Everything You Want Me to Be(51)
“What were you planning on doing, Hattie? Sleeping with us both?”
“No.” She swallowed. “Just you.”
My mouth went dry and my blood shifted from a pound to a dangerous pulse.
“But you let him kiss you.”
“Are you jealous?” A smiled flashed across her face and was gone. “It’s just acting, Peter. There’s not much to being Tommy’s girlfriend. I could have nailed it when I was twelve.”
I took a step closer, compelled beyond reason toward this girl who kept shedding masks like a matryoshka doll, each one more audacious than the last, a psychological striptease that racked me with the need to tear her apart until I found out who or what was inside.
“Is your entire life an act?”
She dropped her head and something like shame finally crossed her face.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And what role am I supposed to be playing?”
“None!” Her head snapped back up.
“You’ve planned this whole scene.”
“No! It’s not like that.”
“Who am I, Hattie? The big-city teacher who throws his whole life away for you? Who sweeps you off your lying feet? Like this?”
In a heartbeat I closed the distance between us and hauled her up again. “Is this the part where I declare my love? Where I tell you I can’t get you out of my goddamn head?”
“Yes,” she choked out.
“How does the fantasy go, Hattie? What comes next?”
Her eyes swarmed with fear, anger, and arousal, everything that had been torturing me since the Jane Eyre play, and then I knew what came next, what I couldn’t stop myself from doing any longer.
We moved at the same time. I took her mouth in a race of lip, tongue, and teeth, and pulled her down to the floor with me, straight into the welcome blood rush of hell.
HATTIE / January 2008
I LOST my virginity when I was fifteen, although lost is a funny word for it. I didn’t misplace it like a homework assignment or a cell phone. It wasn’t like I could find it again and tuck it back in there. I gave it away in Mike Crestview’s basement on an old sofa with a cabbage-leaf print while we watched Lord of the Rings. I suppose it was a pretty typical first time, except I wasn’t all starry-eyed about Mike. I was curious more than anything. You can’t watch that many seasons of Sex and the City without getting a little curious. And Mike was a nice enough guy, a senior all excited to leave for college. I probably liked that excitement as much as anything else about him.
We were watching the part where Gandalf fights the fire monster and falls into hell or wherever when I asked Mike if he wanted to have sex.
He seemed pretty surprised. He was actually better friends with Greg than with me, but Greg was gone for the weekend, so I’d come over alone.
“Do you have a condom?” I asked him. “If not, we can forget it.”
It was kind of hilarious how fast he found a condom and made sure his parents were still at the grocery store.
The sex itself was bumpy and weird and I didn’t help very much. Mike said he’d done it before, so I just lay back and let it happen, observing more than participating, I guess. The thing I remembered most, besides the scratchy fabric rubbing my butt, was the vein that popped out in Mike’s forehead, like a curvy blood river. After that I figured I understood what sex was all about, and didn’t have any urge to try it again.
Last fall, as my junior year started and Mike was off enjoying life in Minneapolis, my grandpa passed away right in the middle of harvest and my parents had to go to Iowa to take care of the details.
He’d been in a nursing home for years, ever since my grandma died and he had a stroke. Before the stroke he was just like my dad—a tough, matter-of-fact guy. Dad had a sense of humor, though, while Grandpa always seemed tense, like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but if it ever did he wouldn’t say a word about it. After the stroke, it was like he’d been turned inside out. He cried all the time. He cried when we came to visit him, when the nurse put him to bed at night, even about stuff that should have made him happy like when the Twins were winning. It was as if eighty years of buried emotion started leaking out his eyeballs.
The nursing home was a sad-looking concrete building outside Des Moines where all the old ladies sat on the cracked patio and tried to wave us over to their wheelchairs. We ignored them and kept our eyes on the backs of Mom’s shoes as she walked inside. Grandpa always had stale Bit-O-Honeys that just about broke your jaw and we had to sit there chewing them while Mom chatted to the walls as she fussed around his room and he stared at us, silent tears running down his grizzled, old face.
When he died I wondered if my dad was more upset about missing the harvest. Nobody talked about their feelings around here. They just absorbed the hurts and the losses and barely nodded if anyone said anything about it. It was okay to be funny or crack a joke like Dad, but any other emotion just got the American Gothic treatment. It was all hidden and sometimes I wondered if it was even there. I guess Dad really did love his father, though, because he left in the middle of the harvest and hired a migrant contractor to take over his fields while he was gone.
I stayed behind to finish school that week and was supposed to come down for the funeral on Saturday. One afternoon I was reading on the log swing by the house, tracing the outside of one breast absently while I flipped pages, when I glanced over and saw Marco standing twenty feet away, staring at me. He was tall and thick, the kind of fat someone got when they did manual labor and probably ate a bunch of fast food, layers of muscle over fat over muscle. Dad had said he was Guatemalan, with dark skin and hair, but his eyes were bright and fixed on the hand on my breast.