God Bless This Mess(29)
I didn’t kiss a boy until I was seventeen years old.
It’s not that I wasn’t interested. I was interested from the first day of high school.
Brady was in my freshman Spanish class, and I looked over at him and instantly fell in love. I can’t explain it. Just looking at him did something to me that I had never felt in my life. I went home after school that day and told my mom, “Mama, I think I met the boy I’m gonna marry.”
I’ve never felt that again, with any guy—even on The Bachelorette.
The only problem was, Brady had a girlfriend. So we didn’t date. We didn’t date until our senior year. But right away I could tell he liked me, too.
His girlfriend hated me, and she let me know it. To my face. It was like Mean Girls on steroids, and it got ugly. She could tell there was chemistry between us, and her way of telling me to keep away from him was to do things like write “B*tch” in ketchup, on my driveway. And this was before Brady and I ever dated!
I didn’t really want to date anyone my freshman and sophomore years anyway. I was just too busy with pageants, which meant I was busy trying to be Miss Everything.
I worked really hard. I made all good grades. I didn’t drink or party. I had more reason than ever to prove to everyone that I was the “good girl,” and being in pageants helped me with that. I had no choice but to be smart about who I hung out with and what I did, because I didn’t want anything bad to ever get out about me. My choices in life were all about the way other people saw me, which I realize now isn’t exactly the healthiest way to live. But it gave me this self-imposed pressure to not mess up, and I do not think that’s a bad thing to have when you’re a teenager.
Heck, I didn’t have time to mess up! Like I said, I was in all the clubs and did all the things. I never had dates to any of the events because I didn’t date, but I got voted onto the homecoming court my freshman year. Our class was somewhere around five hundred people, and only two people from each class make the court. I did the school beauty pageant, and I won that as a freshman, too.
What I didn’t understand, what I didn’t see, was what my peers thought of all my “winning.”
When I came back to school for my sophomore year, when the homecoming court votes were happening that fall, a bunch of my friends turned on me. “You win everything,” they said, “so we didn’t put you in this year.” Not only that, but I found out there was a whole thing going around the school with people saying not to vote for me. I never asked for people to vote for me! I genuinely thought that winning meant people liked me. That they accepted me, you know?
But the accolades and attention I thought were so important ended up hurting my relationships and connections all over school. Suddenly I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends anymore. Some of them were jealous. But I couldn’t say it out loud, because calling people jealous makes you sound as if you think you’re superior to them. And I didn’t think that. I felt like an outcast. I got really nervous going to school, and I felt like I couldn’t actually talk to anyone about what was going on.
I felt insecure pretty much everywhere and all the time, except when I was up onstage. Onstage, I was good. I felt like I knew what I was doing. Offstage? I wanted my girlfriends to like me, that’s all. I could not understand it: Why would they not like me just for doing well at the things I loved doing?
By the time my junior year came around, I didn’t really fit in anywhere at school. Not with the jocks, not with the band geeks, not even with the other “good girls” and smart kids. The only girlfriends I had were some older girls from church and from dance class, who went to different schools. And they were moving on to college now. I felt so alone. But I got voted onto the homecoming court again that fall, and I chose to see that as my validation. There had to be a lot of people who liked me, or I wouldn’t have made it, right?
And then one of the most popular boys in school started talking to me.
His name was Tucker. He was a senior, and he was funny. I loved that. The two of us could banter like nobody’s business, and I’m just a sucker for somebody I can banter with.
He was cute. He was cool. He was on the baseball team but also played golf. And as soon as we started talking, I liked him.
He knew I had never dated anybody, and he asked me to be his girlfriend, and we dated for all of my junior year.
Tucker was my very first kiss.
I know he sounds like the dream boy in a Taylor Swift song, and he kinda was. But in some ways he really wasn’t.
Tucker was the jealous type, and he hated that I was friendly with other guys. It was innocent flirting, never anything else. But he didn’t like it—and he let me know that.
He got real possessive, like if I went home because I had a lot of homework to do, he would get upset that I wasn’t spending time with him. So I started spending more time with him, because I thought maybe that’s what a girlfriend is supposed to do. I stopped bantering with other guys, because I didn’t want to upset him.
And then he wanted to do a whole lot more than just kiss.
I was into him. I was. I could have made out with him for hours. I let him take my top off in the back of a car, and that was a lot for me. I was a good girl! But he would always push the line, and I would have to tell him to stop.
He didn’t like that, either.
He knew how self-conscious I was about my weight and stuff, and I’d be there with my shirt off, asking him to slow down, and he’d look me in the face and say, “You’re not that pretty.”