This Will Only Hurt a Little(31)
After rehearsal one day, I was talking with Craig in the school parking lot and sort of apologizing for being a crazy mess the year before, when he revealed that his mom had been diagnosed with cancer again and this time they thought it was terminal. Maybe six months to a year. I was so devastated for him, standing there as the sun was setting behind the mountains and turning the sky pink and purple and orange. I remember his face so clearly, and I remember just having an overwhelming feeling like I needed to be in his life. That I needed to take care of him. I committed to myself in that moment that I would.
There was something so sweet and innocent about Craig’s crush on me. We were the same age, but you know how it is with boys and girls when you’re a teenager. I was seventeen, but I seemed like I was twenty-five. My girlfriends and I would get served alcohol in restaurants. Shawn’s sister Britney taught me that if you just ask for a pinot noir, they assume you’re old enough because you know what you’re talking about, and she was almost always right. On the rare occasion that we got carded, it was embarrassing but not the end of the world. We weren’t trying to get into bars. We were ordering wine in Italian restaurants. They were always happy to make a wine sale.
I was still dating random guys who were older, and occasionally going down to Tempe and fucking Shawn Harris in his dorm room. Lord knows why. I guess it was just something to do. So while I knew Craig liked me, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about it. I loved hanging out with him, and as we worked on the play I found him more and more attractive. He was really cute and really talented and so funny and smart, which was probably more attractive to me than anything else. And he thought I was so funny. I loved making him laugh, and I loved watching him watch me tell stories. And I loved the fact that I could tell he was so into me but wouldn’t do anything about it. And I loved him. I just loved him.
I was really into raves that year, and Brett started coming with me more and doing drugs, which drove Craig crazy. He thought we were so dumb for wasting our time like that. I mean, he wasn’t wrong. But it was fun as fuck, and what else were we supposed to do in Arizona but waste time? But as the school year went on, I started to like staying in and making popcorn on the stove with Craig and watching movies that his older brother Jeff, who was already studying screenwriting at NYU, would recommend. To my surprise, I liked it just as much as I liked getting high on E and staying out until the sun came up.
One night, after watching Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming for the millionth time, Craig walked me out to my car. It was freezing, and while I was wearing my fuzzy black coat from Delia’s, he was just wearing a sweatshirt. We were leaning against the car as we talked, and I said something that made him double over laughing, which I always loved. (You might be sensing a theme here: I love a good audience, especially one-on-one.) And then I felt that thing. All of a sudden, I wanted him to kiss me more than anything. But I knew he wouldn’t. So I looked at him and narrowed my eyes.
“Do you want to kiss me?”
He glanced at me and then up at the sky. He shivered, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because of what I’d just said or because it was freezing. I didn’t need to ask. I knew the answer. But I wanted him to say it. He didn’t. He just looked back at me. And then I moved in front of him and put my hands on his face and kissed him against my car.
He would tell me later that after I left he went inside and wrote a note for himself that said “THAT REALLY HAPPENED” and placed it on his nightstand, in case he woke up in the morning and thought he had dreamed it.
I wish I could tell you that he became my boyfriend and everything worked out, but that wasn’t exactly what happened. We kept hooking up, off and on, with everything being a first for him. And then I would get annoyed that he didn’t seemingly want to be my boyfriend, even though he said he did. I mean, he wouldn’t hold my hand in public, at school he didn’t want people to know we were dating, and we didn’t really go “out” places. We mostly just hung out at one of our houses. It was really confusing, and it also felt like I was always trying to convince him it was okay for me to like, give him a hand job or whatever. I know. When has a seventeen-year-old boy ever needed to be convinced of that? But he did. He was very inexperienced and nervous about it all. So I kept dating older guys, including stupid Shawn Harris.
In the winter, my agent called and said that Mattel wanted to hire me for the huge toy fair in New York! They would fly me and my mom out and put us up at a nice hotel, and I would work for two weeks. It was the start of the second semester of my senior year. The only catch was that I had to convince all of my teachers to excuse me for that long, and I also had to convince Mrs. Carrick, my drama teacher, to still allow me to star in the spring musical even though I would miss two weeks of rehearsal. Guys and Dolls was only one of my FAVORITE MUSICALS of all time, and I’d been waiting my WHOLE LIFE to play Adelaide (or at least since eighth grade, when I had seen the touring production).
Most of my teachers said it was okay, that they would just send my work with me and I could turn it in when I got back. Except my asshole Republican sexist Government teacher. He flat-out refused, which put me in a real tough spot since I wouldn’t be able to graduate without completing Government. I asked my mom to help me, and she called the vice principal, who agreed to meet with me to discuss my options. She was a humorless older woman who had been in administration for so long that I’m sure she’d forgotten what it was like to deal with kids who actually had dreams that extended beyond just going to ASU and becoming a CPA or something.