This Will Only Hurt a Little(18)

One Saturday, Trey came over and picked me up in his SUV; then he drove around to the back of a strip mall where the dumpsters were and I gave him a blow job. My dad, who had recently started a consulting job in Salt Lake City and was only home on the weekends, happened to pull into the lot as we were pulling out, and the look on his face was so horrified I still to this day remember it. It wasn’t that he’d seen anything—at least I’m almost positive he didn’t—but he knew this loser kid was up to nothing good with his fourteen-year-old daughter. And he wasn’t wrong. But neither of my parents talked to me about it.

One night, my sister was home from college on break and had gotten tickets for us to see Nirvana. I was so excited. After school, my phone rang. It was Trey. He told me that he had night school that evening but could maybe come by and see me afterward. I immediately marched into my sister’s bedroom and told her I wasn’t going with her to see Nirvana.

She stared at me. “What? Busy! Come on! You’re so excited!”

“No. It’s fine. Take someone else. I have a lot of homework and school tomorrow and I don’t want to go—”

“WHAT?! WHY?! Come—”

“NO! JESUS, LEIGH ANN, LEAVE ME ALONE!”

I slammed her bedroom door. I don’t think I need to tell you that Trey didn’t show up that night, and I guess adding insult to injury is the fact that I never did get to see Nirvana, since Kurt Cobain killed himself like four months later.

? ? ?

For Christmas that year, my dad gave me Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes. He’d heard the songs on NPR and said, “It just seemed like something you would like, Elizabeth.”

It’s weird. I wasn’t close with my father at all, but that Tori Amos CD basically saved my life. I remember listening to it over and over and just finding everything I needed in there. Like she had written it for me. I understand how dramatic that sounds, but it was. It was. It all was. It was truly a gift to fourteen-year-old ripped-apart me.

Around New Year’s, I decided that I was done calling or seeing Trey. I was done trying to be his girlfriend or thinking that I was. I actually wrote in my diary something to the effect of “I’m sick of this little game that Trey and I are playing and I’m done with it!” Oh, sweet baby Busy. There was no game, honey. But here is where I found my true talent. Because what I was able to do was cut it off, all of it, everything that had happened. I shoved it down so far inside myself, it barely even existed anymore. It brought me no pain. I didn’t feel it. It was like it never happened. Any of it.

After winter break, I stopped hanging around with Kendra as much. Emily invited me to come sit under the olive tree in the quad and eat lunch with the kids she was friends with. Kids who were the opposite of the skater boys. The AP weirdo kids. Not nerds, just kids who were super smart and interesting and all ended up going to Wesleyan and Brown and NYU and Reed. Right before Valentine’s Day, one of them—a junior named Chris—asked me out. He was so nice and smart and had plans to go to Cornell University. I said yes.

I remember not being sure what was expected of me sexually, but he was so sweet, and I didn’t feel like I had to do anything. Mostly we just made out at his mom’s house. Like how it should be, I guess. But after a month or so, I got bored and broke up with him over the phone. I wanted something more . . . what? Exciting? Challenging? Dangerous?

Eventually, I started hanging out with Kendra again, mostly to avoid the awkwardness of seeing Chris under the olive tree, since I felt like he always gave me weird puppy-dog eyes. Even though I had been trying to reinvent myself as the girl who hung with the smart kids and dated nice guys who aced their SATs and weren’t trying to pummel me in the back of a car, I missed Kendra and the freedom of roaming around Scottsdale at night, smoking cigarettes in the washes and hanging out doing nothing with skater boys.

One day, I went with my friend Nelson—who I knew from theater—to the mall so he could buy a new bathing suit. Nelson’s claim to fame was that he was the original Hobie on Baywatch but had been replaced by Jeremy Jackson. Which was a pretty great claim to fame since no one could prove him wrong. We were riding the escalator up when I instinctually turned around and looked below. I knew it was Trey before I saw his face—I knew it from the back of his brain-damaged head. I started to panic. I got shaky and sweaty and short of breath. I didn’t know what to do.

I grabbed Nelson’s wrist. “That’s Trey.”

“Where?”

“Down there. What do I do??”

“Nothing, why? He’s just your ex-boyfriend, right?”

Yeah. That was the story I had going. That he was just a regular ex-boyfriend.

But then, before I knew what I was doing, I screamed out, “HEY, TREY, FUCK YOU!”

I grabbed Nelson’s hand and ran to the mall exit. I looked for Trey’s car in the garage, thinking I’d key it, but I don’t remember if I did. Still, it was pretty satisfying. It felt good to scream at him, at least once.

I saw him only one more time after that, when I was a senior in high school and my dirtbag on-again/off-again boyfriend and I went to some random house in Phoenix to buy drugs for a rave we were going to. There was Trey, sitting fucked up on some dirty beanbag chair on the ground. Again, the immediate shaking and panic and shortness of breath.

“We have to leave now,” I said. My boyfriend was annoyed, but he’d already scored the drugs and could tell I was freaking out anyway, so we left.