in front of another person like that, and then let someone go inside them.
The word had was weird, even, because it’s like people were saying that sex was something you could own, like a lawn mower or a toaster oven.
Anyway, when Brad went down on me in his Datsun—not even bringing the herpes into it, but just the act itself—it made me feel like he was disgusting. He was disgusting for wanting to do that to me, and I was disgusting for letting him. I couldn’t even watch—I just moaned after what felt like forever, and he stopped. Then I was supposed to pretend it was the greatest thing in the world. Like, Oh my God, I’m so grateful.
Heather had sex all the time—lots of times with people she barely knew. I could tell she usually felt bad afterward, but it also gave her this sort of power that you could see—like she had discovered a lost island.
Heather was the one that Brad lost his virginity to—in the cabin of Scottie’s father’s sailboat, while it was tied up to the dock at Humming Rock. Susan had sex too. Some of the people they’d had it with overlapped, since Hopuonk was such a small town.
Even Corvis had sex, at her summer camp in Maine. It was all girls, and Corvis had sex with more than two of them. I overheard her talking to Kristen about it once in the locker room. She also had sex with at least one girl at Lilith Fair—that weird feminist music festival—last summer, right after the Indigo Girls played. Unlike Heather, she didn’t appear to feel bad about it. She just did it.
I think everyone knew I was a virgin, but they didn’t know I had an STD.
The word herpes sounds like the thing it is.
On the car ride home from the gynecologist, I could tell Sandra was proud of me. Having sex meant you were normal. “So you and Brad are really together?”
She could come to LA too, I thought. She could have a diamond-encrusted toothbrush, a sports car made of pure gold, a face that was known by people. I could give those things to her, if Johnny Moon wanted me. I could give those things to her, and to Susan, and they would love me. What could I give her here? A red-faced, crying grandchild? A spare room in a Cape house when she grew too old to bartend—a room swirling with dust and sadness? Clean teeth every six months?