This Will Only Hurt a Little(21)
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On board, I settled into my seat, and just before they closed the doors, the older businessman slipped into the seat next to me. We exchanged hellos as the flight attendant offered us orange juice. As she left he looked at me and said, “Tell me about her.”
“The flight attendant?” Great. My day was not getting any less weird.
“Yeah. I feel like you’re the kind of kid that knows things about people. What’s her story?”
Look, I don’t know how to explain this without it sounding totally crazy. But I was a kid who knew things about people. I am a person who knows things about people. My imagination has always been such that I can invent and create whole narratives and worlds for strangers to live in, and a lot of times, my imagination lines up with the reality. People fascinate me. They always have, and I’m really good at paying attention and listening. The same stories are happening all over, just to different people. If you figure out the type of person you’re dealing with, you can guess at some approximation of a narrative that fits. I don’t know all people’s stories, obviously, but I think it’s a talent. You just have to pay attention.
So this man asked me to tell him about our flight attendant and I did. I actually went back and read my diary from this time, because I needed to remember exactly what I thought right after it happened. Basically, I ended up talking to him for most of the flight from Newark to Dallas (where I had to change planes), and this guy told me, among other things, that my heart was in New Orleans (okay, I mean, I really do love New Orleans. Maybe I should move there now?), that few people have the ability to make their dreams come true in life but I was one of them (a classic thing to say), and that I was about to enter a dark period in my life but there was a light at the end of it (I was fifteen, so that seems like a given, but still . . . ).
Finally, he asked me if I was afraid of flying and when I said I was, he replied, “Well, I don’t want you to concern yourself about that anymore. Nothing will ever happen to you or anyone you love on a plane again.”
I hadn’t told him about Megan Briggs but maybe he just guessed that’s why I was afraid of flying? All of these things have logical explanations, for sure. But it was such a wild experience, made even crazier by the fact that I was so sick. All these years later, I’m still slightly baffled and awed by the whole thing.
As we got off the plane, he turned to me and said, “It was so nice talking with you, Busy! You’re going to have a wonderful life and I’ll be thinking of you often.”
I know that could easily sound creepy coming from an older businessman, but it really wasn’t. I called my mom from a pay phone and told her about it, and my mother, in her typical dramatic fashion said, “Oh Busy! You were sent a guardian angel to take care of you since I couldn’t be there with you!!”
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The rest of the summer I spent mostly in bed, getting better and taking visits from friends. Rachel and Emily would come play board games with me when they weren’t at their own sleepaway camps. Kendra would come over, and we’d call whatever boy she was currently interested in and cut out pictures from Spin magazine to hang on my wall. And of course Ben came to see me as much as he could. He wouldn’t kiss me for a few weeks since I had mono, but eventually he did. I was so in love with him. I wrote in my diary that I sometimes felt inadequate because I was sure that he and Samantha had “fucked all the time and everywhere” and I wasn’t like that and he knew it. I asked him in August if he loved me while we were on the phone, and his response was, “Yeah . . .” Which was good enough for me.
The love I felt for Ben was that all-encompassing first love. He was all I could think about, the only person I wanted to talk to or see. But I was also very aware that I didn’t want to be a slut with him. He was my boyfriend and I wanted him to love me and respect me. I wanted the opposite feelings that Trey had left me with.
I waited until September to have sex with Ben. It seemed like an eternity. My friend Ella’s parents were going out of town and leaving her alone in the house (seriously, parents of the ’90s, get your shit together!!). Ben and I talked about it and I told him I was ready. He brought over a bunch of pot and we got super stoned and hung out. He told his parents he was sleeping over at Grant’s house and so he was able to spend the whole night with me.
The sex was fine, I guess. We were in Ella’s brother’s bedroom and I remember looking at his Red Hot Chili Peppers poster hanging on the wall and noticing how his sheets were soft, like they had been washed a million times. I derived no pleasure from it, really—I certainly didn’t have an orgasm, but I made a lot of noise and we did it a few times, and truthfully, I was just so happy to be that close to him and to be able to give him what I knew he wanted.
For the next few weeks, Ben and I would have sex whenever we could. I mean, he was sixteen and it never lasted long, so we did it a lot. I started to have a creeping feeling like maybe we should use something so I didn’t get pregnant, but it never occurred to me to say something to him. That would be embarrassing. Plus, I was so lucky he loved me. Little unlovable me. I didn’t want to bum him out by telling him he should use a condom. Ugh. I wasn’t totally lame!
I guess I thought that sex was something that just happened to you if you were a girl. That it was something that the boys controlled and your job was to do your best to please them. I was never taught any different. Not by sex ed in school, not by the movies I watched, and certainly not by my parents.