Who Do You Love(33)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

Marissa raised her quart of Gatorade, the one she’d spiked with vodka before we left town. “To new cuties!” she said, and swallowed, then passed me the bottle. Marissa had an older brother at the University of Florida who, for the extortionate rate of ten dollars a trip, would buy us peach schnapps and wine coolers in such adventurous flavors as Racy Raspberry and Whatta Watermelon, but lately we’d moved on to vodka, ­reasoning that it was more sophisticated than the sweet, babyish drinks that I suspected we both secretly preferred.

I took a sip, trying not to wince at the burn, or to worry when it felt like my heart had hiccupped when the booze went down. Acting like a careless, laughing girl who hadn’t come any closer to mortality than the death of a grandparent or a beloved pet was only part of it. Proving it mattered more. For that, there were boys.

First there’d been Jason Friedlander, who’d asked me to dance at my bat mitzvah and then, before the candle-lighting ceremony, had taken my hand, led me into an empty classroom, and kissed me. It was shocking, to feel his hands on my shoulders, his face against mine, his breath in my mouth. When Jason tried to sneak one of his hands up my top to explore the recently brassiered terrain, I pushed him away, not wanting his fingers to find the raised, bumpy line of my scar.

“What?” he blurted. He was breathing hard, and his brown hair, which turned out to be remarkably soft, was flopping over his eyes. “Don’t you like me?”

The truth was that until that day I’d never given Jason any thought, and didn’t have an opinion about him one way or the other. After that day, though, he became all I could think about. His face, which had once struck me as unremarkable and maybe even a little goofy, was suddenly handsome. His hands, his lips, the confident way he touched me—all of it combined made me dizzy, like I would swoon right onto the floor. Best of all, his desire, the way he’d chosen me, made it clear to the whole seventh grade that I was a normal girl.

By the time my parents drove me home—my mother, still teary, apologizing for embarrassing me; my father, gruff and a little stern, saying, “Now, Helen, just calm down”; and my brother, Jonah, rolling his eyes with a rolled-up joint barely hidden in his suit pocket—all I could think about was Jason. Had he liked me for a long time? What had caught his attention—my hair, my eyes, my laugh? Did he think I was pretty? Was he my boyfriend now?

The questions left me feeling like someone had adjusted my skin, taken nips and tucks and tiny tapers, and now it fitted me perfectly, and every inch of it was tingling with a new awareness. I felt unbroken, whole. Late that night, inspecting myself naked in the bathroom’s full-length mirror, with a towel pressed against my chest to cover my scar, I thought about Jason looking at me this way, seeing my flat belly, my narrow, high-arched feet, my long neck, the shape of my breasts. Maybe I could never be the prettiest girl or the one with the least-complicated history, but if I was a good girlfriend, if boys liked me, it meant that I was normal, just like Kelsey and Britt and the rest of them.

Tell me more, I’d said to Jason when he’d talked about making it to the state quarterfinals in Little League the night his mom drove us to see Edward Scissorhands at the six-plex. Tell me more, I’d said the next year to Scott, whose parents were getting divorced and whose dad had moved into a one-room conch shack on Casey Key near Sarasota. After Scott had been Derek, who’d starred as Captain Hook in our school’s spring musical. When the show’s run ended, I talked him into keeping the hook so we could park in handicapped spots when we went out for pizza. People would start to yell at us, to tell us we were inconsiderate and rude, until Derek flashed his hook and gave them a smile at once woebegone and brave, and they’d swallow hard and start to apologize.

After Derek was Anand, who had run lights during the show and comforted me after Derek hooked up—no pun intended, I’d told Marissa—with Jill Pappano, who’d played Tiger Lily. By my sophomore spring, Anand was replaced by Troy, a tennis player with beautifully molded calves and forearms and, it soon emerged, nothing much to say, although he was the most persistent of my boyfriends, always trying to slide his hands up one article of clothing or down another, or pushing my hand between his legs and saying things like, “Feel what you do to me.”

I knew what he wanted. By then girls were starting to get serious with their boyfriends. Marissa had gone all the way, except she and her boyfriend had both been drunk at the time, so she claimed it didn’t count, and Britt had given a guy a blow job, except none of us had met the guy, a sophomore at Duke whom Britt said she’d met during spring break on the beach. The truth was that sex scared me. My whole life, I’d had to be careful with my body, never running too fast, never getting too hot, taking vitamins and staying hydrated and washing my hands until my skin chapped, knowing that, with my weakened immune system, I’d catch any cold that was going around, and a cold could turn into the flu, which could turn into pneumonia, which could send me to the hospital again.