loose (11 page)

When we hang up, I feel like I might throw up. I go to the kitchen and down a glass of water. I dial Heath’s number, but it just rings and rings. Then I go to the living room and flip on the TV. I do anything. Anything to get away from the fact that my own mother assumes I’m easy.

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r e b e c c a g r a b s m y a r m and pulls me into the student lounge.

“You got me in trouble,” she says.

“What are you talking about?”

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A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n She sighs and looks around, making sure no one else can hear.

“Heath told Jeff you did it doggie-style with him,” she whispers.

I bite my lip, embarrassed. “So?”

“I won’t, and now Jeff is saying if you do it with Heath, then I should too.”

“We only did it once like that,” I tell her.

“You know how they are,” she says.

I do. All the boys in Jeff’s crowd are obsessed with anything concerning sex. One ripped off a tag from an airplane life jacket that said jerk to inflate, and he wore it in his fly for the day until a teacher made him take it off. They all have this ongoing joke about doing it from behind. They answer every question that way: “What are you doing?” “Doggie.” “How would you like that prepared, sir?”

“Doggie.” They think it’s hysterical, but we girls roll our eyes.

“That’s so canine,” we tell them, which makes them laugh even harder.

Now, though, I’ve been caught. Now Rebecca knows my rolling my eyes has been a bunch of crap. I think back to the time Heath and I had sex like that. I didn’t particularly want to. But Heath begged, and wanting to please him, I did. The whole time I hated it, how impersonal and dirty it felt, as though I could have been anyone beneath him.

Later, I call Heath.

“Why did you tell him?” I ask accusingly.

“I don’t know,” he says. “That’s what guys do. Haven’t you ever heard of the locker room?”

I take a deep breath, frustrated.

“You didn’t seem to care when my friend was outside that time and I let him know we were having sex,” he says. “I would say you even liked it.”

“Fuck you,” I blurt.

“Fuck you too.”

I close my eyes, wanting to get us back to how we were. I’m not really mad at him. I’m mad at myself, that I do these things and

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then pretend I don’t. I spend half my life lying about who I am and what I want. I don’t even know who I am most of the time.

“Listen,” I say. “Let’s just forget it, OK?”

“Whatever,” he says.

But I can tell he’s still annoyed.

The next time we talk, he tells me he wants to break up.

I sit on the floor of my bedroom, my body empty, my heart wrung.

“Why?” I plead.

“It’s just not fun anymore,” he says.

“We can make it fun again.” I close my eyes, knowing I sound desperate.

“Kerry,” he says. I grip the phone, holding on to my name, his voice saying my name. “It’s over.” He wants to get off the phone, be done with it. He and his friends call having a girlfriend “dealing,”

and now he doesn’t want to deal anymore.

“Can we at least talk in person about this?” I ask.

He sighs. “You can come here now, I guess.”

Twenty minutes later I park the Civic in front of his house. Before I have a chance to get out, he comes out the front door and slips into the passenger seat. Keeping me away from his home again. My heart is pounding, my mouth dry.

“What did I do?” I ask.

He leans his head back against the seat, revealing his pale neck, his Adam’s apple. I wish so much he would just gather me in his arms, but I know that isn’t going to happen.

“I just wanted to have some fun, you know?” he says.

“We were having fun.”

“Yeah. But things changed. You’re starting to sound like me, do you know that?”

I stare at him, confused. “I am not.”

“You are,” he says, a million miles from me in the next seat. “You say ‘dude’ and ‘baked.’ Those are things I say. And you make your

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A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n voice do the same things mine does. I don’t like it. You just want too much.”

I lean back, that sick feeling spreading through my body. The feeling of being seen, exposed. My ugly needs giving me away once again.

“I’m over it.”

I nod. I get it. My wanting makes me unlovable. It’s something I already know.

“Let’s just say we had a nice time and move on,” he says, and smiles. This doesn’t bother him at all.

My throat is tight with despair, but I smile back. We hug and he gets out of the car. I watch him go up the stairs to his door and disappear inside. He doesn’t look back.

At home, I put on Roxy Music and listen to the song “More Than This,” wanting the song to make me cry, but it doesn’t. The music only lodges the sorrow more deeply inside. I go to the bathroom, and on the counter are the pills I finally got from Planned Parenthood. I just started my first pack, and in a month Heath and I would have been able to have condom-free sex. Stupid me, thinking it would last that long. I look at myself in the mirror, my flat, brown hair, the freckles sprinkled across my nose. I have never hated myself more.

The next morning I stay in bed, not wanting to wake up. The morning turns to afternoon, and at some point, Dad knocks and opens my door.

“I’m sleeping,” I say, and turn over. I pull the covers over my head.

“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon,” he says. I listen as he walks to the bed. He pulls back the covers a bit and gets in beside me.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I say. “I’m just sleeping.” I can smell his familiar scent so close. He puts his arms around my middle, like he

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used to when I was little, when we would cuddle together while watching TV. But I’m older now, and it feels weird, so I try to pull away. He holds tighter.

“Mmm. You’re so warm and nice.”

“Get out of my bed,” I say, kicking him off. A panicky feeling is making its way through my body. I’m only wearing a T-shirt and underwear. I don’t want him touching me like this, my father in my bed.

“What,” he says, “I can’t show my daughter a little affection?”

When I don’t say anything, he gets up.

“Jeez, you’re an ice cube.”

He shuts the door and I let out my breath.

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t w o w e e k s l a t e r , Rebecca, Jeff, and I go to a party. I know Heath will be there, so I dress as sexy as I can. A miniskirt, a tight-fitting top. I take a curling iron to my hair. When we arrive, he’s flirting with one of the blond girls from my school. Jealousy seeps through my skin like water, but I try to act nonchalant, like I’m fine, like I don’t need him so much. But as the night wears on, and as he drinks more and more, I grow frantic. Finally, I approach him.

“Come home with me,” I whisper.

He winces. He can barely look at me. “I’m staying at Jeff’s tonight.” His breath is sharp from beer.

“Fuck Jeff’s,” I say. “Come with me.”

He looks around, stumbles.

“I’ll make it worth your while,” I say.

He turns back to me, his eyes blurry from the booze.

“Drive me to Jeff’s,” he says. “His parents are away.”

I scramble to find Rebecca and Jeff and convince them to leave.

And soon, Heath is in my car. He pokes at the radio, looking for something he likes as we follow Jeff and Rebecca. I try to think of something to say, something that will endear me to him, get him

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A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n back to who he was in the beginning. But when I look over at him, his eyes are rolling back in his head. I shake him awake when we get there.

Inside, he ignores me. He finds himself food, then turns on the oversize television to play a video game. I follow him from room to room, my throat tight, until finally he leads me upstairs to Jeff’s parents’ bedroom.

“Look at this fucking room,” Heath spits out.

It is massive, with a king-size canopy bed. I know Heath struggles with this, with the fact that all his friends live in huge, luxuri-ous houses while he lives in his simple home. He cares too much about it, like how I care too much about what people think of me, especially boys.

His mouth is tart and clumsy, and he yanks off my clothes in a hurry. He feels different, angry or annoyed. I don’t know what. But I let him keep going. He pushes himself inside me. I was going to tell him about the Pill, but he doesn’t get a condom anyway. He just pushes and pushes, jabbing and hammering, like I’m nothing beneath him. That blond girl, maybe. Or no one at all. Tears come to my eyes.

“Come on,” he yells when I don’t respond. “What’s the problem?”

I look away, tears streaming.

He pulls out of me quickly, not done, and runs into the bathroom where I hear him retch.

I roll over and wrap my arms around my bent knees.

When he comes back, he lies on the other side of the bed and falls fast asleep. I sit up and see my clothes on the floor. Twisted shirt and crumpled skirt, my underwear rolled into a ball. I gather them up, my throat dry. I know I should leave. It is the only dignified thing to do. But then what? I’ll be home, alone in my room, unable to sleep there, either. I think about the next morning, waking up with this ugly night weighing on my mind. The thought is simply unbearable. So I settle back down and wait for sleep to come.

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In the morning, I wake to the sound of Heath in the room. He has put on his jeans and he sits at the end of the bed with his head resting in his hands.

“Don’t say anything,” he says when I sit up, “or my head will split open.”

I put on my clothes, which I realize I cuddled with all night, and I get out of the bed. I’m thinking about how he said I want too much, and I’m desperate to get out of there, to prove him wrong, even though I’ve just proved him right.

“Do you need a ride?” I ask as softly as I can.

“I’ll get Jeff to take me home.” He doesn’t even look at me.

I wait another second, but he doesn’t say anything else.

For a brief moment, I see myself as though from a distance: my wrinkled clothes, my mussed hair, mascara smeared beneath my eyes, waiting for something from this boy who is done with me. I am pitiful, wretched even. I need to end this for myself. But in the same instant, the vision is gone. I wonder now if I had been able to maintain that perspective for maybe a few moments longer, perhaps I wouldn’t have kept going down this path. Perhaps this would have been the turning point, the place where I learned my lesson and found a way to love myself. But my desperation was too strong. It was like a tidal wave, pulling me deeper into its current. And the rest of me was not strong enough to fight it.

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6

That summer, my dad rents a house on Fire Island off of Long Island. Fire Island is a small beach community made up solely of boardwalks, docks, and water taxis. No cars are allowed. In the summer, the towns on Fire Island come to life. Wealthy Manhattan families take ferries there every summer weekend, many of them leaving the children with nannies for the week when they have to head back to work. Two towns are renowned for being a gay mecca, where men can meet each other and have sex along the forested boardwalks, no one wagging fingers or turning their eyes in horror.

Our house is in Dunewood, a family-oriented community with only a small grocery store and a kids’ recreation center. We have the house for July. I’m excited both to be on this beautiful island and to spend the month with Dad and Nora. She’s become a second mother to me, kind and generous and thoughtful of my feelings, the mother I always wished for. I like the way she makes light of things, such as telling us men are good for three things—paying, carrying things, and sex. Later, she’ll amend this, adding “waiting” to the list. She

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calls Tyler and me her “almost daughters.” She’s joking, but it means a great deal, to have her think of us this way.

One evening when I was feeling lonely and dejected because none of my friends were available, she rounded up my dad and took us for Chinese and a Mel Brooks marathon playing downtown.

“Everybody needs New York when they’re feeling glum,” she told me during dinner, “and what’s more New York than good Chinese and Mel Brooks?”

“You make it sound like being a New Yorker is the solution for everything,” Dad said, serving himself sesame chicken.

Nora shrugged and gestured for him to put some on her plate. “A lot of times it is. We have the best of everything here, food, muse-ums, music, shopping. Listen,” she said when Dad looked doubtful,

“you’re lucky I even talk to you. You’re from New Jersey.”

I laughed. Even feeling blue, Nora always gets me to laugh.

Dad allows me to invite a friend to Dunewood for the month. The Jennifers are busy with their own family vacations in Europe and St.

Barts, and this makes me nervous. I still live in constant fear the Jennifers will exclude me, or forget me entirely if I’m out of sight for too long. Since I can’t invite them, though, I invite Ashley. Ashley, who was with Liz and me at that gas station so long ago. Ashley, who tried so hard to keep me innocent that night, but to no avail. Even though we’ve been at different schools, we’ve stayed loosely in touch, and she still feels like a sister to me, sometimes more than Tyler, to whom I rarely speak. Nora’s like another mother, Ashley’s like a sister. The truth is I go through my life trying to piece together the family I want, the one I didn’t get.

On the ferry to Fire Island Ashley and I are giddy, in great moods.

Dad, Nora, and her daughter, Miranda, are down below, away from the wind, but we opt to sit up top, our hair whipping around our faces. We can see the island in the distance, a beacon. There’s something about the summer, tanned skin, bare feet, the ocean air. We smile knowingly at each other. The thing with Heath hangs over me

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A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n like a winter coat, and I am eager to shake it off. I heard that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. That’s exactly what I intend to do.