Gawky (13 page)

Silence.

I worried that the Tampax lady, like Alyssa, might have similar concerns regarding my social standing, so I said, “Don't worry, I haven't told Jonah.”

“Well, did you actually have sex with this Jonah?” she asked.

“No . . . that would be gross,” I said. “At one point he did French my cheek, could the angle have affected things?”

“No, the angle could not have affected things.”

I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding as she explained on.

“Well, miss, you may not know this, but it's very common in young girls to have irregular menstrual cycles at first.”

Silence.
Irregular? Whatever. Was I pregnant or not?
!

The Tampax lady continued. “Sweetheart, a ‘leak-out pregnancy,' as you call it, is highly unlikely and in any case would have had to involve nudity at the very least. You're definitely not pregnant. Calm down. Everything is going to be okay.”

It was going to be okay! Was it really? Was everything going to be okay? Okay to me meant happily starting my weekend over French toast with my family before socializing at the sunny park with my many, many friends who loved me. Instead, I was spending a beautiful
Saturday afternoon alone on the phone with a middle-aged stranger whose job it was to field calls about menstrual blood. Thinking about how I had managed to already be a huge disappointment to human-kind, again I had no words.

“Miss? Miss, are you there?”

“Yes,” I said, clearing my throat. “I'm here.” Why couldn't I just say “thank you” and hang up? What more did I want from her?

“Miss,” continued the Tampax lady, “are you okay?”

This was a loaded question. On one hand, I was okay. I had gotten confirmation that I was not pregnant; I was not going to have to go “study abroad” like Teresa Carimonico. But on the other, I also had confirmation that Alyssa, the sexiest girl I knew, had no idea what she was talking about. She was supposed to know everything! After all, she did have big boobs and boys liked her. So if she was faking it, and she wasn't really all-knowing, what did that mean? Did anyone really know anything about anything? I suppose the Tampax lady did; otherwise she wouldn't have been hired as a licensed period expert. But still, I was now doubting the credibility of the entire human race. I needed to answer, so I decided to leave Ms. Tampax with a cliff-hanger.

“No,” I said. “I am not okay.” And then I hung up the phone so aggressively it dinged a little, a truly dramatic ending to a bizarre phone call. If I ever one day spoke of this to my brother (highly unlikely), I would certainly advise him to use the “No, I am not okay” phone slam in his next creatively licensed film. This conversation with an employee of Tampax was the most informative discussion of sex I had ever had up to this point. This anonymous call with a kind stranger was the most I had opened up to anyone the whole year.

Despite the relief I felt from finding out I was not in fact teen pregnant with Jonah Hertzberg's baby, how could I be okay? I was a gargantuan young girl, entering her teens during what seemed to be the wrong decade, in the wrong town, in the wrong state. Everyone
else seemed to be reveling in Umbros, Color Me Badd, and New Jersey culture, while I indulged in bell-bottoms, Jethro Tull, and Haight-Ashbury. Something was definitely wrong with me if the
best
thing that happened to me all year had been the Gulf War. Something was definitely wrong if Alyssa, my confident neighbor whom I thought of as the next Dr. Ruth, was just as clueless as I was about sex. Something was definitely wrong with my depth perception if I believed a poorly angled, clothed French kiss could cause a fetus to grow inside me. Aside from the Tampax lady, I was pretty sure the rest of the human race was just as dumb as I was. No one knew anything about anything.

No, Ms. Tampax, I was not okay.

CHAPTER 7:

T
he phone call to the Tampax lady was truly a low point, so I decided to spend more time with live friends my own age. After spewing it all to an anonymous expert on period blood, I had the realization that I was desperately in need of more true friends. Alyssa and I hung out more and more as seventh grade was ending and summer approached, but I was itching to branch out. I also needed to figure out what I was going to do for the summer. Now that I was officially a teenager, I wasn't sure I should spend it in my usual fashion—performing in the community summer theatre review, run by failed actors with possible drinking problems. This program took place at the local high school and had just enough budget to make all costumes out of tin foil. Being one of the oldest participants, I had basically peaked the summer before, when I was cast as Mary Poppins in the Disney montage. I stood on a riser, swaying to “Chim Chim Cher-ee” wearing a large hat. I had no solo or lines but all the glory. I got to have a solo bow instead of the
horrible group ones, and got “special makeup” instead of the requisite blue eye shadow and red lipstick (which also got used as blush). I had a feeling if I went back again for the fifth year, I would be spending my pre-show moments hoping that the lipstick being smeared across my mouth hadn't just been used on some sweaty kid's acne-ridden cheek. I would be back to my usual role of girl in back row wearing unflattering high-cut leotard. I was a little too old for that stuff now, and needed to figure out another way to spend my days so I wouldn't go stir-crazy inside the house. If I didn't find an activity, my mom would surely find one for me, whether it be weeding, laundry, or dusting her endless bone china teacup collection. I needed to find a new summer outlet.

I was not athletic, or coordinated, or agile, so when Alyssa invited me to horse camp, I was skeptical as to whether or not this was my true calling. I said yes, although I wondered just how fast Alyssa could gallop on a horse with her giant boobs. Perhaps horseback riding was a place where my A cups would be an asset. Alyssa's invite was my pathway to finding a social group outside of my town, where everyone knew me as the girl who has looked thirty since she was twelve.

I was optimistic about horse camp, even though I had never ridden a horse, or experienced one in person for that matter. I had barely even seen one on film. When my brother re-created the Godfather trilogy on his borrowed camcorder, we used my live dog as a replacement for the iconic horse's head scene (although I found my brother's description of that scene to be far less harrowing than the old lady chloroform scene from
Cloak & Dagger
). I had never seen the actual Godfather movies because my parents deemed them “too violent.” (Yet
Octopussy
when I was a small child and
The Crying Game
as I hit puberty were perfectly appropriate.) I had an aversion to horse-centric
Little House on the Prairie
, which I thought was for choir girls and sissies.
Laverne & Shirley, The Carol Burnett Show
, and
Moonlighting
reruns on Lifetime . . . Television for Women never had a single horse on any episodes.

Besides, horse girls were constantly reading books like
Black Beauty
. I still hadn't moved on from my obsession with
Go Ask Alice
,the published diary of a suicidal, drug-addicted teen. I continued writing every journal entry with the intention of someone reading it, discovering I was a genius, and publishing it at a profit, which was such an un-horse girl thing to do. Horse girls sported long, straight ponytails that they brushed out frequently and publicly like manes. I did not have a long, straight ponytail. No matter what I did with my hair, I always ended up looking like an extra in a Whitesnake video. Horse girls wore clothing inspired by Quakers. I wore clothing inspired by Jimmy Page, Stevie Nicks, and Cher. Horse girls drew horses on their notebooks and wore sweatshirts with horses airbrushed on them. Perhaps the horse girls would also be misunderstood and desperate for new friends and we could bond over not quite fitting in.

Nonetheless, I was excited for horse camp. I didn't need to spend another summer singing “Home” from
The Wiz
Broadway musical alone to my own reflection in my mother's full-length mirror. (I had wanted to play Dorothy in a previous summer's production of
The Wiz
but ended up the Scarecrow. They told me it was because I moved in such a “floppy manner.”) I didn't care if I'd be spending the summer surrounded by girls who would probably remain virgins way longer than most and tended to be obsessed with mythical folklore. Horse camp for me was purely a social strategy. Maybe at horse camp I could be at the upper level of social standing. Compared to these girls, maybe I could be cool.

Despite Alyssa's current interests, which included above-the-jeans hand jobs and Nair, she was an undercover horse girl. No one but I knew her dirty secret, which is how she remained so popular with boys at school. She had been going to this camp for years. This horse camp was a few towns over, where all the girls were rumored to be sluts. I had heard all the girls in that town had professional, salon-quality full-set
acrylic nail tips with nail art. They chewed gum at all times and went all the way with boys behind the Gravitron whenever the ghetto carnival came to town. I was thrilled to be leaving my town on a daily basis, even if it did mean I had to spend time with sluts and spooky animals whose severed heads could be placed in one's bed if one ended up rolling with the wrong crowd.

The first day of horse camp, Alyssa's mom pulled into my driveway in her old station wagon with a F
OLLOW
M
E TO THE
H
ADASSAH
bumper sticker promptly at 8:00
AM
. My mom, being somewhat unsupportive of my new career as an equestrian, didn't have any desire to be a part of the first day of the rest of my life. Although she enjoyed betting on horses at the racetrack, riding them was something foreign to my family. We were more of a placing-bets-while-someone-else-rode-the-horse kind of family.

When we arrived at horse camp, I quickly discovered that this town had no horse girls available to run the place, so instead they utilized the local Jersey sluts. I had imagined that even in this skanky town there would at least be one or two horse girls on call—but no. These girls were not reading
Black Beauty
, they were getting finger banged by guys in jean shorts behind a Friendly's dumpster. They were classic Jersey girls with big perms, tans, spandex shorts, mirrored sunglasses, and an unlimited supply of gum. They all looked like the spawn of Tawny Kitean and Samantha Fox. Still, they had a certain cred. Alyssa immediately informed me that she had heard one of the counselors had made out with a member of Skid Row. She didn't know which guy it was, but it “definitely wasn't Sebastian Bach.” Yes! This was exactly the kind of lifestyle I had been yearning for. I was under the supervision of a girl who actually knew a real rock star and had tasted his saliva! I was practically in the presence of rock 'n' roll royalty. I immediately became obsessed more with the counselor's past relations with D-list rock stars than with saddling up a stallion.

I didn't expect the counselors to make us ride on the first day. I thought we'd spend the day trading gum and swapping lip-liner techniques. But after a very brief intro, they discussed the difference between riding Western (sexy/badass) and English (pretentious/Hamptons). I tuned out and let my mind consider these options. Girls who rode Western seemed more attainable, while the girls who rode English were wealthy and wore cute helmets, beige tight pants, and fitted blazers. These girls came from old money, possibly had their own pony at home, and definitely had a country house. I had never met the type of girl who rode English, and I had high hopes to possibly encounter one during my brief stint at horse camp.

Suddenly everyone was standing up, and I snapped back into the discussion, forcing my brain away from my fantasy of going to visit a preppy girl named Tabitha in the country, to discover that the skanky counselors were making us all get on horses. It was assumed if we all went to a camp exclusively for riding horses, that we would all have a strong interest in actually riding said horses. I resented the assumption. My time on a horse was short-lived anyway. Before we even took off for our first trot, I showed my true equestrian abilities by falling off a horse that was standing still. A permed brunette counselor, noticing I was not quite at the horse camp entry level, abruptly separated me from the group and told me, “You gotta sit out.” As I explained that I was just clumsy because I was so tall and not fully adjusted to my never-ending growth spurt, I saw Alyssa galloping away with the rest of the advanced riders, not to be seen again until her mom picked us up seven hours later. I was reduced to beginner's activities such as cleaning out horse's hooves, brushing horses, and learning how to put on a saddle.

It turned out sitting out at horse camp was much better than participating in horse camp. Sitting out meant I got to be a fly on the wall to these whorish teenage girls running the show. I listened intently to every single detail of their very active sex lives.