I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends (4 page)

Before I met Sara, I wasn’t even aware of how poor we were. But the day I met her in kindergarten, she took out her shiny, new, gigantic box of Crayolas, the one with the sharpener in the back and fifty magical colors, like atomic tangerine, and it became crystal clear. My mom had sent me to school with a couple of broken crayons from Garcia’s Mexican restaurant. Since Sara had a beautiful bounty, I innocently asked to borrow one. “No,” she sniffed condescendingly. In that moment, I got a life lesson in both class warfare and cattiness. Naturally, I made her my best friend.

I was also a cheerleader in junior high and then again in my sophomore year of high school, but the sorority vibe of it just wasn’t my thing. The girls were always complaining about something trivial, or talking about their feelings. I hated the whole fake Kumbaya vibe, when these girls were ripping each other to shreds behind their backs. I did have a close group of girlfriends growing up, but they were mostly jocks, not your typical girly girls. In the end, I really loved hanging with the guys. Less drama and fewer complications.

I tried to skirt around my mom’s ban on boys, but her plan was extremely successful in one very important way. I had been raised to be a gigantic prude: I was completely naïve about sex and totally inexperienced. After my epic make out session with Ryan in sixth grade, I didn’t so much as kiss a guy again for another five (!) years. For my first two years of high school, while my girlfriends were hooking up and learning about sex and their bodies, I was still innocently passing notes to the boys I liked. Even though they flirted back, that was the extent of their investment in me because they knew moving forward would just mean blue-ball city. I wasn’t allowed to go to dances with boys, so I had to go stag with a group of girls freshman and sophomore year.

Nobody was having sex with me—and nobody was even talking about it with me. Not my mom, not my sister, and not even my best friend, Sara, who had taken a virginity pact with me, even though she was dating a guy who became a star Major League Baseball player. I actually looked up sex in the dictionary once just to figure out what it was.
Merriam-Webster
was not very helpful.

All this sexual repression was starting to make me really curious, and really hot and bothered. I had a TV in my room and, around age fifteen, I suddenly started noticing that when half-naked people hooked up on
Baywatch
I’d get super horny (Jeremy Jackson, people,
not
David Hasselhoff). But it was a particularly steamy make out session between Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams on
Dawson’s Creek
one summer evening that sent me over the edge. After I turned off the TV, I couldn’t sleep. I’d heard my friends joking about “flicking the bean” and it was like an animal instinct kicked in. I put my hand down south and went to town. I felt amazing and then suddenly, uncontrollably, I let out a moan so loud I worried I’d woken up everyone in the house, maybe even cute little Dallas next door. I snuck to the bathroom, totally blushing, but thankfully I was in the clear. Apparently nobody heard me.

Emboldened by my erotic discovery, I masturbated every night for the next—well forever. For a little visual stimulation, I started taping (it was still VHS back then) a montage of the dirtiest scenes I could find on
Baywatch,
love scenes between James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes in
Dawson’s Creek,
and a few Lifetime movies. I was convinced everyone knew I was a filthy degenerate. I was paddling the pink canoe so much my hand was getting cramped.
There’s got to be an easier way to do this without getting carpal tunnel syndrome,
I thought. Though science was never my strong suit, I had a eureka moment in the bathtub. Like so many industrious women before me, I realized the water stream out of the faucet could do the job. Needless to say, Calgon took me away—a lot.

So, in a few short years I’d gone from Ryan’s sixth-grade alien kisses to making myself have multiple orgasms. It was quite an achievement, if I do say so myself. I’d give myself an A for effort
and
execution.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I was not getting As for anything else, except maybe gym class. I was practically flunking out of high school. School and I just never meshed. I cried so hard the very first day of kindergarten, like shoulder-heaving sobs, that I got sent home. I ended up getting held back that year. I was put into “developmental kindergarten” because I was “emotionally immature.” My attendance in school from then on was spotty, bordering on truant. Bored, easily distracted, and possibly dyslexic, I went to the nurse’s office anytime I couldn’t deal with a teacher or student, or wanted to avoid a quiz on my archnemesis, the times table. The nurse would roll her eyes when I walked in pointing to a random spot on my body complaining of a phantom ailment.

But the thing was my mom was always happy to come get me. I think she was bored, too. Before she met my dad, she’d opened a successful pottery-painting shop in the mall. But after having kids she sold the store and became a stay-at-home mom. Alone all day and desperate for company, she’d scoop me up from school and we’d sit together all afternoon watching
All My Children
and
Maury
.

My early absences didn’t help my future success in school. My parents wanted to test me for dyslexia but my teacher told them I was “perfectly average.” She said I may not excel in school but that I was a “social butterfly” and that would help me succeed in life. By high school, I was getting mostly Ds and forging my dad’s signature on my report cards. I probably set a record for summer school classes needed to graduate. I was embarrassed about my grades and tried really hard to hide them from my friends. It didn’t help that my sister Rachel was a brainiac and would constantly call me stupid. “I got the brains and Court got the beauty” was her mantra. It always bothered me because I knew I was smarter than my grades made it seem. I was just totally lost when it came to school. Unlike a lot of kids, I had no clue what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t even think I
could
be anything because I was so bad at school.

One time, after getting frustrated studying, I sat on the patio with my dad and cried. “You’ll be okay,” he’d say. “You can always be a model.” I thought he was just being nice and cried harder. With my flat chest, baggy boy clothes, and broken nose—courtesy of a kick to the face from my sister’s handstand in fourth grade—I never really felt that attractive. Puberty wasn’t very kind to me.

Frustrated sexually and academically (who am I kidding, I didn’t give a shit about school back then), I felt like a big loser. But I was desperate to be in love, like all of those couples I watched on TV. It came to a turning point during the summer before senior year when I finally turned eighteen. Sara invited me to her family’s lake house in Michigan, where, after sharing several cigarettes (remember, this is the daughter of a doctor), she confessed that she’d been lying to me. She wasn’t a virgin. She and her boyfriend had been boinking for the last two years! Feeling envious and like a lame goody-goody, I vowed right then in my mind that as soon as I got back to Arizona, I was going to ho it up like it’d never been ho’d before. Enough was enough already! But first I needed some tutoring, because I was miles behind my classmates and, apparently, that little horndog Sara.

I decided that my kissing instructor would be Ryan, who I’d never stopped liking but who had moved on to girls who were more experienced. I started dragging him into corners and bathrooms at parties. He had greatly improved his make out skills and happily showed me the ropes. As word got out that I was shedding my nun’s habit, my other guy friends started making ethically questionable moves on me. Ryan’s best friend, Cole, threw him under the bus and told me that Ryan didn’t like me anymore. Because Cole looked like a blond Adonis I chose to believe him (I always had a thing for blonds, excluding David Hasselhoff). Plus, I was a sexually liberated woman now; I couldn’t belong to just one man.

I was ready to go to the next level with Cole, so I asked him to teach me how to give a blow job. He quickly and eagerly agreed to be my mentor. One night, we snuck onto a golf course and he instructed me how to use my already cramped hand, and how not to use my teeth. The golf course became our go-to spot for many future fellatio-fests. I understand why Tiger Woods liked to sink his balls in so many holes. Golf isn’t boring. It’s sexy!

On the way home from one of my dates with Cole, I pulled up to a stoplight, lost in thought. A truck with two guys in it backed up to check me out. I glanced over and the driver was a blond, blue-eyed surfer boy. And, at this point in my life, he was the best-looking guy I’d ever seen. He was God’s gift to women and the world. It was love at first sight.

“Hey, where ya going?” he said.

“Home?” I answered coyly.

“We’re going to P. F. Chang’s. Wanna come?”

“What school do you go to?” I asked.

“Camelback.”

Camelback was on the wrong side of the tracks in Scottsdale.

“What are you doing all the way over here?”

“Where do
you
go?” he said, kind of offended.

“Arcadia.”

“Of course, that’s where all the pretty girls go.”

With that, he peeled off into the night and I worried I’d never see him again. Instead, I kept running into this same guy all over town at parties, the gym, and the Fashion Square mall. I found out his name was Chris, star of the Camelback basketball team, originally from Maui. Once, at the gym, I left him one of my signature notes with my number and this message on his windshield: “You’re the hottie with the body!” He called me but said he had a girlfriend and the note got him in big trouble. I told him when they were over to get back to me. I may have become a guy magnet that summer, but I certainly was no home wrecker.

Once I mastered the art of the BJ, I was ready for actual sex. The weekend before senior year started, I found the perfect guy to deflower me at a pool party. Jono was a year older and worked at Costco. His mom died when he was younger, he was estranged from his dad, and he lived with a classmate’s family. Jono was shy, quiet, and kind of sad and mysterious. I’d never seen him out before this night. Thinking he’d be gentle and discreet, I made him my mark. After everyone went inside, I asked him if he wanted to go swimming.

“I don’t have a swimsuit,” he said.

“Let’s go skinny-dipping,” I answered bravely without really thinking it through carefully.

Number one: I was still very self-conscious about my flat chest.

Number two: I had an absolutely gigantic bush. Nobody ever told me or taught me how to shave down there.

Luckily, Jono didn’t notice or care. We peeled off our clothes, me covering my nonexistent boobs, and got in the pool naked.

“Hey, I’ve always had a crush on you,” I purred.

“Really? I’ve never seen you before,” he deadpanned.

Before I could get insulted, he pushed me up against the side of the pool and started making out with me. Then he fingered me. I think. Nobody had ever done it to me before so I wasn’t sure what was happening. After that, there was some bouncing up and down. Whatever was happening felt good but I stopped him.

We exchanged numbers and after he left I went inside to dish with my girlfriends.

“I think I just had sex!”

“You think?”

“What do you mean you think?”

“Are you sore?”

“Yeah?”

“Then you had sex!”

The drought was officially over. I was no longer a virgin. As senior year commenced, I skipped school about nineteen times to have afternoon delights with Jono between his shifts at Costco. At the same time, Chris had broken up with his girlfriend and we started dating, too, but not going all the way. He even got me a part-time job at Abercrombie and Fitch at the Fashion Square mall, where I folded a shit-ton of shirts and fought off our college-girl coworkers who tried to steal Chris away from me.

Jono was my sad-eyed fuck buddy, but I was totally infatuated with Chris. Chris wasn’t so infatuated with my relationship with Jono or my gigantic bush. After he put his hand down my pants during the movie
Shrek,
he made a stinkface, said “Whoa!” and requested that I tame the beast.

But Jono liked the big bush and didn’t want me to shave.

What was a girl to do?

I stole my dad’s razor, popped a fresh blade in, and did a hatchet job somewhere in the middle.

Though my dad was okay with Chris and dubbed him Cuddles after spotting him for the gazillionth time draped all over me on our couch watching movies, my mom did not like Chris and told me he was “shady.” In case you were wondering, my mom was still not talking to me about sex. She avoided the conversation at all costs and had a “no boys allowed in my room” policy. I think she assumed I was staying out of trouble, or just couldn’t bear to hear the truth. I knew she would murder me if she found out I was having sex.

KEEPING IT REAL

Hey there
Bachelor
fans. I’ve asked my family, friends, and your favorite members of Bachelor Nation to offer up tips, tricks, advice on life, love, and reality TV! Be on the lookout for insider info, confessions, and blind items as my journey to love unfolds. Let’s kick it off with the woman whose advice means the most—my mom.

My Mom on Men

In addition to “men are scum,” Sherry Robertson has many more pearls of wisdom:

Never marry a man with an ass smaller than yours.