Girl Meets Boy
Authors: Kelly Milner Halls
GIRL
MEETS
BOY
BECAUSE THERE ARE
TWO SIDE TO EVERY STORY
INTRODUCTION:
WHAT WAS HE/SHE THINKING?
LOVE OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
by Chris Crutcher
SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE
by Kelly Milner Halls
FALLING DOWN TO SEE THE MOON
by Joseph Bruchac
MOONING OVER BROKEN STARS
by Cynthia Leitich Smith
MEETING FOR REAL
by Ellen Wittlinger
NO CLUE, AKA SEAN
by Rita Williams-Garcia
SEAN + RAFFINA
by Terry Trueman
MOUTHS OF THE GANGES
by Terry Davis
MARS AT NIGHT
by Rebecca Fjelland Davis
What Was He/She Thinking?
As a kid, I was my family’s “tomboy.” My sister had staked her claim on being the “girly girl.” Tomboy was the only choice left, but it suited me. I loved sports, getting dirty, and catching animals; my best friends were always boys.
As a teenager, the tomboy experience landed me in a realm of odd confusion. At last bonded with female friends too, I hardly recognized the heartless, narrow-minded boys they often described. The girls my guy friends talked about seemed just as cruel, shallow, and strange.
I realized—early on—truth is often subjective. Perception colors human reactions. If something happens, and two people were witnesses—one male and one female—their descriptions of the event might differ significantly, even if they were both determined to tell the truth.
Do you ever wonder, “What was that guy (or that girl) thinking?”
I was considering that question one night when it came to me. What if a group of authors took on the challenge of perception—boys versus girls? What if one writer wrote a story from a male or female point of view, then another writer of the opposite gender told the same story from the other character’s perspective?
Girl Meets Boy
represents the fascinating fruit of that literary labor. Twelve writers, paired to explore the differences and similarities.
Chris Crutcher wrote his story of a funny, great-looking jock falling for a dangerous girl first. I responded as the toxic girl who might never learn how to be loved. Cynthia Leitich Smith created her fearless, Native American basketball star. Joseph Bruchac introduced her to the tender, artistic boy she never knew she wanted. James Howe wrote about a gay boy aching to fall in love. Ellen Wittlinger revealed the girl who might help make it happen. Terry Trueman explored a white boy’s crush on a fine African American young woman. Rita Williams-Garcia went back and forth on giving that player a shot. Terry Davis gave us a glimpse of a Bangladeshi boy trying to survive in Iowa. Rebecca Fjelland Davis’s farm girl found an ally in the Islamic boy she soon came to love. And finally, Sara Ryan and Randy Powell revealed why romance wasn’t an option for a very compelling girl and boy.
“Each pair of stories in this anthology is about bridging the gap of gender-based misunderstanding that can happen between girls and boys with the most reliable of human structures—the truth,” said author Terry Davis. “Each team of writers deftly illustrates the courage required to ask, ‘What is really happening here?’ and, more important, to ask why.”
With those two informational tools—the “what” and the “why”—real enlightenment is attainable. And when both genders (both races, both countries, both political parties, both sides of any disagreement) find enlightenment, they discover they’re different in some ways, but heart-linked by sameness in many, many more.
OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
by Chris Crutcher
My name is John Smith, and though I’m aware that an overwhelming number of men use my name to check in to motels they shouldn’t be checking in to, I try to be a man of virtue. Okay, I’m sixteen; a boy of virtue. On the surface, with one exception, I couldn’t seem more average if I lived in Kansas and drove my Ford Taurus to my job at the John Deere dealership five days a week. I’m five feet ten and a half inches tall with dark brown hair and light brown eyes. I weigh a hundred fifty-three pounds. My grade point average is a 2.5 out of a possible 4.0, and I’ve never had a grade lower than a D+ or higher than a B. Average guys should be calling me average. But I said there was one exception, and this is it: My face is so handsome it hurts. If People magazine knew I existed, they’d swarm this town like bumblebees on a turned-over honey truck right before their “Beautiful People” issue came out.
It probably sounds like I’m bragging, and if I were most guys, I probably would be, but this thing is a curse because it turns me into one lying son of a bitch. And I hate myself when I lie. I grew up going to Sunday school, learning the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule; got a snoot full of the wrath of God from the Old Testament and the kinder, but just-as-firm, teachings of Jesus from the New Testament. They taught me that bad things happen if you lie and you stand a better chance of getting to heaven if you don’t. My sixth-grade teacher was also the pastor of our church, and he was one no-nonsense kind of dude, the kind of guy who knows the true meaning of the word smite. In church he called them commandments and in school he called them rules, but the bottom line was, whether they were prefaced by “Thou Shalt Not” or “You’d Damn Well Better,” they were written in stone and were to be followed.
I have no problem with that, seriously. There’s nothing in the Ten Commandments that, under most circumstances, won’t make you a better person. Under most circumstances, you shouldn’t be killing people and you shouldn’t be taking their stuff, and it would probably be in your best interest if you weren’t having wet dreams about their wives or girlfriends, much less acting on those dreams. It probably doesn’t help you much to covet their stuff, either. I admit it’s hard to get behind not taking the Lord’s name in vain; that one should probably be demoted from a commandment to a suggestion. I mean, if there is going to be hell to pay for breaking commandments, it doesn’t seem right that a guy who cusses should pay the same hell as a rapist or murderer.
But I digress, because this isn’t as much about my belief system as it is my integrity, which goes right out the window
every time I get involved with a girl. As I said, I have learned that lying is a bad thing. I don’t cheat on my homework anymore, and I don’t shoplift like I did for about a month there in grade school, filling my pockets with SweeTarts and Tootsie Pops. If a cop stops me and asks if I know how fast I was going, I tell him. When my football coach asks if I followed the summer workout regimen, out comes the truth, whether it means running a mile after practice every day or not.
But when any of my old girlfriends asked if I was ever attracted to anyone else, I looked her right in the eye with an expression that said,
“ME?!
” and told her unequivocally she was the
only
one I ever thought of. I mean, I spoke in italics. Now, for reasons I may or may not go into here, I was a virgin each and every time I told that whopper, so while I wasn’t breaking the adultery commandment, I was setting records alone in my room coveting to beat the band, and whatever else. At first that would be as far as it went, but then (and I hate to say it, but it’s because I’m so darn good-looking) some girl who was also into coveting would come along and start telling me her problems, because I seem to have a sign on my flawless forehead that says “Tell Me How Awful Your Life Is, and I Will Save You” (which I have since been told comes from having an alcoholic mother), and I would set about saving her. Only the next thing I’d know, we’d make some secret unspoken agreement that the best way to save her was to have my hands all over her and my tongue in her mouth. I guess maybe my behavior around my current girlfriend would change because
she’d
start asking more and more often if I ever thought about anyone else, and then it would turn into was I
messing
with anyone else and, well … eventually, the girl followed my integrity right out that window. When I turned
around to lick my self-inflicted wounds, guess what? There was another girl waiting. To my credit, I didn’t jump right into a relationship with the first girl in line. Sometimes I’d wait as much as a week.
So I wanted to do the next one differently. I figured there had to be some kind of science to it; the idea of random mate selection probably wasn’t a good one. If I wanted to know about fish, I’d see a marine biologist, right? If I wanted to know about space, as in the universe, I’d ask an astrophysicist. So, I thought, who would be the scientists when it comes to this love thing?
Counselors, that’s who. Therapists. Psychologists. Only I didn’t know any counselors or therapists or psychologists, except for “Mrs. Don’t-Take-It-Out-for-Anything-but-Urinary-Relief Hartson,” our school counselor. So the next best thing would be to go to someone who had been to one. Doesn’t that make sense?
Maybe on paper.
Her name was, and still is, Wanda Wickham, and she was sharper than the piece of glass she keeps in her purse to cut on her arms with. She was sixteen and had been in five foster placements in the past three years. She wasn’t very tall, maybe just over five feet, and built like … Well, put it this way: If you were part of the crowd streaming out of Sodom and Gomorrah right behind Lot’s wife, and you saw Lot’s wife look back and turn into a pillar of salt, and Wanda Wickham was back there waving a handkerchief and cooing your name, you’d look back, too. Instant deer lick, but you’d look.
So in the beginning I was just going to use her for deep background, you know? I mean, she’d been in trouble every day she’d been to school, which was about fifty percent of the time, telling off teachers or breaking the dress code in ways that sent
most of us guys home sentenced to night sweats. It was that or getting into physical altercations with girls who had to slap their boyfriends’ slack jaws shut every time Wanda “accidentally” rubbed up against them in the lunch room or out by the lockers. I figured
some
thing had to be keeping her out of alternative school, and I figured that something was more than likely a good shrink.
I was right.
I didn’t have to seek her out, really. Wanda and I were well acquainted. My last girlfriend, Nancy Hill, had barely escaped a three-day suspension after I broke up a fight between her and Wanda. There had been an hour-long session in Mrs. Hartson’s office following that fight, during which I had to back up Nancy’s version of the story. Wanda sat across the counselor’s office from me, just out of Mrs. Hartson’s line of vision, running her fingernails over the soft rise in her tight sweater, a smile playing around her lips as she wet them with her tongue. I was in more trouble with Nancy
after
I bailed her out of a three-day vacation than I had been going in.
“So, Wanda,” I said now, “what’s going on?”
She closed her locker and held her books tight to her chest. “You’re going on, Johnny Smith,” she said. “You’re always going on.”
I said, “Listen, I’m doing a little research project, kind of a thing for psychology, and, uh, I wonder if you would … could … tell me … like, do you see a counselor, by any chance?”
Wanda put a finger to my nose. That should have been a warning, because what might be just a cute gesture coming from most girls was
electric
coming from Wanda. “You’re doing a research project for
psychology
on me? I think you’re doing a research project for
yourself
on me.”
At that point I was a few days out of my last relationship, so I was trying to catch my lies before they did that geometric thing they do. “Actually, you’re right,” I said, and I told her my plan, which basically amounted to a poor man’s way of talking to a psychologist. “So, do you? See a therapist?”
Wanda laughed. “I’ve seen more therapists in the last three years than our whole class has seen McDonald’s workers. Tell me how I can help.
Damn
you are good-looking.” She touched the side of my face.
I blushed and gave her my story in a nutshell. “Every time I get with a girl, I think I’m going to do it right this time. No matter what, I’m telling no lies, except for the necessary ones—you know, ‘How do you like this blouse?’ ‘Do you like my hair this way?’ Or ‘Am I the best kisser you’ve ever kissed?’”
“Those are good questions to lie about, if you have to,” she agreed. “How do you like this blouse?”
“This blouse” included about two inches of cleavage. I said it looked very nice.
“So how long does it take you to start lying?” she asked.
“Depends,” I said. “If I like her a lot, not very long. The first lie is easy. It comes in response to her first question about how I feel; the minute I know how I really feel is not the way she wants me to feel. I can read that stuff like a book.”
“Oooh.” She laughed. “You are every needy girl’s dream.”
That
is the line to which I should have paid maximum attention.
So Wanda Wickham and I made a deal. We would sit down once or twice a week, and I would vent a little history for her to run by her therapist. She’d come back and tell me her shrink’s response—give me some free psychological advice. She had
spent the last six months covering the same old territory in her own life and thought her therapist might enjoy the divergence. It
seemed
like such a good deal I was considering majoring in business when I go to college.
Think
bankruptcy.
Our first meeting was at the Frosty Freeze only hours before her next appointment.
Wanda said, “So tell me about your mother.”
“What?”
“Your mother. Tell me about your mother.”
“Why would I tell you about my mother?”
“That’s the first thing any therapist wants to know. Trust me. If I don’t give her that information, she’ll just tell me to come back and get it. Any therapist worth her salt has to know about your mother.”
I felt like I did wearing that gown they gave me when I stayed overnight in the hospital having my tonsils out. My butt was exposed.
Well, nothing’s free. “Let’s see. She works as a checker at Walmart and cleans houses on her days off and on weekends. She does some of the light bookwork for my dad’s business. She always has dinner ready on time and keeps the place cleaned up; you know, laundry and dishes and all that.”
“Do she and your dad have sex?”
“I don’t know! How would I know that? Your therapist would want to know that?”
She patted my hand. “Take it easy. People do that, you know. So, she works outside the home, cleans and does laundry, gets ignored by your dad. Does she have sex with you?”
I’m
up.
I mean, I’m up. Standing over Wanda, who looks at
me innocently. “What kind of question is that? What’s the matter with you?”
She smiled, reached over, and patted my chair. “Sit down,” she said. “I was just messing with you. That’s the kind of thing therapists ask. Usually they wait quite a few sessions, though.”
I stared at her.
“I was
kidding.
”
I sat back down.
“Anything else?” she said. “About your mom, I mean.”
“Well, she’s an alcoholic.”
That information didn’t have much impact. “What kind?”
“What do you mean, ‘what kind’? What kinds are there?”
“Lots. There are people who drink all the time, people who go on binges, people who only drink at certain times of the day—”
“That’s my mom. She starts drinking when she starts making dinner. Goes to bed about nine. Actually, passes out about nine.”
“Hmm. Workaholic and alcoholic. Tell you what. I can give you a little therapy without even asking Rita. I’ll make some statements, and you tell me if they’re right or wrong.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“Your mom and dad don’t talk to each other much.”
She’s right.
“Your mom’s sad.”
Right again. There’s a pervasive sadness about my mother. Even when she’s enjoying herself, she’s sad under it.
“Your dad’s distant.”
“Meaning?”
“You never know how he feels. He just tells you—and your mother—how things are.”
Right.
She looked into my eyes and squinted. “So when your mother feels bad enough, she tells you how she feels.”
Whoa. She was so right I didn’t even nod.
She put up her hands, palms out. “Don’t answer,” she said. “I know the answer to that one. And
you
try to make her life better. You tell her how cool she is and how good of a mom.”
I wanted to ask her how the
hell
she knew that, but to tell the truth, I didn’t want to know. I have always listened to my mother’s woes for hours on end. The more she curses herself, the more I tell her how cool she is.
“Okay, then,” she said cheerily. “I’m off for your therapy session. Wish me luck.” She stopped at the door, turned back, and shook her head slowly. “God, but you are good-looking.”
And that was the way it went. Wanda Wickham would sit with me in the Frosty Freeze and listen to the stories of my slow parade of girlfriends since age thirteen—none of whom liked me anymore—and take them back to Rita whatever-her-name-was. I don’t remember much of her return advice, other than at one point she told me Rita said I was a very conscientious boy and it was good that I took care of my mother’s emotional pain. Had I really known anything about therapy, that line alone would have told me trouble was brewing.
The problem was, as you might have already guessed, that I was paying less and less attention to what Wanda said to me and more and more attention to how she was dressed and what it felt like when she accidentally brushed my leg or pressed something soft against my elbow.
She was waiting for me at the Frosty Freeze when I got there after her—
our
—fourth or fifth session. “I’m sorry, Johnny,” she said. “I think we’re going to have to stop this.”