Scrappy Little Nobody(25)
“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 f*cking 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.