A Girl's Life Online (9 page)

Despite the chill in the house, I felt warm as I signed off. Mark was so open to hearing my feelings about swimming. It was even more important that he didn't judge me, or act like he expected anything from me. He seemed to understand and I became more and more open to him. I said things that I would never have said to anyone else. I knew he was a good friend to me.

While everyone else was relaxing during the holiday break, the swim team was scheduled for a week of daylong training sessions. Two of my friends on the team—Maribeth and Jennifer—would have to travel an hour each way from their homes to attend. To save them the driving, it was agreed that they would stay the week at our house. And I looked forward to their arrival, thinking it would break up the swimming week.

Maribeth was a thin girl and she and Jennifer were freshmen in high school. To me, high school kids were about as mature as one could get.

My mom used to shiver when she saw some of the things Maribeth wore—tight cutoffs with a tight silver latex-looking midriff top, heavy makeup. She wore her hair in a very high ponytail on top of her head, which my mom called a whale spout.

As different as Maribeth was from me, I liked her. On our first night together, my mom ordered in pasta from Prezzo, one of my favorite restaurants in New Canaan. After dinner we watched TV for a little and then went up to my room for bed. Between a trundle bed, a cot, and my own bed, the three of us fit in my room. It was a little tight, but it was worth the sacrifice so that we could all be together.

After five minutes of bitching about swimming and how long the week would be, we started talking about sex. Lying there in the dark you couldn't make eye contact, which made it easier to be open.

At thirteen I wasn't concerned about intercourse. I knew that unless I was raped, I was not going to do that before I was married or at least engaged. But I could foresee getting into a situation just short of the act itself. I wanted to know when in a relationship you were expected to let a guy finger you. When did you have to give a blow job? Was it assumed that you should just allow a guy you were dating to put his hands up your shirt? From what I had heard at parties, and from my other friends, I knew that some girls were doing these things, but I hadn't had a good live source of information since Karen had started going out with Peter and no longer had time for me.

Maribeth was by far the most experienced of all my friends. She went to the kind of parties where people experimented in these things, and she had done them herself. What surprised me was that she hadn't planned on any of it. She admitted to being fingered, which I found disgusting, and I wanted to know how she could let it happen.

Maribeth laughed and said, “It just happens, Katie.”

I didn't want to believe it. I mean, it doesn't just happen that a guy opens up your pants and then slips his finger into you, does it?

But Maribeth had no deeper explanation, so I changed the subject. I wanted to know how long this went on, and what you were supposed to do while he was doing this.

Maribeth explained that you just let him touch you and let him do it as long as he wanted. You were supposed to just sit there. I was having a hard time envisioning this. Were you supposed to get an orgasm from being fingered? I wondered. (Despite all the magazine reading, I wasn't quite sure what an orgasm was, but I was still curious.) Maribeth said no, you weren't supposed to orgasm. That only happened during real sex.

Now I was really confused. I had read more than once in
Marie Claire
that this kind of touching was a pretty sensitive, intimate thing. Maribeth didn't make it seem like that at all.

Maribeth wouldn't tell me if she was a virgin or not, because I think she was embarrassed. Anyhow, it didn't seem like her virginity mattered to her. In fact, I don't think it meant anything to her. I couldn't figure it out. She almost made it seem like you were just supposed to please yourself and that it didn't really matter if the other person was being aroused. That contradicted everything else I had ever heard or read, but in this area, she was definitely more experienced than me.

Through all of this discussion, Jennifer barely spoke. She had never had a serious boyfriend, nor was she one to kiss and tell. But she seemed just as interested as I was in what Maribeth had to say.

As I lay there listening to all the intimate details about Maribeth's affairs with guys, I said absolutely nothing about my own relationship with Mark. We were talking about sex, not relationships, and Mark and I were not sexual. Our relationship was more than something adolescent and physical. It was a deep friendship. And so I didn't tell them about him, but secretly, it made me feel more confident, knowing that I was involved with someone who was definitely interested in
me
, not just my body parts.

For some reason, I had trouble sleeping after my late-night talks with Jennifer and Maribeth. I woke up very early and couldn't go back to sleep. I'd go on-line. If Mark was there, I'd spend a long time chatting with him, sometimes sharing what I had discussed with the other girls. If he wasn't on-line, I'd write long e-mails to him. He was always interested in what I was thinking, and what was happening in my life.

As time passed, Mark replaced Karen as my main confidant. It wasn't something I planned. But I just never seemed to have time to be with her. I had swim meets on Saturdays, and that obligated me to have a good night's sleep the evening before. So it never seemed practical to go out on the weekends. I began declining invitations more and more, leaving Karen to find other friends. I felt bad about this, but at the same time I had made a commitment to my swim team.

I failed to see what was happening in Karen's life. I didn't think that her brother could be dying, and Karen said nothing that would make me think he was. After all, I was thirteen, and the biggest worry I had was finding the right outfits. Terminal diseases were not part of the world I knew.

Karen began to find new friends and spend time with them. I couldn't hate her for this, or even hold it against her. I had left her no choice. Still, I clung to the belief that we were best friends. Neither one of us said anything about the change, the pulling away. She never said, “Why don't we spend more time together?” I never said, “Karen, why can't you just talk to me about why you are so upset?” Our friendship just kind of ran out.

That January I caught the winter “bug” just as soon as school resumed at the first of the year. I either catch the flu or pretend to catch it every single winter. Most of the time I have faked it. It is pretty easy to trick the school nurse. I'd say that I had a sore throat and an earache. Usually one of my ears looked a little red anyhow. And since I have always had large tonsils, the chances were that if the ears were fine, my throat would look like I had some kind of bug.

If I knew I didn't have the symptoms to move the school nurse, there was always my mother. All I had to do was walk into her room, whine a little, and I was excused. It usually went something like this: “Well, if you really don't think you can go to school, then I guess you shouldn't go. But if you think you can go, then you should go.”

I would assure her that, yes, I was sick, and that was it. I didn't do this a lot. I usually missed just ten days of school each year. I thought that that was a reasonable number of absences. And I don't doubt that my mother sensed that sometimes I was perfectly fine.

Unfortunately, this winter was one of the few times I was actually sick. And this year's flu was not the simple fever-and-aches kind. It was the messy, vomit kind that held me to the confines of my room and the bathroom for a week.

The only good part about the flu is that you can eat anything you want and not gain weight. Someone else might have just stopped eating altogether, until it passed. But I saw the flu as an opportunity to eat whatever I wanted, and in any amount. This time I chose to eat a lot of sour cream and onion potato chips. I don't think that they aided my recovery.

I was so sick that I barely talked on the phone at all, and I did not go on-line, which meant I didn't speak to Mark for well over a week.

When I felt better and I checked my e-mail, he was there, asking me where I had gone. After I told him I had been ill, he told me that he didn't want me to lose communication with him ever again for that long. He said that if he had known I was sick he would have called every day to make sure I was okay. I thought this was lame, and I was upset with him for not understanding why checking e-mail wasn't my biggest concern while vomiting all day.

But Mark was only expressing concern. He cared about me. That's what our relationship was about. He was a positive influence in my life, and I enjoyed being the only one from my world who knew Mark. He listened to my feelings about the people and circumstances around me. And he always supported me with encouragement and advice.

It was around this time that Mark and I exchanged pictures. He sent me some of himself at Disney World. I wondered who had gone there with him. After all, Disney isn't a destination you might expect for a single man. I wasn't impressed with his looks, but he was obviously a young, clean-cut guy, which was all that I really cared about.

I hid the pictures in my room, in the top drawer of my armoire, because I knew what they would look like to someone else who couldn't understand the connection we had made. And something in how Mark had complained about my short disappearance had begun to worry me. I began to wonder if we were getting too close. I know I was thinking about him more and more. I had followed my heart into this relationship, and it told me that this was a mature, adult friendship.

My connection with Mark grew stronger around my birthday, January 26. I was going to be fourteen, not an especially big milestone, but I was as excited as I had been at Christmas. In part this was because I was leaving thirteen, an age everyone seems to associate with teenage silliness. The night before, I tossed and turned in bed. For some reason I thought I would get to sleep faster if I buried my face into my pillows but that didn't work. Neither did adjusting and then readjusting the blankets.

I woke up at about two in the morning, and for the life of me I could not sleep. It was pointless to lie there awake when I could be doing other things, like making cupcakes to bring to school. I walked downstairs, being careful not to wake anyone. This didn't require too much caution. My mother wasn't even going to be home for my birthday. She was in San Francisco on business. David snores so loudly that nothing can wake him up, and Carrie has even slept through our alarm going off.

I went into the kitchen and I opened the light cherry cabinet doors. I found a box of Duncan Hines cake mix, the super-moist type with the red background on the box. I am not much of a cook or baker, so this was perfect. Add water. Bake. Get a fairly reasonable cake.