And Then Things Fall Apart Read online

  Amanda is also the one I spent at least eight hours a week working with at the D&D. Eight hours is a lot. It’s more time than I spent with Matt during the week. More time than I spent with both my parents. I spent more time talking with Amanda, one-on-one about my life, than I did watching TV, for Christ’s sake.

  It’s my own fault. I’m the one who decided she was so cool in the first place. I was fooled by her makeup, her well-placed eye rolling, her willingness to listen to me while I blathered on and on about Matt and school and books and all the rest. What choice did she have? I was her bosses’ daughter. I had a choice, and I shouldn’t have chosen her. I ignored the little things she did and said that made me uncomfortable, like making fun of my mom’s jeans or taking quarters out of the register so she’d have enough to buy a pack of cigarettes at the 7-Eleven. It all seemed worth it to be in our girl gang of two, to hear her say “You’re right,” or “Got a light, Keekinator?” Making me feel like my life was as complex and subversive as I imagined it.

  I used to have a real best friend. Nicola. She is nice. She does well in school. She is also a teenager, and we text and study together. She used to come over and we’d try new things like ratting our hair to make retro hairdos or concocting natural facial masks from organic ingredients found in our own kitchens. Nic is great. She is well-groomed and hell-bent on Northwestern or Princeton. She is lovely, decent, and for all intents and purposes exactly like me.

  Amanda is not like me. She isn’t in high school. No, she’d been through all that crap and come through it smelling like a rose. She was smart about things I knew nothing about, like craft beers and sex, and twenty-one-and-over shows. She had her own car and apartment. She had a job.

  When we were together, I felt like I was finally sharing time with a like-minded individual. The thing is, my brain is not high school material. Why waste my time talking about SAT scores and homecoming and the latest homeroom scandal that no one over eighteen gives a rat’s ass about?

  Being with Amanda was—it was just amazing. She let me try smoking in the back when my parents weren’t around. I didn’t like it, but I loved just holding a cigarette between my fingers and staring into space like I was French and my heart was broken. It wasn’t then, but it is now, and Amanda, screw you. She’s, I dunno, twenty-three, twenty-four. I mean, barely ten years older than me. When she was fifteen, I was five. So, okay, there’s a large gap, but still. Too close for freaking comfort. Sick. Dad, you are a little sick. And I hate you. A little. And a bit more every day.

  Some people, they just get it. They do what they say they will. They show up when it’s important. They have integrity and genuine kindness and you can trust them with everything. Nic is one of these people. One thing is for sure, Nic would never have slept with my dad. The thought would never even have occurred to her in a million decades. Which is to say, a zillion billion years. An eon? An epoch? My eyes hurt and I am going to stop now so I can scratch the five places I am allowing myself to grate like cheese with my bitten-down nails.

  MUTANT FROGBOY

  Your hot tongue feels like

  Laughter in my mouth

  Alive.

  Your smooth amphibian skin

  Slides over me, silvery heat

  More.

  You are muscle and sinew

  Supple and balanced seeking contact

  Again.

  DATE: July 19

  MOOD: Dorian Grayian

  BODY TEMP: 102

  My name is Karina, so why doesn’t anyone call me that? Keek. It’s starting to sound like slang for urinating or puking. “Yo! Gotta take a keek.” When I was little, I couldn’t say “Karina,” so when people asked me what my name was, I’d say “Keek” and then smile like a big dope while they all oohed and aahhed. Fast-forward thirteen years, and this is why I am fifteen and known to one and all as Keek. Don’t make me keek.

  I totally keeked last night. For real. Gram made me chicken soup and an egg salad sandwich and gave me a big glass of orange guava juice, which sounds total yum but at about ten thirty it was just the opposite. I didn’t quite make it to the bathroom, because for a minute I didn’t know where or who the hell I was. I thought I was home and that Mom and Dad were down the hall, but, duh, Dad was in the basement and Gram was watching the night rebroadcast of Judge Judy. As if being fifteen with the chicken pox isn’t humiliating enough, I go puking down carpeted hallways.

  I so take the body for granted. You need it to move around and stuff. To bring thought to action. I’m all about my brain. I often think I would be more than happy to be a brain in a jar hooked up with electrodes like in sci-fi movies from the 1960s. Then I could keep myself amused for decades with my own mental blathering, or at least figure out how to take over the world with my understanding of The Bell Jar and rudimentary applications of sine and cosine.

  But here I am, weak and skinny, and I’m seeing health as something exotic. Wrestlers have intense strength and bulldog tenacity. Cheerleaders—whom I, perhaps unfairly, mock—can command their bodies to do splits, backbends, and hula-colorful-hoops around their hips, and barely break a sweat. The picture of health. I am like Dorian Gray: From afar I look like your average pink-cheeked teen, but on closer inspection, the blush is from fever and I’m covered in weeping sores like a leper waiting for Jesus. Christ! And so freaking itchy.

  I need my poor itchy body. Even though it betrays me all the time. Cancer cells could be lurking in my breasts right this second and only cause trouble when I’m in my fifties. My body could also derail my whole vague virginity plan with its own agenda, like it did that midsummer’s night in Matt’s room last June.

  Oh, God. That midsummer night in Matt’s room.

  Let me just say that last summer we had only been going out for a little while, but long enough to know that we were crazy for each other in a new and extreme way that surprised us both. Matt invited me to his parents’ annual A Midsummer Night’s Dream party. His parents are the biggest geeks around. His dad is some kind of executive networker and attends a lot of galas and fund-raisers downtown. His mom’s an optometrist with a thing for Shakespeare in the Park. His house is enormous, and the yard is even bigger. His parents must be surprised that their only son is such a jock. That he needs help with his English essays. That he doesn’t need eyeglasses. Needless to say, Matt’s parents really like me. A lot.

  I showed up to their big annual garden gala in a white sundress and a flower behind my ear. There were giant paper lanterns dripping light all over the backyard, glowing pale yellow and pink and lavender like miniature moons. Fire-flies twinkled at our fingertips. Most of the guests wore costumes, the women in fairy wings like oversize kinder-gartners, and garlands of flowers around their necks. The men went for a troubadour/Renaissance faire/Hobbit look with sandals and peasant shirts. In two words: Awe. Some.

  And then Matt took me by the elbow and pointed toward the garage, where this skinny guy with a giant papier-mâché donkey head started skipping among the guests, tossing flower petals from a basket slung over his arm and braying—like HEE-HAWing. “My mom gave him fifty bucks to do that,” Matt said.

  The donkey came over, took its head off, and it was—who the hell else?—Earl the Squirrel, sweaty, out of breath, and already half-drunk, laughing, er, his head off.

  “Hey, Keek,” he said like he was actually glad to see me, and then to Matt, “Dude. You haven’t lived until you have been a Bottom,” and then he cracked up again, glitter sticking to his forehead.

  “Don’t be an ass,” I said, and we were all giggling like idiots, and I hadn’t had anything to drink yet.

  Earl went to find food, and Matt brought me and a bottle of wine to his room so we could drink and talk and watch the lovesick fairies in the garden eat stuffed mushrooms and talk about the stock market under white Christmas tree lights.

  “Cool party,” I said. We were sitting on his bed swigging from the bottle like pirates. Up until then we’d only been able to make out on park benches like French people. Or in his car, or in the back of the D&D. We hadn’t even been at each other’s houses or anything official like that. But it was clear we were into each other and an actual couple, and there we were—on his bed. His room was semi-tidy and had a soccer ball in one corner and an empty fish tank in another. The wine was delicious. Or maybe after the first twelve sips I just got used to it. I’m so like Esther that way, hoping that one day I’ll wake up and think that alcohol actually tastes good and not like poison. It—and I mean the whole situation—was on fire with amazingness.

  “Cool party if you’re into that stuff. Shakespeare, I mean. You are, right?” He was so beautiful. He had a little glitter on him, too and his lips were dark from the wine. I was into anything he wanted me to be into. And what kind of honors English student would I be if I didn’t adore Shakespeare?

  “Yeah.” My voice was weird, low and husky. When I saw him take a book out of his back pocket, dear reader, I almost passed the hell out. Because then?

  He.

  Started.

  To.

  Read.

  To.

  Me.

  A FREAKING SONNET.

  Do I remember which one? Does it matter? There were thees and thous, enigmatic questions, and he had one knee on the bed, and then both, and then an elbow, and then we were rolling around on top of his sheets. My sundress, made of white cotton, became just another sheet, and off it came, so I was just lounging on his bed in my underwear, which was rather like a bikini.

  How did I get practically naked? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s like he Googled “How to seduce an honors English virgin” and was testing his new romancing skills on me. I was lying there all ready to let Matt gather ye rosebuds. No, really. My body was on autopilot. My brain was
in the back room with the dishwashers taking a smoke break, and the inner rubber band that usually kept my knees together had just snapped in two. Everything—every breath, kiss, eyelash flutter on my neck—felt so good that you could have taken a knife and sliced me from stem to stern and I would have loved it.

  But then there was a knock on the door, and my dress was back on fairy-magic fast, desperately holding on to my shoulders with two pathetic spaghetti straps, and there was Earl the Squirrel, leaning in the doorway, holding a paper plate of artichoke dip and toast points, saying, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo, yo?”

  Matt was all nonchalant, running a hand over his bangs and stretching in an obnoxious and over-the-top way to draw attention away from his RAGING ERECTION.

  Am I glad that Earl showed up? I guess. I mean, yeah. But not really. The thing about my virginity is that I want it to be taken from me—like pick-pocketed from my purse on the bus. No. I don’t want to be raped or anything sick like that, but I also don’t want to have to mull it over and make a big conscious decision about my course of action. But if my virginity is snatched—tugged gently from my neck like a diamond necklace by a handsome highwayman in the middle of the night—that would be great. I want to be in control and out of control at the same time. Which I know is irrational, a little gutless, and not really like me, but when it comes to the maidenhead, I am a big chickenshit.

  Besides, Earl’s WTF? face in the doorway, chewing with his mouth open, was never in one of the millions of virginity-losing scenarios I had imagined.

  So I got up. Scrunched my hair up in my fingers for that bed-head look, slipped on my flip-flops, and went back out to the party, my insides all jittery and my pulse thumping through my ears like soldiers on the march. I made small talk with adults. I quoted Shakespeare. Once in a while I held Matt’s hand and blushed because I wanted to kiss him with my entire body under the stars on that beautiful night.

  Now Matt and I are very familiar with each other’s houses. He knows where we keep the snacks and that the Cokes are in the back of the fridge. Coffee galumphs down the carpeted stairs when Matt comes over, falling all over herself, for a belly rub. But it is that first star-flecked night that I still think of before I fall asleep, the lazy nonchalance of it. No one ever told me that finding out about bodies and what I like and what I want from boys—men, what-ever—was supposed to be fun or that it was a moderately joyful process. It always seemed fraught with secrecy and shame. Pregnancy terrifies me. Betrayal terrifies me. And how insane howl-at-the-moon lusty I get whenever Matt breathes on my neck is a little scary too. That night was the only time things felt different. And easier. Why do I make everything so complicated?

  Still, when I see Matt tug off his ear guards after a wrestling match and his hair goes all spiky and he looks for me in the stands and winks, I remember the sheets and the fireflies and savor it like a butterscotch candy in my mouth, clicking it around my teeth. When I am old, I will probably remember that twinkling night more than other more naked and debauched nights that might never happen.

  But that night was a year ago already. And although I get a little brazen once in a while and I have been expanding my comfort zone with Matt millimeter by millimeter every day, I still panic and freak-the-hell-out just when things get really interesting. When my bones go rubbery and my mind slows down with desire, I’m all “Later, alligator,” gone in a flash.

  I’m making my (non)sex life up as I go along. That night in his room at the beginning of our relationship would have been the best possible time for Matt to reveal what he waited more than a year to tell me. If only he had told me then instead of last week. If I were writing the screenplay of my life, that is the place where I would have sofa king put it.

  AMANDA THE TWO-FACED TRAMP

  Unasked, you harvest

  My weaknesses and wounds,

  My anxieties and girlish blunders,

  My teenage dread and virginal dreams,

  Gingerly placing each one,

  Hot, private, painful,

  Into a Tupperware box.

  A heartbreak snack

  For later,

  To launch at me in sopping, bloody chunks

  Before you slink away

  And fuck my father in the freezer.

  DATE: July 20

  MOOD: Twice Shy

  BODY TEMP: 101

  I am too embarrassed to talk to anyone about my family. Except Matt, and for all I know, he has the hots for Amanda too. I wouldn’t put it past him. See where my brain is? Why am I able to type my guts out without fatigue but hardly have the energy to drag myself to the bathroom or sit up to drink the tea that Gram brings me each afternoon? And when I finally fall asleep, I have nightmares about babies in jars. Or Amanda, ripping open my neck and filling a beer stein with my blood at a vampire bar on the North Side of Chicago. She invades my brain all the time, and I’m sick of it. I can’t help but try to figure out when I should have started to mistrust her, to become suspicious. Why was I so addicted to her?

  Amanda and I went shopping together, often. In malls. Like teenagers in John Hughes movies. (Nicola calls malls “mals,” as in French for “bad.”) My best-est in the west-est new pal Amanda and I bought stupid jewelry and T-shirts with ironic sayings. Afterward she—real—and I—pretend—smoked in her car, listening to her iPod via the car lighter adapter.

  Listening to Amanda’s music was like being inside her brain. She always had it on shuffle, so it was like a trip through her entire life there in her crappy used hatchback, or whatever it was, with pennies all over the floor. There was corny musical music from Guys and Dolls (which she was in, in high school; a Hot Box girl, sofa king textbook), heavy-bass techno stuff, reggae, and some really old punk from her ex-boyfriend, who used to be in a mediocre band that supposedly played at the Double Door all the time.

  Even though most of it was benign, every song made me think of sex. And not just sex in movies or ridiculous

  Internet porn, but bodies in general. There in her car I remember thinking that people—and by “people” I mean me, Amanda, my parents, rock stars, baristas, CNN reporters, etc.—are free, for the most part, to do whatever they want. As long as no one gets hurt. How cool is that? AS LONG AS NO ONE GETS HURT.

  Every time one song faded into the next, I fake inhaled and exhaled plumes of renegade smoke, thinking of Amanda dancing backstage in leather pants or emerging spectacularly from a pool in Las Vegas wearing a bikini, water cascading over her navel ring. This is probably how my father thought about her too as he delivered pizzas all over the western suburbs. Ugh. Absolutely disgusting.

  Matt’s parents have a walnut-paneled basement with an upholstered white leather L-shaped couch. The corner of the L—well, let’s just say I like the corner of the L and Matt loves the corner of the L. We are currently at a standoff about how much further we’ll go in the corner of the L, because there is not really much further we can go without going through with it.

  I’m an only child, okay? If I had a sister or something I would have talked about this with her instead of my parents’ employee, who, unbeknownst to me, was about to embark on a covert plan of sleeping with my father and ruining my life and my mom’s life and everything else in the process.

  So imagine, talking with this very person about very intense, intimate things like the taste of a boy’s penis (!) and orgasms (?) and what am I supposed to do, and basically revealing how, despite my smarts, wisdom, and cynical disregard for mundane behavior, I am so inexperienced with this real-world stuff that it’s entirely embarrassing.

  What the hell would Nic have contributed to this conversation? Probably a lot. Probably would have asked me what I thought was important. Asked me why I was so scared. Told me I should probably take a break if it was freaking me out so much, because I wasn’t quite ready. Basically she would have made me feel like an absolute CHILD, which is why I didn’t talk about it with her in the first place. So instead I told that wise, empathetic, and loving dirtbag Amanda all this stuff with total trust, respect, and high regard, desperate to hear what she had to say about my sexual misadventures on Matt’s L-shaped couch.