Sex was the absence of control, the opposite of caution. It meant letting go entirely. What if I couldn’t? Or worse, what if I could and did, and got hurt?
It wasn’t something I could discuss with my cardiologist, kind Dr. Karen with the monogrammed handkerchiefs that she kept in her pocket for crying parents and the curly hair she kept cut short and never bothered styling. She had been taking care of me since I was a baby, so there was no way I could ask her what would happen to my heart if I did it, and it certainly wasn’t something I could talk about with my mom. After my sixteenth birthday, she’d knocked on my bedroom door. I’d opened it to find her standing there, still wearing the nametag from the library, where she’d started volunteering three days a week, dressed in pale-gray linen pants and a peach silk blouse. My mom wasn’t beautiful, but she was pretty, with her pale, freckled skin and soft, light-brown hair and round brown eyes that always looked a little surprised, like someone had just snuck up behind her and pinched her bottom.
“What’s up?” I asked. It was Friday night and I had plans to meet up with my friends on the beach.
Without answering, she came and perched on the very edge of my bed, like she didn’t want to get comfortable. She crossed her legs, fiddled with her rings, and then gave me a stiff little speech about how I was now, “in some senses,” a woman; that I’d be making my own choices about my body and she and my father hoped that I’d make good ones. “I don’t have to tell you how much it matters,” she’d said with a sad smile, which was true. The year before, Jonah had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. There’d been a weekend of phone calls, worried looks, and fights conducted in whisper-shouts in my parents’ bedroom. I could hear my dad saying, “Helen, forget it,” and could hear her saying, “Bernie, calm down.” All of this had culminated in a Sunday-night sit-down: Jonah and my parents, his girlfriend, Greta, and her mom and dad in the living room, and me, hiding just out of sight on the second-floor landing, where I could hear every word. On Monday morning, Greta had gone to the doctor’s. Jonah declined to accompany her, and by the end of the week they were broken up. That was what I knew about sex—that it could feel good, but it could also get you in trouble, could ruin relationships, shame your parents, end in all kinds of disaster.
I’d tried masturbation. Marissa had been doing it since she was twelve, had described it enthusiastically, and had even, one night when we’d each had three wine coolers, offered to do a show-and-tell. But my attempts had been halfhearted failures. Even though I’d read dozens of sex scenes and seen at least as many in the movies, I had a hard time imagining what it would actually feel like, and my solo efforts just left me with a sore wrist and the same vague, crampy feeling I’d have the day before my period arrived. A whole lot of nothing, I would think, rolling onto my side. Maybe it was all a lie, something people made up to sell books and movies.
Still, I was as romantic as any teenage girl. I’d play UB40’s “(I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You” on repeat until my dad yelled “Enough!” down the hall. I wanted love, the big love, the kind people wrote songs and made movies about. I wanted to be the center of some guy’s universe, the only thing he could think about. I wanted to matter that way.
“Hey!” Marissa elbowed me, then passed me the bottle again. I glanced at the chaperones at the front of the bus, then drank, savoring the glow in my belly, and with it, the knowledge that I was breaking the rules, being a bad girl . . . which was to say, a normal girl. The bus driver had put on Back to the Future, which almost everyone was ignoring. Kids were talking, or were sneaking sips from water bottles filled with liquids that were not water, or were smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, in spite of the NO SMOKING sign. Rabbi Silver was up front deep in conversation with Melissa Nasser’s mom—something about Israel, I guessed, which was Rabbi Silver’s number-one topic. In the very back of the bus, a few couples were making out. As I watched, Patti Cohen positioned herself on Larry Mendelsohn’s lap, and Larry slipped his hand up the back of her blouse. I watched him work his tongue in and out of her mouth for a moment, then said, “I bet I know how he looks when he’s plunging a toilet.”
“That’s disgusting,” squeaked a high, childish voice from the seat behind us.
Marissa shoved the Gatorade bottle into her Gap tote, then glanced over her shoulder. Bethie Botts gave her a wide, empty smile.
“Another planet heard from,” I whispered, and we both rolled our eyes.
Every high school has its hierarchy. Every totem pole has its girl or guy at the bottom, the kid who even the most acne-plagued nerds or socially inept grinds or unhappily closeted homosexuals can look at and think, There, but for the grace of God. For as far back as my memories of school went, our low girl was Bethie Botts. Aka Big Bethie. Aka Beth the Blob. Bethie was enormously fat, which was one of the reasons no one was sitting next to her—there wasn’t room. Her thighs bulged against the seams of her nylon slacks (no jeans or pants for Bethie, what she wore could only be called slacks); the flesh of her belly and breasts and upper arm wobbled over the dividers to jiggle against the velour of the empty seat.