Big Girl Small (20 page)

Maybe this is amazing, or maybe not, but I didn’t hesitate. It was like smoking with Ginger. I mean, I wasn’t going to be good at it, but I didn’t really want to be like, “No, I can’t, I’m too pure,” or “I never did it before.” Plus, what’s so great about being a virgin when you’re about to be seventeen, especially if you’re me? I did think the condom question came up suddenly, but I was mainly just glad that I had already decided, in the driveway, that I would go the whole way if it came up. I could even hear myself calling Meghan in California the next day and being like, “I lost it to the hottest guy in the school, yeah yeah, average size, yeah yeah, Kyle, the one I told you about.” I even thought I’d tell Sarah and maybe Molly, and that if the school found out, well, so be it. Meghan and I had already thought we’d probably lose it the summer we were seventeen—that seemed about right, or at least senior year—so if I got a jump on it by a few months, what was wrong with that? Especially since it was
Kyle.
Kyle. I mean, I loved him. And I thought he either already loved me, or would soon.

Maybe this makes me a slut or whatever, but I wanted the whole experience, and didn’t think I would ever have a chance to lose it to anyone lovelier than Kyle. So while I entered an even deeper level of panic over how I’d manage the next step, I watched him put the condom on. He did this kneeling over me, naked, and I had the same thought I’d had the first time I met Kyle Malanack, that he was the most un-self-conscious person in the universe. Here he was, on his knees above me, wrapping that hideous flesh-colored balloon around himself as if it were the least embarrassing thing that had ever happened. I mean, I was so mortified I thought I might faint and fall off the bed, and I wasn’t the one spread-eagled and basically standing up. I also wasn’t, you know, turned on. So that made me think about acting, about what I would do if I
were
turned on. Maybe move around a lot? Wiggle? Make noise? There was no way I was going to make noise. And in fact, moving around a lot sounded horrible too. Then I figured, whatever, it was already slutty enough that I was sleeping with him on the first date—and it wasn’t even a real date—I didn’t want him to think I was like a nympho or anything. So I just kind of lay there, waiting, but then I started worrying that lying there like that was unsexy. But he was on top of me, fumbling around for what seemed to me like an awkwardly long time. I tried to help by arching my back but I was kind of scared and super weirded out and the light had changed and the room seemed suddenly brighter and I wondered what he could possibly be thinking and even what I was thinking. Then I started really freaking out, like
what am I doing here and did I say yes to this and who
am I and will I regret this later
, but by the time I was having those thoughts, he had put it in and it was so painful somewhere up near my lungs that I took a sharp breath that made noise. That gave me something to think about, because I was wondering was that noise unsexy, but Kyle was coughing or moaning or something and then he stopped moving. It was all very uncomfortable. And since I’m being totally honest here, kind of gross. I wanted him to get off me, even though it was Kyle. Because by then I felt like I didn’t know who he was and even if I had known at some point, we were both different people from who we’d been then anyway. I tried to remember sex scenes from movies, even Internet porn I had once accidentally walked in on Chad watching. I wished I had paid closer attention, watched more, read my parents’
Joy of Sex
more carefully. I mean, I had read it, but all it had was pictures of a skinny, hairy guy climbing all over a hairy girl like they were missing links trying to create the next human in the chain. And what did that have to do with me? What did girls do when guys were slumped like that? I hadn’t seen any pictures of a beautiful guy like Kyle coughing and slumping in the
Joy of Sex
. I considered scratching his back like Alice always did to Chad, but I didn’t know how that would go over, and all I wanted was to get up and put my jeans back on and run home and lock myself in my room so I could think this over and decide what it all meant. That’s the thing about me. I prefer things once they’re already over and I’m working on understanding them. I wish I were faster at that—like, I could understand things while they’re happening—but I always have to read the whole book and write the entire paper before I even know what the hell I’m thinking.

So I just stayed still in Kyle’s bed, waiting for it to be over so I could know what to think. I just lay there like a dead person. Thankfully, after ten seconds, Kyle rolled off me and stood up, pulled his boxers and jeans on. I sat up then, super relieved that he had finally given me the chance, and scrambled for my underpants and jeans.

“Sorry,” he said.

I was confused by this. Had he been able to tell I hadn’t liked it?

“No, no, that was—” I said, even though I wasn’t sure what we were referring to. I didn’t want to admit that it had been bad, was worried that he’d said sorry, because I thought that meant he’d known it was bad too. I had already pulled my jeans back on and was rehooking my bra. A wave of nausea washed over me.

“Um,” he said, “was that okay? Are you okay?”

I looked him over and nodded. I suddenly really liked him again. Liked the way he said “okay” in his friendly, sleepy voice. That he was worried about whether I was okay. We barely knew each other, I realized. Then he took it to a whole other level.

“You don’t have to answer this,” he said, “but have you ever done it before?”

I wished I knew which answer he would like better—I would have supplied it. I tried to buy time.

“Are you serious?”

He looked serious. “Yes, why not?”

What would I have said here? Who else would ever have wanted to? No one’s ever liked me except Joel at the LPA conference and we were fourteen?

I didn’t want to be that pathetic, and it wasn’t totally true, I mean, an average-height boy named Ian had kissed me and put his tongue all over my mouth and face once during a game of spin the bottle in seventh grade, and that had to count for something—I mean, I thought I might drown, there was so much spit. It was like getting water up your nose. Later he asked me to go to the video game arcade with him, but I’d said no, because I couldn’t reach the joysticks or the change machines, and I didn’t want to have to watch while he realized it once we got there. He never talked to me again. But that didn’t seem like a good story to tell Kyle, either.

So I said nothing. He looked into my eyes, in the same serious way he always did.

“Anyway, you don’t have to tell me,” he said, and that made me be like, “No, I’ve never done it before.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he felt really bad about having been my first. “I’m sorry it was so—you know,” he said, and I realized, in one of those epiphanies that’s so obvious it makes you stupid to have had to have it at all, that he was thinking about himself, not me. That there had been something bad or wrong or not cool about how he had done it. And maybe that’s why the whole thing grossed me out suddenly. Maybe it was the way he collapsed. Or maybe he finished too fast or something, and I should have said, “This happens to guys all the time,” but that would have meant I had done it with guys all the time, and I didn’t want to say anything like that. Plus, I had never been totally sure what that meant anyway. Maybe he had totally sucked in some way I didn’t know about. I was glad. Not to be mean, but at least he wasn’t as worried about whether I’d been sexy as he was about whether he’d been. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Kyle Malanack would care at all what I thought, even of him naked, even of him having sex. As soon as I’d had this thought, I had the next one, which was that I had slept with, had sex with, lost my virginity to Kyle. I could not believe that it was true, that it had actually happened this way. His room was so bright. I looked around it again, at the details, trying to memorize them so that when I started to sort this out in my mind for the rest of time, I could supply myself with the pieces that would prove it fact. Then I let myself wander into dream territory: Maybe it would happen again. Maybe he would offer to drive me home the next day and the next.

“Have you?” I asked suddenly.

“Have I what?”

“Ever, you know, before.”

He nodded. Was it someone from D’Arts? Elizabeth Wood? Or Kim Barksper? I hated the thought of either one of them in his room, his bed. Maybe it was someone in Boston, from his old school. But I couldn’t ask.

So I retreated into the bubble bath of my fantasy. We would arrive at school on Monday in love, write notes to each other, eat lunch together, and hold hands walking down the hallway. Of course, when I came to this part I had to block out the part about my short arm reaching up into his long one, looking from behind like a little girl and her father. We would comment constantly in American lit, making it seem like we meant the books, but actually meaning our love. We would raise our hands so many times that Ms. Doman would have to shush us, and then we’d be forced to have meaningful eye contact that everyone else could see. My stomach was somersaulting—with thrill, nerves, horror, everything. I’d never felt that way before, the way I felt after that first time with Kyle, and I don’t expect—or even hope, really —to feel that way ever again. I mean, a lot of that feeling was fear.

If you had told me at any point in my life up until that day that I would lose my virginity to Kyle Malanack, not only would I not have believed it, I also would have thought that whatever happened as a result would be worth it. That’s the funny thing about earlier me’s—they’re so naïve, those domino girls falling over into a dead row behind the me who exists now. I used to like to throw my mind backwards. I’d think, “Okay, if you showed some earlier me a video of my life now, would she be happy?” The reason I liked to play this game was that the answer was always yes. The younger me’s would have been impressed: that I had turned out pretty cute, that I got one of the coveted shabop girl parts in
Little Shop of Horrors
at Tappan, that I was valedictorian there, that I won a Lilah Terrace Fellowship to D’Arts, even that I had turned out brave enough to change schools like I did. When Ms. Doman read my paper out loud to the class, I thought, “Look at me now, all you younger Judys! Look at the soaring dwarf—if you could only have told me when I was younger that this would be happening, I would have cheered. I would have danced on the roof of a car like they do in
Fame
.” Because I would have been that excited for myself. But now I hate that game. I never want to play it again, because if you’d shown me the me I am right now, how would I have been able to look myself in the eye?

9
I’ve been watching TV nonstop because I can’t stand to think. So I happened to see an episode of
Celebrity
Apprentice
from the bed in the Motel Manor, and let me just say that if this were the movie of my tragic life, that’s exactly the clip the director would have had me watching. Because in case you think the
Wizard of Oz
problem was just the result of it being like the 1900s when that movie was made, you’re wrong.
Celebrity Apprentice
was having a contest for who could design the best ad about laundry detergent. (How can TV producers stand themselves?) For some baffling reason, they decided to call it “Jesse James and the Midgets,” and right when I turned it on, this complete asshole Hershel Walker was like, “What if we let Little People wash themselves in all detergent in a bathtub and you hang them out to dry?” And then Clint Black was laughing, “I’m trying to envision how we’d hang them out to dry,” and Joan Rivers, whose face is hanging off her bones to dry, said, “Well, I have a terrace. We can hang them out on my terrace.” And then she tried to move her paralyzed mouth into a laugh, and failed. My takeaway from this is that anyone who thought that people in America aren’t still dying for a dwarf to hang needs to think again. It’s like a national fantasy or something.

I ran straight to Bill’s room and knocked twice quiet, once loud, and he opened the door and came out into the hallway and we sat down together and he lit a cigarette.

“Do you mind if I have one?” I asked.

“It’s not good, not good,” he said, meaning smoking.

“I know. But I’ll just have one.”

So he lit a cigarette for me, and I puffed and choked until it was halfway gone and then stubbed it out. Whatever Bill thought of this performance, if he thought anything at all, he politely kept to himself.

“Do you want to talk?” Bill asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “Would that be okay?”

“Of course,” he said. “I like your story. I like it, even though it’s sad. Parts of it are happy, too. Parts of it.”

I liked this idea, even had the thought that I would like to make a kind of percentages chart of the ratio of happy to sad parts of my story. I mean, if you don’t think of it as a plot, then maybe half is happy and half is sad. The fact that the happy stuff is ancient history and the terrible parts are recent makes me feel like the entire thing is a sour mess, but I like Bill’s attitude better. It reminds me of Ms. Doman. So I decided to focus on a happy part: Sam.

After I lost it to Kyle, I was more grateful for Sam than ever before. That night after Kyle’s house, I went to the Grill and helped Sam with his homework while my parents did the dinnertime rush. Being with Sam was like returning from an alternate universe to a safe one. Plus, he was the type who could tell I was jittery with delight, but didn’t know the kinds of prying questions other people might have asked. Mainly I asked him things. That’s how it’s supposed to be with people who are younger than you, by the way. Adults who talk about themselves endlessly in front of young people are unacceptable narcissistic freaks. They should do the asking.

I remember Sam was hunched over the desk in the back office at the Grill, poking the keys on the laptop. “What are you working on?” I asked, reaching up and putting my arms around him.

He kept tapping with his finger, typing one letter at a time. “Lists for my project.”