It made sense that Joe thought college was freaking me out. When you grow up like we did, the mainstream doesn’t exactly make sense to you. It’s not what it sounds like. I’m not a freakish loser or incapable of meshing with society. I wasn’t raised by wolves, and we didn’t grow up in a cult or anything. The thrive is an experiment—a community of people with like-minded ideas. In this case, equality, justice, freedom, care, and community support. Our parents and the other thrivers decided to live their ideals by separating themselves from the grid and everything that comes with it. We grow our own food; we have a community school; we help our neighbors when they can’t make ends meet. It’s like a huge open-minded family who lives together and spends their free time fighting for equality in the larger world.
I’m proud that I was raised this way. I’m proud of who I am because of it. I mean, I was at my first LGBTQ Pride parade before I could walk. I’ve protested sexism, racism, ableism, classism… when it comes to human equality, I am there. I have carried a picket sign on the Washington Mall more times than I can count, and I most definitely have an FBI file. Growing up on the thrive is special. It makes you self-sufficient. I can fix a transmission. I can build a shelter. I can grow plants for eating and for healing. I can recite poetry and play the guitar. In the mainstream, I’m a renaissance woman. On the thrive, I’m normal.
But the thrive also makes you a total weirdo once you’re old enough to join the mainstream, which for both Joe and I was when we started classes at the local community college. We were the first of our tribe—so to speak—to get old enough to need to go to school outside the commune. Can you say culture shock? I mean, neither Joe nor I saw a television until we were in our late teens, and even then, it wasn’t like we had one in our houses. When we began our collegiate journey, our entire community of one hundred and fifty-three people had seven computers and one building with Wi-Fi. Sure, we knew all the best campfire songs, had a well-rounded knowledge of feminist theory, and could raise our own livestock, but we’d never heard of a text message.
The learning curve was fierce. We made mistakes. We thought people our age would understand our perspectives, our openness, our sense of community, and our belief in equality for everyone. We had weird clothes. We hummed and whistled. We thought that the average college freshman would want to talk about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. There was some bullying—particularly once people realized we were from the thrive. And then there was also a lot of condescension from so many, including our professors. We would try to explain that computer access was complicated or that we didn’t have personal emails or phone numbers and people just looked at us like we were crazy. Eventually, we convinced our parents that any child of the thrive that chose the college route needed a smartphone, a laptop, and access to Wi-Fi. Joe and I also host this whole “intro to college” party every semester to try to prepare the others, but it’s still a struggle.
So, yeah, Joe thought I was freaked out about going to college because I’d have to start over and be the weirdo again—which was true, and when I got around to thinking about that, I felt totally freaked out. For sure. But honestly, since Bonnaroo, I wasn’t thinking about that. Instead, I was fixated on the guy. I hadn’t really told Joe about him, which was weird because I told Joe everything. Well, I did tell him that there was a guy who was out of it from drugs or something and I tried to help him, but I kind of left out the whole moody seduction, soaked panties thing. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep it a secret—although, on some level, I was completely mortified. Honestly, it was just that my obsession with the guy from Bonnaroo was effed-up and I wasn’t ready to admit that out loud to anyone.
I knew it though. I knew that I was obsessed with some nameless guy. A nameless guy with incredible shoulders, huge grabby man hands, and really good hair, but nameless all the same. From the minute I saw those jerks tormenting him, it was like I had lost my mind. First of all, I know the statistics. I am well versed in the reality that young men, particularly in groups, are not to be trifled with—and this is even more so when you're a woman, alone. And yet, I couldn’t stop myself. It was like I was possessed by the ferocity of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth: “Screw your courage to the sticking place!” I think I would have killed them—those jerks who were tormenting him, clawed their eyes out with my fists and teeth.
Literally, I couldn’t remember another time in my life where I went all super mama lion on anyone. I was a pacifist for Christ’s sake. I had a vegetable garden and read the works of Mahatma Gandhi. I bought hook line and sinker into the slogan, “make love not war,” but in that one moment, I was willing to do anything to stop them. I didn’t even consider what they could have done to me. I just jumped. Walked right into the fire with him—and strangely, I was proud of what I did. I felt the rightness of it deep in my intestines. Admittedly, I didn’t bite off any earlobes or pull out any fingernails. I squelched the situation peacefully, but I knew that if my “negotiation tactics” failed, I would have devolved into something violent, and for some illogical reason, I couldn’t bring myself to begin to feel any shame about that.
Furthermore, and I hate it when people refer to themselves in the third person, but honestly, Lua Steinbeck does not make out with strangers that she found passed out in the dirt. Next to his vomit, I might add. Gross. And yet, when I closed my eyes, I could still feel his hands on me. With no rhyme or reason, my mind drifts to my moments with him—the expanse of emotion that flashed in his eyes when he blamed himself, the heat of his chest against my face, his aching gaze as my hand touched his jaw, the flutter of his lips against my neck, the explosion of desire as his mouth found my ear, and oh, God… those few seconds when he crushed my body against him and rolled my hips so that everything hard and soft about us caught fire. This memory just flared up and repeated on me like I was a skipping CD—trapped in some cosmic game of infinite repeat. Honestly, it didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing. I was constantly plagued by the feeling of him. It was a visceral need. I ached for him, a stranger who had “dickhead” scrawled on his forehead when I met him and never actually kissed me—like lips to lips. EFFED-up.
The worst part about my endless distraction was that I knew nothing. Literal dickhead guy could be anywhere… anyone. The likelihood of us crossing paths again was slim, a million to one, more, a needle in a haystack, a galaxy in the universe, a singular atom in the wide Sargasso Sea, and yet, I thought I’d see him again, which is ridiculous—as absurd as Joe’s swimsuit. Inane. Ridiculous and downright juvenile. And somehow, I still felt all romantic-y, which made me want to vomit. Destiny was not something I bought into and soul mates, please. I had things to do—college to prepare for. I couldn’t constantly be drifting off into the land of unrequited orgasms and achingly sexy sorrowful eyes.
And so, instead of sharing, I was silently walking with Joe who seemed to be getting huffy. He started making sounds—sighs and grunts of aggravation. In just a few more steps, we’d be able to see the lake and he wanted me to talk to him. This was part of our friendship. Joe gives me just enough space to think and then he forces me to talk. When we broke through the tree line, Joe dropped the picnic basket and started running.