Confessions of a Not It Girl (7 page)

"Hey."
It was Josh. He put his hand on my neck and gave it a mock shake. "Didn't you see me wave to you outside?"

I turned to him, trying to look surprised, which I was, a little. Rebecca said, "Hey, Josh," and he said, "Hey, Rebecca," and then she slipped away.

"No, I didn't," I said. I tried to think of something really clever to say, but apparently my brain had gone AWOL...again.

Josh looked at me kind of strangely, half frowning, half smiling. "Oh. Well. How are you? I was wondering where you were."

"Um, I'm okay."
Though I sure could use my brain right about now.
"How are you?"

Josh didn't answer my question. Instead he said, "I just found out the strangest thing. You know Mandy?" I tried to nod in a way that conveyed my familiarity with Mandy but not my desire to remove her eyes with my fingernails. "Well, it turns out her friend is this girl who went to my old school, you know, in Seattle?" I nodded again. "So this girl, her friend, is
incredibly
hot. I mean, every guy at my school wanted to go out with her, but she never went out with anyone. I mean,
never.
And a lot of guys tried, dozens. There were all these rumors about her, you know, that she had some boyfriend somewhere only he was a lot older or something, or that she was an ice princess. But it turns out...well, Mandy was just telling me, she's a
lesbian!

65

"No
way"
I said. Was there a chance Mandy was a lesbian, too? Suddenly the night had taken a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.

"Way,"
he said. "Mandy said they spent a summer at Bennington together and the whole time she was fooling around with a girl in Mandy's dorm!" This was not as good as if she'd been fooling around with Mandy, but it was better than if Josh had said,
Mandy was just telling me she's in love with me, which is a real coincidence because I'm in love with her, too.

"Wow," I said. "Are you going to tell anyone?"

"No," he said. "I mean, it's tempting but..." He trailed off.

"But ..." We were being wedged up against the wall by all the people crowding around us.

"But I think the kids at my old school are probably more prejudiced than kids at Lawrence. I mean, Mandy was cool about it, but I don't think the kids back there would be."

"That's funny," I said. "I always think of Seattle as being a really enlightened city." Actually what was funny was that I had just started a sentence with the phrase
I always think of Seattle as being
since I never actually think of Seattle at all.

"Yeah, I know what you mean," said Josh. "You just don't think of Starbucks and prejudice as going hand in hand."

"And Silicon Valley," I added.

"Actually, that's northern California," he said.

I laughed like he'd just said the funniest thing I'd ever heard. "Right. Sorry."

66

"Did you mean Microsoft?"

"Right. Microsoft." My voice had developed a metallic ring, as if instead of being a girl at a party, I was in a play where I had to
act
like I was a girl at a party. "I can never keep all that stuff straight."

"Stuff?" asked Josh, smiling.

"You know. Technology. Geography. Stuff."

He laughed his awesome laugh. "If you live there it's not hard to keep Microsoft straight. Basically it's like, 'Welcome to Seattle: brought to you by Microsoft.'"

I laughed, too, and brushed my hand over his wrist. There was an article in, I think,
Glamour
that said men's bodies immediately respond to a woman's touch by producing more endorphins or seratonins or something. It's a subliminal seduction technique.

Josh didn't seem too affected by my touch, though. Maybe the response is also subliminal.

"Is it strange for you being so far away from your corporate sponsor?" I asked.

"Sure. But there's a chip in my head so they can keep track of me at all times."

By now the kitchen had become so crowded we were practically smushed up against each other.

"So you're saying Bill Gates might be listening to our conversation right now?"

"Exactly," said Josh just as someone bumped into him and he fell against me. I sucked in my stomach and stuck out my boobs a little.

"Sorry to be practically on top of you," he said.

"Don't worry about it," I said. It was hard to speak

67

since I was holding in my abdominal muscles so tightly. Josh's face was very close to mine. Why did he always smell so good? Tonight in addition to his usual shampoo-Josh smell, he smelled slightly of the beer he'd been drinking.
Listen, I wanted to tell you that I broke up with my girlfriend last night....

"So, are you having fun yet?" he asked, smiling down at me. He had one hand up on the cabinets behind me, and he was holding his beer in the other. All I needed was about five more people to try and cram into the kitchen.

Someone squeezed in behind Josh, whose thigh pressed into mine. I started to answer him. "It's not too--"

"Hey, Jan!" I looked up in time to see Tom Richmond coming toward me. The crowd in the kitchen parted like he was Moses and they were the Red Sea. "How's it going?" he said when he got over to me. I shrugged, and he laughed and put his arms around me and gave me a hug. It wasn't a
bad
hug, but it was no
Romeo and Juliet
hug, either.

"Do you know ..." I turned to where Josh had been a mere second ago, but he was gone.

"Do I know
what?"
he said in a voice that only a little while ago I would have found incredibly sexy.

My dad has this proverb he likes to repeat:
When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers.
In the case of Tom Richmond, the punishment is that they waited two weeks to give me an answer.

By then, the prayer had changed.

68

CHAPTER SEVEN

"You've
got
to check this out," said Tom. He had his arm around my shoulders and was guiding me out of the kitchen and into the living room. I kept looking around for Josh, but it was as if he had disappeared into thin air. When we got to the foyer, Tom turned me toward the steps leading upstairs.

So many people were sitting on the staircase it was like an obstacle course, but once we got to the third floor there was no one around. Tom led me down a long corridor past several closed doors. At the end of the hall he stopped, turned to me, and said, "Ready?"

"Yeah, sure," I said. I had logged so many hours back in September imagining being alone with Tom, now that I actually
was
alone with him, I felt an uncanny sense of déjà vu.

"Check it out." He pushed open the door and pulled me in behind him.

We were in what I guess had once been Drew's room but was now more like a den with a lot of Drew's stuff all over the place. The lights were off, but the room wasn't dark; it was lit up by New York. The Brooklyn Bridge shimmered and was reflected in the black of the East

69

River, and as I got closer to the window, I thought I could make out people milling around the South Street Seaport. The view was so beautiful that for a minute I forgot to think about why Tom had been so eager to have me appreciate it. But as soon as I saw the Empire State Building, I knew he had taken a page straight out of Rebecca's book.

"Wow," I said. Why was it everyone but me knew how to use the beauty of the New York skyline as an instrument of seduction? Was I the only senior at Lawrence who lacked this skill? Had there been an assembly on it one day when I was absent?

"I'll show you
wow,'"
he said, putting his arm around my shoulders again.

And then Tom kissed me.

Or for accuracy's sake I should say,
attempted
to kiss me. Mostly he just started drooling onto my face and pushing me, as if I were his opponent in a wrestling match. I managed to partially resist his attempt to maneuver me onto Drew's bed, which resulted in our being half on the bed and half on the floor. At this point, Tom must have decided that this was as close as we were going to get to lying down because he stopped trying to get on top of me and started grabbing at my chest while licking my eyelid.

Ever since elementary school, I have been waiting to experience a good kiss, and all I can say is: I'm still waiting. In junior high I went to parties and played Spin the Bottle and Three Minutes in Heaven and Six Minutes in the Closet, and as far as I'm concerned, if some guy thrusting

70

his slimy tongue in my mouth is heaven, send me to hell. I assumed things would get better in high school, but except for the bottle and the closet, it was just more of the same. Tom Richmond grabbing at my boobs like he was a passenger on the
Titanic
and I was the last remaining lifeboat gave me the feeling that senior year wasn't going to bring a big improvement on the status quo.

It was completely depressing because I had very high hopes. When I was eleven we rented a house on Fire Island for the summer, and the people who owned the place had left all these really cheesy romance novels behind, so I spent July and August reading books with titles like
The Promised Passion
and
The Lingering Longing.
They're basically how I got my idea of what sex was going to be like--you know, women being carried away by some guy touching their heaving bosoms. Even if my heart belonged to Josh, when Tom had leaned in to kiss me, I assumed I would have to struggle to resist the
tingling limpness running through my limbs.

But it wasn't much of a struggle resisting the slippery strand of saliva running down my cheek.

The combination of drooling onto me and grabbing at my mom's cashmere sweater was clearly becoming too much for Tom, and he started breathing pretty fast. I, on the other hand, was barely breathing at all since the last thing I wanted was some errant strand of saliva to run up my nose and drown me.

The time had come to draw the line. Tom pushed my turtleneck aside and started half sucking, half nibbling on

71

my neck while making a noise that sounded like, "Mooo." The door opened for a second and then someone shut it quickly, saying, "Oh, sorry." I decided this was my cue.

"Listen, Tom, I should probably go. It's getting late." Actually, I had no idea what time it was.

"You don't have to go," said Tom, licking my chin.

I resisted the urge to wipe my face. "Yeah, actually, my parents are
really strict,''''
I said.

"What time do you have to be home?"

"Um, what time is it now?"

Tom managed to check his watch while barely taking his lips off mine. "Eleven-thirty."

"Oh my God," I said, as if he'd just told me it was two A.M. Tom, unimpressed by my manufactured hysterics, jammed his fingers at my chest. Was this supposed to turn me on? Was this what caused bosoms to heave all over the world?

There actually
was
a part of me that wanted to heave, but it wasn't my bosom.

"Just stay a few more minutes," he said, pushing me back against the bed.

"No, really. I need to go. My parents will
kill me
if I'm late." It was as if in the few minutes we'd been making out, Tom had grown a dozen additional arms. Every time I managed to peel one of his hands off me, another one materialized on a different part of my body.

"What's their problem?" he panted. Or I think he did. It was hard to hear what he was saying since his tongue was licking my eardrum.

72

"Oh, they're
tough."
I mentally substituted Tony and Carmella Soprano for my art-history-professor father and documentary-filmmaker mother.

"That sucks," said Tom. He loosened his grip on me for a second, and I managed to shake myself loose and stand up. After a minute he did, too.

"Well, I ..." he started to say. I could see him moving in for another grab and backed toward the door.

"Ah, good night," I said, putting my hand on the knob and turning it.

"Yeah, good night," he said as I opened the door. "We should try and--"

"Yeah, bye," I said. The only thing I wanted to try and do with Tom Richmond was avoid him, and that didn't seem like something we could really work on together.

Downstairs I searched for Rebecca, who was sitting next to Drew on the kitchen counter.

"I think I'm going to go," I told her.

"Where have you been? You've got--" She reached her hand out toward me.

"I'll call you tomorrow," I said, backing away.

"But--"

"I'll call you tomorrow."

As I walked over to Clinton Street to get a cab, my feet seemed to be beating out a rhythm that went
guys suck guys suck guys suck.
Slowly it evolved into
life sucks life sucks life sucks.
At Clinton Street there weren't any cabs, which is very unusual since there's usually one every

73

minute or so.
Guys suck life sucks guys suck life sucks guys suck life sucks.

What exactly are you supposed to do when a guy starts kissing you? There you are, having a nice time, minding your own business, just trying to appreciate a beautiful view, and the next thing you know someone's got his tongue up your nose. I mean, do I need to start carrying pepper spray?

"Life sucks!" I shouted out to the universe.

"Jan?" I turned around.
Oh my God. OH MY GOD! OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD!
There he stood. Tall. Beautiful. Perfect.

"Josh?"

"Hey," he said. "What's so sucky about life?" Wearing his black wool cap pulled down low on his forehead and a blue peacoat, Josh looked like a very cute sailor on shore leave.

"What?"

He repeated himself, carefully enunciating each word. "What. Is. So. Sucky. About. Life?"

I made a vague gesture as if to say,
Oh, you know. Poverty. Hunger. Racism. Bad kissers,
and then we just stood there for a minute. I hopped from one foot to the other.

"I was going to get a cab home," he said finally.

"I was going to get a cab home, too," I said.

"Maybe if we combine our efforts we'll have better luck," he said. He gave me a half smile, and I realized the rakish grin on Josh's face was probably the look Tom had been going for when he first slid his arm around my shoulders in the kitchen.

74

"Sure," I said. I put my arm out, thinking,
Stay away, cabs. Stay away, cabs.

Of course an empty cab pulled up immediately.

"You seem to have the touch," said Josh as I opened the cab door.

"It's a native New Yorker thing," I said, sliding across the seat.

"Where to?" asked the driver.

We gave him our addresses.

"I thought you'd left," said Josh.

"Oh." What can you say to that?
Actually, I was upstairs being mauled by Tom Richmond.
"No, I was...still there."

"Oh."

Silence. Josh started tapping his knuckles against the window.
Tap.
Pause.
Tap tap.
Pause.
Tap tap tap tap tap.
The hand that wasn't tapping was on the seat mere centimeters from mine. I thought about Rebecca saying,
You should make the first move.
I willed my hand to drift over to his, but it refused to budge.
Move. Move.

Nothing. Apparently having a crush turns you into a quadriplegic.

When the cab pulled up in front of my house, I reached for my wallet, but Josh said he'd pay.

"So," I said. I'd said it emphatically, like I had a really significant follow-up. Unfortunately, all I followed it up with was "Good night." I opened the cab door.

"Good night," he said.