Scrappy Little Nobody (12 page)

I went through two phases of trying to win the affection of boys. While we were still young enough that sexual contact was off the table, I waged a full-out assault on the seemingly impenetrable interests of the male. I was short, I was loud, I wore the same thing to school for days at a time—where was I going wrong?

During that blissful period before I had to think about sex, I liked to present myself as “boy crazy.” I did like boys, both boys that I knew and the appropriately feminine boys in
Teen Beat
, but I played up being “boy crazy” because it seemed like the trait of a pretty, popular girl. In third grade, I took a quiz in
Seventeen
magazine and brought it to school.

“I’m totally boy crazy according to this. It’s so embarrassing. Look!”

I’d looked at the answer key prior to marking each question
but thought my classmates would be duly impressed. My teacher took a look at the magazine and cautioned me to curb this quality as I got older.
What is she talking about? The whole point of this is to seem like a cool, older girl!
It took me years to realize she was warning me not to become a slut.

For as much as I thought about boys, which wasn’t as much as I pretended but was still a lot, they did not seem interested in holding up their end of the bargain. They were supposed to stride up to me in the cafeteria, push Libby Perrino and her shiny black hair to the side, and ask me to the school dance. But we didn’t have dances in elementary school, and none of the boys I knew wanted to talk to me anyway.

Wait, that’s it!
By fifth grade, I cracked a major development in strategy. I needed to get boys to
talk
to me. I wasn’t pretty, but I could make them like me through the magic of conversation, or at least trick them into revealing some actionable knowledge and go from there. My current crush was Matty Boothe. He had dirty-blond hair and seemed dangerous in that way that only a fifth-grade boy from Maine can. The only thing I knew about him was that he liked gory movies, so I spent a few weeks letting my older brother pick the movie rentals for a change. We’d tell our parents we got
FernGully
again and wait until they went to bed to sneak downstairs and watch his selection. I forced myself to sit through horror films and action films and
Pulp Fiction
. I knew I was unprepared to see some of them (
Pulp
fucking
Fiction
!) but I was going to turn myself into Matty Boothe’s dream girl, dammit.

One day he stayed after class because he hadn’t done his
homework (mah boy was such a rebel!), and I lingered and pretended to clean up my desk. I ever so casually struck up a conversation.

“Oh, Matty, you know the other day”—three weeks ago—“when you were talking about the grossest movies you’d ever seen?”

Cue Matty looking up at me, cautiously intrigued.

“Well, I’ve got a really gross one for you. Have you ever seen
Outbreak
?”

“
Outbreak
isn’t gross. It’s not even scary.”

“Yeah, totally.”

Okay, so talking to boys had not been a success. But I didn’t blame myself for not watching movies that were gross enough or scary enough for this boy’s taste. If anything, I walked away thinking,
Wow, talking to boys is not that fun. Or at least, talking to a boy with whom I have nothing in common, and who has no interest in me, is not that fun. New development! I just won’t bother with boys who don’t like me or any of the things that I like! I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll definitely never make the same mistake again!

In middle school, I discovered that liking boys who didn’t like me back was all I’d be emotionally capable of for a very long time. Middle school was also when I went through a phase of liking exclusively non-Caucasian boys. They didn’t like me back, either. Any boy of any ethnicity other than my own was automatically the object of my love. In case you forgot, we are in Maine at this point, and the handful of racially diverse young men I met in middle school immediately struck me as exceptional.
I barely knew any of them; I was just attracted to them from afar. Looking back, it’s pretty plain that what I liked was how different they seemed. I was desperate to be around anything and anyone outside of what I’d experienced in my life so far. One could even argue that I wasn’t attracted to the
person
but was actually fetishizing their race (but definitely don’t listen to that because it’s dangerously close to an intellectually sound argument where I come off sort of racist). All I knew was that in sixth grade Shahin was beautiful and Iranian and so much cooler than me.

Seventh grade was interrupted when I moved to Yonkers with my dad for the duration of
High Society,
so I never developed a crush on anyone at school. In New York, I did have a crush on the boy who played Young Simba in
The Lion King,
but since I was only in a room with him one time and our parents were there, our love did not blossom.

My friend Nora from
The Sound of Music
and I often discussed that great mystery that looms before all adolescent girls: sex. We talked about sex A LOT. Not boys (I apologize if this freaks out any parents)—we did not talk about <3boys<3 and how cute Ryan’s new haircut was, or how dreamy the boys in 98° were—we talked about sex. What we’d heard about it, what it would be like, how you were supposed to do it. We were on a mission to compile everything we’d ever heard about all things sex-related. Condoms, porn, hookers, first base, second base, third base, and by the way, when the hell were we gonna get boobs?

If any parents are still with me, the good news is that we were
way more interested in figuring it out than actually doing it. We were like theoretical sex engineers. Oh!
Theoretical Sex Engineer
! Title of my next book!

The other good news is that we were pathetic. We were the blind leading the blind. She told me about a pornographic comic book she’d seen and the offensive joke it contained about Hispanic women’s pubic hair. I told her that a girl from my church had seen Stephen King’s
Thinner
, and in one scene, the wife leaned in to her husband’s lap and moved her head up and down. . . . So blow jobs involved . . . moving, I guess?

It’s adorable in a super-uncomfortable way, right?

I’m grateful that we were wondering the same things and that we were both hungry to put a name to our feelings and to have someone reflect them back. I didn’t know how lucky I was until I went home and received many blank stares from friends who were not interested in or prepared for talking about sex out loud.

That was the last time I would ever be ahead of the curve sexually. In fact I pretty much plateaued there for the next six years. This was only a noticeable problem once I got to high school and phrases like “fooling around” and “hooking up” were no longer empty braggadocio.

When kids I knew started to go past first base, I felt nervous and excited. It was like waiting in line for a roller coaster, if you’d seen a sex-ed video about how the roller coaster was probably going to ruin your life. For me, the nervousness usually outweighed the excitement. Now that potentially seeing each other naked was part of the package, I would still try to court the male, and then RUN FOR MY LIFE at the smallest sign of interest.
I was the romantic equivalent of the annoying friend who goes to the haunted house but chickens out and eats candy apples outside until it’s over (also me).

I don’t know if my aversion came from the suspicion that I’d make a fool of myself, insecurity about my body, or just the fear that it would hurt. I could sense I wasn’t anatomically ready when most girls were; maybe the emotional part was waiting for the physical part to catch up? It certainly wasn’t that I didn’t have The Feelings. But I was dealing with those on my own.

I was conflicted, to say the least, and it didn’t help that I’d found a pamphlet under a seat in the auditorium that proclaimed, “No one likes a tease,” but I still sought to ensnare a boy. Sure, the odds were against me, but there had to be at least one guy I could trick into settling for a girl who wore a training bra and was terrified of sex.

There was Andy, who had long eyelashes and was so cerebral and self-aware that even at fourteen I deemed him “pretentious.” Intellectual insults were my high school version of pushing someone on the playground. If I thought he deserved the label, it clearly didn’t bother me very much. I followed him around during his free period so often I almost failed the class I was
supposed
to be in during that time block. We flirted a lot and kissed a few times, and I was never sure if we didn’t get together because he didn’t want to, or because I would get that queasy “what if he wants to see me naked” feeling whenever he showed more than a passing interest.

I met Hunter at a rave that my brother snuck me into. He was slight and kind of gorgeous. He wore a bandanna with the
Puerto Rican flag, I suspect to compensate for his misleading white-kid name, and he told my friend Lindsey that I had a “nice ass.” Who talked like that? Even putting that memory on paper gives me butterflies. I had never met anyone so forward. He asked for my number (what are we, in a movie?) and called a couple times but stopped after the third phone call when the awkward pauses led him to ask, “Am I bothering you?”
No, you’re not bothering me! This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me ever!

But I didn’t say that. I was stuck in the limbo of wanting a fifth-grade relationship but not being able to admit it, even to myself. I mean, I wanted to do
something
before I graduated, but not everything. And the only thing worse than having sex or being a virgin loser forever would be having a mature conversation with a guy I liked about waiting until I was ready. The world would have ended.

Even though I remember high school as a never-ending barrage of rejection, I would feel dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that there were guys who liked me. Or at least one. Noah left a rose by my locker on Valentine’s Day and had to trick me into walking past it, because my locker was on the third floor and I didn’t use it. I panic-hugged him, said “No thank you,” and walked away before I had to look at his face. He was remarkably cool about it and made sure things didn’t get weird. We stayed close friends throughout high school, and when he asked me on a Friday, “You wouldn’t want to go to prom on Saturday, would you?” I wrongly assumed the late ask and casual tone meant “as friends.” I was grossed out and frankly kind of hurt when
he drove me to a motel after the dance. I had to pull the old phone call to Mom where I loudly whine “Why not?” and say my mom’s being a bitch and I have to go home. (An excellent tool for getting kids out of situations they don’t want to be in. My mom always played along and I would recommend this trick to any parent.)

Some bitter boys reading this might accuse me of “friend-zoning,” but I’d like to say that even if a girl has misinterpreted a situation that someone else thinks was obvious, she does not owe her male friends anything.
^I

Noah knew me well. He knew I was a virgin, in every possible sense, and that I didn’t take it lightly. But the motel implied that he hoped we could fool around, even though we weren’t dating. He was a nice boy who did something skeezy, and it sucked. We stayed in touch for a while after I moved to LA. In fact, he and a friend once stayed on my couch for a week and left a lovely thank-you note on the refrigerator the morning they left. I woke up and saw the note and felt guilty for being irritated by the end of the visit. Then my roommate stuck his head out of our bathroom. “There’s an enormous shit sitting in the toilet.” Maybe you’re just destined to lose touch with some people.

I
. Needless to say, this applies to every arrangement of gender and orientation. I mention males pressuring females because that’s been my only personal experience of it, but it turns out my personal journey isn’t an infallible barometer of the entire human experience. Weird, right?

I
met Landon through the internet. Not ON the internet like some kind of freak. No, I met him the normal way: Heather (my hot blond friend) met Brent (Landon’s hot blond friend) on Myspace and those two introduced us right around the time they were getting tired of having hot blond dry-humping sessions. Because hot blonds need break-up wingmen, I guess?

Landon was attractive and he knew
Anchorman
by heart, which at the time passed for really funny. He was kind of a jock, which made me want to turn my nose up at him—as I did with all jocks—so I could let the world know that not being with a handsome, athletic type was MY CHOICE. But he was persistent and a genuine romantic, and when I weighed my options logically it seemed silly not to date him. I wanted to escape the wasteland of being the nineteen-year-old loner and, to the naked eye, this guy was perfect. He was polite and punctual and my friends liked him a lot . . . and he was very handsome.

One day during our courtship, he dropped off a novelty trucker hat on my doorstep. I know we’ve all figured out that novelty trucker hats are hideous, but it was cool at the time.
Today, that would be like a guy giving you a spiked ear cuff, or a turtleneck crop top (or for future editions: a novelty trucker hat, because fashion is cyclical). It was sweet and original and I could resist no more. Let’s be real: he had a pulse and he wanted to be my boyfriend.

On our first official date, he took me to a trendy restaurant. I rolled my eyes over how “LA” it all was. I’d never been somewhere so stylish, which should have made me nervous, but being openly disdainful of anything cool
is
in my comfort zone, so I still had a couple moves at my disposal. I really shine in a Taco Bell parking lot with a water bottle full of vodka, but I could work with this.

After dinner, we went back to my apartment and talked with my roommates for an appropriate length of time before retiring to my room and crawling into the luxury of my twin bed. We fooled around for a while, I employed a few suggestions from the early chapters of the
Guide to Getting It On!
, no one recoiled in horror at any point—a successful first-date-level encounter.