Love Hurts

  Well, I knew a punch line when I saw one. So the next day at lunch, when no one was looking, I spilled her Diet Coke all over her fancy shirt and said, ‘None of this happened.’ And the next day, my bumper just happened to ram into the side of her daddygirl Cadillac. I left her a note: None of this happened. And it didn’t happen the next day, either.

  I, for one, was amused.

  It was hard for me not to feel a little stupid about Lily White. Not because it ended or that it had gone on for three months, but because I’d started it in the first place. Lily was the popularity equivalent of a B-minus student – never the brightest bulb in the room, but still lit. She never laughed at a joke until she saw other people laughing at it, too. Even when we were kissing, she never seemed to admit that we were kissing – it was like I was saying something she couldn’t hear, and she was just nodding along to be polite. The first time we got together, it had less to do with romance and more to do with Miller Lite. It took just two cans for her to turn playful. We kissed; it was nice. And for three months we pretty much stuck to that. The kissing was hot, but Lily was pretty insistent about not letting the fire spread. Every time I tried to take her clothes off, she suddenly had somewhere else to be. Every time I felt her up, she acted like my hands were cold. And every time I tried to go near her pussy, it jumped away.

  I could lie and say I swore I was through with girls, but really I figured I needed to find someone better than Lily White. When Ashley Cooper came to town, I was primed.

  She made one hell of an entrance.

  She was ten minutes late to homeroom, because in her old school homeroom was at 8 and in our school it was at 7:50. Nobody’d told us there was going to be a new girl; they never do.

  What I’m saying is: I wasn’t expecting her. Then suddenly there was this girl in front of our class, trying to explain to Mr Partridge who she was, only Mr Partridge hadn’t heard a complete sentence since he was eighty, which was a long time ago. He was telling her she was late, and that he was going to mark her down for being late. She made the mistake of asking him if he even knew who she was, and he shot her a look like she’d just told him that World War II was over. Then he shook his head and said, ‘Sit down, Antonia.’

  Man, she looked awesome. Short red hair, full full lips, shirt so tight you could check for tattoos underneath. Most of us put up with Mr. Partridge when we had him for history because at the end of each marking period we could steal his marking book, change the grades, and know we’d be getting As. But Ashley wasn’t the type to let it go. ‘Who’s Antonia?’ she asked. ‘I’m not Antonia.’

  ‘Hell you’re not,’ Mr Partridge chided. ‘Sit down!’

  I thought she’d storm back out; she had that pose. But instead she turned to the class – we were all treating this like gossip unfolding before our eyes – and said, ‘Who the fuck is Antonia?’

  I was so snagged. There was no way I could say something to her. But there was no way I could ignore her, either.

  ‘Antonia’s my sister,’ I said.

  Ashley walked over to me.

  ‘Do I look like her?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I told her – it was really the truth. ‘But I don’t look like her, either, and that’s what he calls me all the time.’

  ‘So he thinks I’m you?’ She didn’t sound offended by this, which was a start.

  ‘He’s looking forward to the day that a man walks on the moon,’ I replied. ‘Don’t take it personally.’

  ‘I try not to take anything personally, Antonia’s sister.’

  I had looked at her eyes for a split second, but now I was looking at her arm. The light from the window was hitting it and I couldn’t stop staring. I’ll admit it – I have a thing for a little hair on a girl’s arm. Not head hair or anything like that – just that soft, translucent hair that looks like a spider wove it. She had that, and some freckles, too.

  ‘You’re new here,’ I said. I mean, duh.

  ‘It shows?’ she said in a dumb-little-girl voice. She tilted her head to the rest of the class. ‘Do they always stare like that?’

  ‘I’m not sure they’ve ever seen a nose ring before. They probably think you’re from MTV.’

  I don’t think Ashley was expecting me to joke. Her laugh caught even her by surprise. She kinda laughed like a barking seal. It wasn’t very cute, but it was definitely sexy that she didn’t care.

  ‘I’m starting to see why Mr Ancient up there thought I was you.’

  If she’d asked me to jump her right then and there, I swear I would’ve. It’s like my mind and my body had the same voice, and they were both yelling, Hell, yeah. The only difference being that my mind, which knew a little better, added, Oh shit. Trouble.

  ‘So do I get your real name?’ she asked as the bell rang and we had to head to class.

  ‘Lucy,’ I told her.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you around, Miss Lucy,’ she said.

  That sealed it. I was completely in danger of falling in love.

  Nobody’d ever called me Miss Lucy like that before.

  Only a certain kind of girl could make Miss Lucy sound tough.

  There’s some history here.

  With all due respect to my mother (although I’m not sure how much respect she’s truly due), Lucy has never been the right name for me. The role models were all wrong. Like Lucy from the Peanuts comics. Okay, so she was probably a lesbian. I mean, her brother’s gay (thumbsucker!) and Schroeder, the boy she pretends to have a crush on, is so gay it hurts my teeth. Plus she’s friends with Peppermint Patty and Marcie, whose relationship has lasted longer than my grandparents’. But even if she was a lesbian, I wasn’t going to be like Lucy. I didn’t want to be. You get a sense from watching her that she’s going to end up being somebody’s evil boss.

  And then, of course, there was Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy. I wanted to love Lucy, really I did. I kept waiting for the episode where Lucy and Ethel finally ran off together and made out. But eventually I realized that wasn’t going to happen. Lucy was scatterbrained like me, all right, and I could definitely relate to the way everything she touched turned into a complete mess. But I knew I’d last a whole five minutes with a guy like Ricky. Maybe not even that. I understood that deep down he was supposed to love her and all, but most of the time I found him to be a whining prick. I’d been there – thank you, Lucy – and I had no intention to go back again.

  That left me with the only famous Lucy remaining: the one who had a steamboat. She came into my life in the same way she comes into most girls’ lives – at recess. I was in second grade, and the second-grade girls were sharing the pavement with the fourth-grade girls – the fourth-grade girls being, in my second-grade eyes, girls of infinite wisdom and certitude. I never would have gotten close enough to hear a single word the fourth-grade girls said, but Mrs Shedlow, the recess supervisor, was a firm believer in democracy, so she’d lined us up second-fourth, second-fourth for the jump-roping. She took one end of the rope and Rachel Cullins’s older sister, Eve took the other. My friend Grace was the first girl to jump, and the rhyme she got was a familiar one:

  Strawberry shortcake

  Cream on the top

  Tell me the name

  of your sweet heart.

  Is it A . . . B . . . C . . .?

  Grace’s foot hit the rope on B, shackling her in eternal devotion to Barry Lefner for at least the next ten minutes. A fourth-grade girl got to R. But most of the second-grade girls couldn’t make it past Evan Eager. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were exhausting the alphabetically early boys, or whether it was because Eve knew my name since I was friends with Rachel, but whatever the case, when the rope started turning for me, the strawberry shortcake was sent back to the kitchen, and Miss Lucy sailed right in.

  Miss Lucy had a steamboat

  The steamboat had a bell

  Miss Lucy went to heaven

  And the steamboat went to

  At this point I tripped up in a downward directio
n, skinning my knee and coming way too close to smudging my favourite shirt. When the next girl went, the shortcake had returned. I walked over to Rachel and asked her who Miss Lucy was.

  Now, of all the Cullins sisters, Rachel was always the one to blush fastest. And I’m sure just the mention of Miss Lucy was enough to make her feel like the worst kind of sinner. There was no way she could share the rhyme with me. No decent girl would. My older sister, Antonia, certainly wouldn’t. She was already in junior high, planning her hypothetical wedding day.

  Luckily, a girl named Heron overheard my question. Heron was fairly new to our school, and generally untested. When Mrs Park had introduced her to the class, she’d said Heron’s name was ‘Hero . . . with an n.’ That set Heron back a couple of months. She wore clothes – even then – that seemed like hand-me-downs from when her mother had been in second grade. I didn’t know what to make of her.

  ‘C’mere,’ she said to me now.

  Curious, I obliged. She told me to sit down with my legs making a wide V. (Don’t worry: I was wearing pants.) Then she sat across from me and touched her feet to mine. She started to make a patty-cake patty-cake motion, and I knew that I was supposed to clap my hands to hers according to a certain order. So far, so good.

  ‘It’s like this,’ she said. And then she presented me with my last possible role model.

  Miss Lucy had a steamboat

  The steamboat had a bell

  Miss Lucy went to heaven

  And the steamboat went to

  Hello, operator

  Please give me number nine

  And if you disconnect me,

  I’ll chop off your

  Behind the ’frigerator

  There was a piece of glass

  Miss Lucy sat upon it

  And it went right up her

  Ask me no more questions

  And I’ll tell you no more lies

  The boys are in the bathroom

  Zipping up their

  Flies are in the belfry

  And bees are in the park

  And boys and girls are kissing

  In the D-A-R-K

  D-A-R-K

  D-A-R-K

  DARK DARK DARK

  It’s not a rhyme, because it doesn’t really rhyme. It’s not a song, because there’s no real music. It’s not a limerick because it’s not Irish. At some point, I guess I just started thinking of it as a biography.

  By the time I got to senior year of high school, I figured I’d run Miss Lucy’s story in my head at least a thousand times. In the beginning it was a source of endless amusement. Then it was one of my earliest pieces of nostalgia – when I was a sixth grader, I used it to remember the fond innocence of second grade. Then it became a place my mind went from time to time. Science class boring? Well, Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Dying to get off the phone with the friend who won’t shut up? Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Stuck in the car while Mom runs in for the dry cleaning? Miss Lucy had a steamboat.

  I had no idea what it meant. That was the beauty of it.

  I could relate to Miss Lucy because her life made absolutely no sense.

  I’d say I was itching to see Ashley again after our first brief conversation, but an itch is something you can scratch, while absence is something you can’t really do shit about. She wasn’t in any of my classes; since I was in all of the average classes, this meant she was either really smart or really dumb. There was a slim chance she’d just decided this place wasn’t for her and had left after homeroom. But that wasn’t the option I was hoping for when lunch began.

  ‘You misplace your attention span?’ my best friend, Teddy, asked when he caught me looking around.

  ‘There’s this new girl,’ I said.

  Teddy snorted. ‘Now, that didn’t take long, did it?’

  Teddy was once the new kid, too. He was born in California, but he spent most of elementary school in Korea. Then his parents moved back to California when he was in sixth grade. In tenth grade, they moved again, this time to our town. That’s when I met him – the first day of tenth grade. I hated him almost instantly.

  His first words to me were ‘If you’re not a [not nice word for lesbian], you sure as hell dress like one.’

  I must’ve immediately looked miffed, because he quickly added, ‘Hey, to me [not nice word for lesbian] is an affectionate term. After all, I’m a big ol’ [rather sexually explicit word for a gay man].’

  I wasn’t ready for terms, affectionate or otherwise from him. I was still coming to terms with myself, dealing with the anxiety and disappointment and exhilaration of being into girls. I tried avoiding him for months. It didn’t work.

  ‘You got it bad, and that ain’t good,’ he said to me now.

  ‘She called me Miss Lucy,’ I told him.

  This made Heron, also at our table, perk up. She’d been reading. She was always reading. She was the only person I knew who’d gotten carpal tunnel syndrome from holding books for too long.

  ‘Miss Lucy is our thing,’ she said. She wasn’t saying it out of jealousy or possessiveness. It was like she wanted to remind herself.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked Teddy. ‘Use your gaydar.’

  ‘You know gaydar isn’t like air-traffic control,’ he tsked. ‘The person actually has to be in the room.’

  ‘Well, she’s not here,’ I said. ‘So I’m going to find her.’

  ‘That’s ballsy,’ Teddy said.

  I looked to Heron for some help.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. That was her version of advice.

  As I left the cafeteria, it became a test: if I found her, surely that was a sign that things were meant to be. Granted, the sign wouldn’t really spell out what those things were – it would be like a street sign that said stuff ahead. But that was good enough for me.

  I found her in the parking lot, leaning on a blue car, eating French fries.

  ‘I had to reward myself for surviving this morning,’ she explained, offering me some.

  ‘That bad?’ I asked, taking a few.

  ‘Yeah, but not without its prospects.’

  I was so used to being the brazen one that I just about flipped to have someone be brazen in my direction.

  ‘Prospects, eh?’ I said, fishing for confirmation.

  ‘Yes, Miss Lucy,’ she replied, stretching away from the car, toward me. ‘And I believe the afternoon’s already getting better.’

  You should never kiss someone in the first ten minutes. I know that now, but back then it just seemed like nine minutes too long to wait.

  ‘So, are you girlfriends or what?’ Teddy asked me, three weeks after Ashley and I started our thing.

  The only place I called her girlfriend was in my head. Sometimes I’d say it about a million dozen times in a row, staring at her in class. I wasn’t secret about it or anything. Hunger is something you can’t hide.

  ‘I dunno,’ I told him. ‘I think I’m her girlfriend, and I guess she’s mine. We don’t talk about it.’

  ‘If you’re not girlfriends, then what are you?’ he pestered.

  I didn’t tell him the answer, because I was too proud of it and also a little embarrassed by my pride.

  Even if I wasn’t her girlfriend, I was definitely her Miss Lucy.

  ‘Come over here, Miss Lucy, and give me a hand,’ she’d say, and I’d be over in a flash, whether it was to sort out her locker, fill in her homework, or unhook her bra.

  ‘I like you, Miss Lucy,’ she’d tell me, and I’d have to do everything I could not to lob a love back at her.

  But she could tell. Oh, she could tell.

  Lily White could also tell. She could try to hide herself in the cheer squad at lunch or look away when she got near my locker, but damned if the news didn’t spread to her ears anyway. I made sure to smile extra wide whenever I saw her. One time, Ashley gave me a big ol’ love bite, right under the collar. That day, when I was passing Lily White in the hall, I couldn’t help myself. Right when she was looking at me, I pulled the c
ollar down a little to show her.

  ‘That’s gross,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t happen,’ I told her.

  Nobody’d ever bothered to tell me that if you get too caught up in running away from the wolf, you end up in the arms of the bear.

  As for Lily White, a few days later she started dating Pete, who was much much nicer than me. But I doubted he was as good a kisser.

  ‘You’re a great kisser,’ Ashley would say.

  ‘Miss Lucy, I’d be lost in this town without you,’ she’d tell me.

  ‘You’re so pretty,’ she’d swear.

  The things she’d do to me, I’d never even had the imagination to imagine.

  ‘When’s she going to hang out with us?’ Teddy would ask. ‘Why do the two of you always have to be alone?’

  I didn’t know how to explain it to him. ‘It’s not that she doesn’t like you—’ I started.

  ‘How could she? She’s never really met us.’

  ‘She just wants to spend her time with me. Is that so wrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ Teddy said. ‘Like this, it is.’

  Heron didn’t say a word.

  ‘I’m through with you,’ I said. ‘Can’t you think about me for once?’

  ‘You’re doing enough of that for all of us,’ Teddy shot back.

  ‘Forget it. Forget all of it,’ I said, grabbing my backpack and storming out to the parking lot. I thought I’d find her there, but her car was gone.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked, then felt stupid for doing it.

  I didn’t go back to the cafeteria. I found my own space, sitting on the floor around the corner from the gym.

  I told myself the emptiness I felt was the space hollowed out from missing her. A negative space that was positive. The loss that meant I had something to lose.