So, there was this girl I met on the first day of freshman year at my high school in the city. We had four classes together over the four years of high school. Biology. Chemistry. Poetry. History. I was so hot for her from the very beginning that it was nearly supernatural. Maybe, looking back on it, she was that hot for me, as well, but I don’t really think so. I am going to estimate that she was between 57 and 83 percent as attracted to me as I was to her.
But hey, if I’d known that for sure at the time, it would have been good enough for me. It’s amazing what the combination of high testosterone and low self-esteem will do to a guy’s expectations.
Right before I met the girl (Elizabeth. Her name was Elizabeth. Still is. She’s not freaking dead or anything. This isn’t that kind of story.), I had spent two weeks training for soccer season at a college campus upstate. That mattered because, well, speaking of high testosterone, I had been cooped up nonstop with fifty guys in a run-down, crappy dorm, listening to their caveman ideas about high-school women.
All the junior and senior guys talked about—and remember, these were the varsity players, the ones the coaches told us eleven times before breakfast were “the men you want to become!”—was sex. They didn’t talk about love or romance or dating. They talked about sex. They rated girls. No, they rated bodies, graded them, classified them. (There were no charts or graphs, but there might as well have been.) They specifically talked about girls as bodies, like, “I would so jump up on that body!” and “I had that body!” and “I’m’a get that body!”
My parents had never, ever talked about sex with me—still haven’t, really. Once, when I was about to head out to a big party sophomore year, my dad took me aside and asked, “Son, you know about, uh…”
He looked like he was going to die of embarrassment, and I know I felt like I might, too, so I mumbled, “Yeah, I’m good,” and that was the end of my training in the finer points of relationship building.
Which was probably just as well, seeing as how Mom was going to dump Dad’s ass without any warning the summer before junior year. Dad didn’t see it coming. I didn’t see it coming. I still don’t really understand what happened. All I know is that if obliviousness with females is a genetically acquired trait, my parents’ situation would explain a lot about my own.
Come to think of it, even if it’s an environmentally acquired trait, I’m still screwed. Meanwhile, Dad’s learning how to live on microwaveable dinners, and Mom’s living in a deluxe apartment uptown with her boss.
Anyway, I had no home training, and I hung out with a bunch of animal jocks. I had no clue how to get a girl, or how to treat her if I somehow did manage to get her. I didn’t even know what “getting” a girl would exactly entail. Would we hang out at cafés and have lively discussions about literature over lattes, or would it be basically all me having and getting and jumping on that body?
Hey, I was up for anything.
But Elizabeth. Wow. She was the kind of girl who was too pretty, too sexual for me to actually talk to in person as though she were a person, if you know what I mean. Basically, looking back on it, I flirted with her by insulting her all through bio class every day, because if I had tried to open up and be serious, I would have gotten all flustered and had nothing to say.
Because I was a dorky little freshman with braces, and she was smoking hot. She had poise. She was three inches taller than I was. She was from a much more sophisticated neighborhood. She outweighed me, for God’s sake, and the weight was distributed in endlessly fascinating ways. So I mocked her.
No, that line of thought doesn’t make any sense in retrospect, but it’s what I went with. We dueled and fenced our way through freshman year. She sat in the row in front of me, immediately to my right, in class. This one time I remember, we were dissecting fetal pigs, and she turned and asked me whether she was supposed to cut just the skin off of her pig’s legs, or cut deeper.
Sarcastically, I said, “Nah, just chop the whole extremity right the hell off.” In my defense, we had step-by-step notes in front of us, and there was a PowerPoint with diagrams on a tablet for every row of seats in the room. But the next thing I heard was a sickening crunch.
The teacher came running over and barked, “Elizabeth, what in the world did you do to that specimen?”
I couldn’t resist. I leaned forward and said, “I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say she pushed a little too hard with her scalpel.”
Elizabeth flashed me a look of pure rage. She looked kind of steamy when her face got flushed like that. There’s something so … erotic … about an angry girl with surgical tools who’s just mistakenly dismembered a gestational hog. Or maybe it was just the seductive scent of formaldehyde wafting through the air.
Then, this one Saturday night, about a third of the way through the year, my parents threw a dinner party, and my best friend, Jeremy, came along with his parents. Jeremy and I were supposed to stay in my room, but at some point, we snuck downstairs to the basement, where the bottles of booze were lined up. We just meant to sneak a few swigs, but I guess a few swigs provided enough alcohol to do the trick, considering I probably weighed about a hundred and two pounds at the time. Counting my sneakers, watch, keys, and phone.
Ah, my phone. After we completed the daring ninja mission of returning to my bedroom without our parents busting us, I decided it would be a brilliant idea to call Elizabeth and declare my undying love to her.
I might have been a bit sketchy on the precise definition of love at that point in the evening. Or, you know, in general.
Jeremy tried to wrestle the phone away from me. I mean, he really tried. I don’t remember the details, but I do know that my room got pretty trashed, and my phone screen was cracked when I woke up in the morning.
But true love prevailed!
Love, lust, whatever.
That’s how I found myself on the phone with an extremely furious Papa Elizabeth, who made clear several key facts to me:
1. Elizabeth had gone to bed, and left her phone on the hall table of their apartment. (I was like, Who goes to bed this early?)
2. I was calling after one in the morning. (I was like, Ah, scratch that last thing I said.)
3. He didn’t know who I was, or what I was thinking. (I was like, Dude. Who’s thinking?)
4. I had some serious explaining to do. (Yeah, I’m getting that.)
5. His daughter did not waste her precious time hanging out with lowlife boys like me. (Oh, yeah? Well, uh…)
But I was not to be deterred. I don’t know what I said, but there must have been pleading involved, and also claims of emergency status. And then—yay!—Elizabeth got on the phone.
“David?”
“Uh, yes, sir. Ma’am. E-lizzy.”
“Why in the world are you calling me at one forty-three in the morning?”
“I dunno. I miss you. And, uh, your face. And stuff. And the talks we have. You know.”
“What are you talking about? We don’t have talks. You make fun of me. And then you trick me into mangling dead piglets. How is that ‘talks’? Oh, my God. Are you drunk?”
I was horrified. I remember thinking my parents were going to hear her. “Sssshhhhh!” I whispered as loudly as I could. Spit flew all over Jeremy, who was lying on the floor next to me, literally gasping with laughter.
“You are drunk!” Then her voice changed. Suddenly, she sounded kind of triumphant. “Hah! You might laugh at me all the time, but I’m the girl you call when you’re drunk. Good night, David. Sweet dreams…”
And then she was gone. And then I was crawling to the bathroom. And then Jeremy somehow disappeared. And it was morning. The sun was too bright. My phone was broken.
And it was Monday. And I couldn’t look Elizabeth in the eye. But she couldn’t stop smirking at me.
* * *
Sophomore year, in chem class, we teased each other back and forth basically nonstop. Sometimes I hated her; sometimes she hated me. But always—always—I couldn’t wait to see her when she walked in. I wanted to see how she looked, what she was wearing, whether she was smiling. And then when she inevitably caught me looking, I never, ever started any kind of human conversation.
Then one day, I was deeply involved in a lab experiment, and Elizabeth asked me, “Is this the gas jet or the water spigot? It’s the gas jet, right?” Because for some incredibly stupid reason, all the gas-jet attachments in our labs looked exactly the same as the water taps. It was just an accident waiting to happen, if you ask me. A liability nightmare.
I wasn’t looking, okay? I was busy. I was involved in my work. Plus, Elizabeth was wearing a flowy dress and she was standing really close and she smelled really good and I couldn’t handle being so close to her. I said, “Yeah,” without even thinking about it.
Then there was this fwoosh! noise, and water was everywhere. Apparently, Elizabeth had hooked up the rubber tubing for a Bunsen burner to one of the water spigots, and then cranked that thing up. The water had gone shooting through the tubing, straight up through the burner, and all the way up to the ceiling of the classroom, before splattering all over everything within maybe a ten-foot radius.
So the chem teacher came over and started yelling at Elizabeth, who said, “But David told me it was the gas jet!”
The teacher asked, “David, is this true?” I couldn’t answer. First of all, I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. Second, Elizabeth’s dress was soaked, and clinging to her all over. I was afraid I might faint if I tried to say anything, but I finally choked out something about how I hadn’t been paying attention.
After class, she came up to me in the hall, poked me in the chest, and said, “So, was that really an accident? Or did you just want to see what I look like when I’m all wet?”
* * *
Junior year. Poetry. Our teacher, Miss Hawk, was obsessed with two things: haiku and 1980s song lyrics. I hated poetry with a burning passion. I had signed up for a short-story class, with drama as my second choice. You had to put a third choice on the form, so I had randomly put poetry on there. Elizabeth loved poetry, though. For the first time, I realized she was incredibly smart and funny and talented. Now I was the one who kept making mistakes. I mean, mine didn’t cause any lab catastrophes, but there were all sorts of poetical failures going on. It was like I was still figuring out how to hold a crayon, while she was seriously composing.
I still remember my best haiku:
Flying through the air,
They sparkle in the sunlight.
Dazzling flying fish!
And Elizabeth’s:
It takes just one look,
A skin on skin, a sparking,
A brush and a breath.
Elizabeth never said anything directly. Why would she have to? She just smiled and shined, except in one area. Miss Hawk loved bringing in audio clips for us to listen to, especially old recordings of poetry readings and her beloved 1980s pop songs. One day, she had us try to transcribe some of the poetry in small groups, and I realized that my ear was better than Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth had a lot of trouble distinguishing what the poets were saying, especially if there was background noise in the recordings. I didn’t make a big deal of it, because I knew she was so much better at actually writing and understanding poems than I was, and also because maybe—maybe—I was starting to learn something.
And then we had a lesson about an ancient band called U2. There was a line in one of their songs that went, “Sweet the sin, but bitter the taste in my mouth.” Of course, Miss Hawk wanted to go on and on about the deeper meaning, but Elizabeth leaned against me (yes, by this point I realized we had chosen to sit near each other in every class) and whispered in my ear, “Doesn’t it say, ‘The sweeter the sin, the better the taste in my mouth’?”
She was totally wrong about the lyric, but I didn’t care. Her breath was on my ear, her body was pressed up to mine, and her voice had that same tone I remembered, dreamlike, from my drunk-dialed freshman-year phone call.
I managed to gasp, “I’m not sure, but it probably should.”
When the bell rang for the next period, I had to sit there for a few minutes to calm down after everyone else left.
* * *
Senior year, in history, there wasn’t even any question of where we would sit. Our teacher, Mr. Romanescu, was a real winner: he weighed about three hundred pounds; he wore these bizarre sweat-dress-pants every day with a dress shirt unbuttoned at the top and several gold chains around his neck; and he was always sweating like a horse after a big race. Oh, and he had huge muttonchop sideburns, plus a handlebar mustache, which gave him the air of a pimp from a really old movie.
The first day, Elizabeth slipped into the seat to my right. When Mr. Romanescu waddled in, she purred under her breath, “Ooh, baby! Come to mama!”
How I loved that class. Mr. Romanescu actually knew his subject, but his grammar was awful. He would say things like, “If you was George Washington, what would you have done at Valley Forge?” Elizabeth would tap me on the leg, and say, “You think he minored in English?” I’d whisper back, “Nah, personal hygiene. But you was close.”
In March that year, we ended up at a party together. She had been in the cast of a play, and I had been in the pit band. After closing night, someone somehow rented a big, empty loft. There were kegs lined up along one wall, with piles and piles of big, red plastic cups. We were both drinking. Somehow, when the dancing started, even though the room was packed, Elizabeth and I kept ending up next to each other, in front of each other, back-to-back. And—unless I was crazy—at some point, Elizabeth started leaning into me. I couldn’t figure it out. We hadn’t been dancing with each other, per se. There had been other partners. There might have even been groups.
There had certainly been groups of beers going down my throat.
But there we were, pressed up against a wall. Elizabeth looked up at me and said, “Hey, you used to be shorter than me!”
I said, “Not anymore.” Because, you know, genius of wit.
Then she said, “That lyric totally should have been, ‘The sweeter the sin, the better the taste in my mouth.’ Am I right?”
Continuing to hold up my end of the conversation, I said, “Uh.” I wanted to say yes. I wanted to agree with everything she ever said, forevermore. But what came out was, “Uh.”
She grabbed my hand, and said, “I’ll show you.”
I had told my parents I was going to sleep at a friend’s house, which I somehow miraculously remembered. I said, “Wait, my ride.”
She followed me through the packed dance floor—we were holding hands!—until I found my friend and told him I had new plans. He grinned and said, “Yeah, I feel you. Just be careful.”
I was like, What can possibly go wrong?
Then Elizabeth took control. She pulled me by the hand down a bunch of flights of stairs until we hit the cold air of the downtown street, and then we walked until we found an alarming-looking alley.
If I had been sober, I would have been dragging Elizabeth in any other direction, because I have seen the Batman movies. I know what happens in deserted downtown alleyways in the small hours of morning. I wanted to fool around with a girl, not have a mugger jump out and shoot our mommies and daddies.
But I was not sober. So, when Elizabeth plunged her hands into my hair and used her hips to press me back against the wall of the alley, I ignored the little ping! of danger that was ringing in the back of my mind, and the louder gong! sound as my shoulders slammed against a metal sign riveted to the bricks behind me. And when she kissed me until I couldn’t breathe, and my heart pounded so hard I thought she must be able to feel it through both of our thin, insufficient jackets, and she said, “See? The sweeter the sin, the better the taste in my mouth,” all I could say was, “Yeah, yes, yes!”
We were there for a long, strange time, doing things just a few feet away from the street that I’d never done before with anybody else. Nobody was out but a few staggering homeless people, and a few—much scarier—loud, boisterous groups of teen gangsters. At one point, I was pretty sure I heard a young man’s voice shouting, “Yeah, baby! Get some!”
Elizabeth and I inched farther into the dark of the alley. I ignored, or mostly ignored, the damp of the dew forming on the metal behind my head, the shouts of the teenagers passing within ten feet of us as our hands roamed, the mulch of trash and puddle water underfoot, and anything else except the pulse at Elizabeth’s throat, the rush of my breath, the steam of hers.
And then, at some point, when the street was as quiet as a cathedral and my lips and loins felt bruised and dull, we both sort of woke up, pulled away, and looked at each other.
“We, uh…” she said.
“I should get you to a cab,” I said, my longest and most coherent sentence of the evening.
Without another word, we straightened the outer layers of our clothing, smiled shyly at each other, and stepped gingerly out of the alley. We were only about four blocks from a main street, where there were taxis running even at that hour. I held out my arm, and the very first one pulled over.
“Well, that was fun,” she said, with that wicked note I now recognized.
I reached in past her and handed a wad of money to the cab driver. As I went to pull back out, I looked at her from about two inches away, and tried to think of something to say, but it was as though I had gone back to freshman year.
I stepped back from the curb, and the cab left. I checked my pockets and realized I had given the cabbie all of my money. It was a twenty-five-block walk to my friend’s apartment, and he wasn’t expecting me, but my house was even farther away, plus there was no way I’d be able to explain it if I showed up on foot, reeking of alcohol and whatever else I’d leaned against or stepped in.
I started the long, scary slog uptown. My legs ached. Everything below my waist throbbed with every step. I hoped the gangs had called it a night, because I was too wasted to run.
There was a bitter taste in my mouth.
I texted my friend from the lobby of his building, and his phone woke him up. He buzzed me in, and it was basically all good.
I didn’t get shot.
I didn’t get stabbed.
Elizabeth didn’t get raped or killed.
But the next morning, I woke up feeling vaguely disgusted with myself. My friend let me take the first shower, but I had to put on the same clothes again. In the light of day, the back of each piece of clothing wasn’t pretty. And then I had to beg my friend for subway fare. I mean, he gave it to me, but it was just more proof of how stupid the whole thing had been, and how lucky I was to be getting home safely.
That was when I thought of Elizabeth.
I texted her in a panic. After the longest eleven minutes of my life, she wrote back, “Why are you always waking me up? ☺”
But, you know, I still couldn’t talk with her that Monday. Eventually, I got up the nerve to ask her out on an actual date, and the weirdest thing happened: we became friends. And then I couldn’t make a move, because it was somehow too late. We went back to her apartment, and talked until super late, and laughed through all our years of history together.
It was strangely terrible to find I’d done it all so ass-backwards. This was a girl I could have really liked, if I hadn’t liked her so much. If I hadn’t started out so transparently obsessed with having and getting and jumping on her body.
We went out two more times, and the same thing happened: great talk, great laughs, and not even a good-night kiss. It was all messed up, it was all out of order—and I didn’t know how to even begin to fix it. I had no game.
And then another guy asked her to the prom, and she said yes.
Tomorrow we graduate. I’m sitting here at a party, not drinking, maybe fifty feet away from Elizabeth, who’s leaning back against her prom date. I notice she’s also staying far, far from the alcohol. Maybe she’s doing some reflecting, too. Today was the day when we all wrote in one another’s yearbooks, and Elizabeth wrote this in mine: “Somewhere under the definition of SAGA in the dictionary, there is a picture of you & me.”
And damn, it’s true. But I blew the whole thing, so I am trying to figure out what I’ve learned, because next year I’ll be a freshman again. I might meet another Elizabeth.
Nah, there will never be another Elizabeth.
But now I know that a beautiful girl, a poetic girl, a plunging-her-hands-through-my-hair girl, just might be attracted to me, if I don’t blow it by being obnoxious, or by choking instead of opening up. Or by getting drunk and being dangerously stupid.
So I guess the question is, will I be smart enough to learn from all of this biology, chemistry, poetry, and history?
Elizabeth winks at me from across the room. She actually winks.
I don’t know whether I’ll be smart enough. But at least now I know it’s possible.