Lying next to Terri in the back of the pickup truck as
it sped down I-5, my clothes gradually becoming soaked
with the flying mist, I felt a giddy anticipation. Something
big was going to be revealed to me on this night. I was
going to be let in on important secrets, and when I went
back to Hyak Junior High on Monday, people would immediately
see that I was no longer the chubby, lank-haired loser
they threw pine cones at every afternoon at the bus stop.
I had made a friend at summer camp that
year. In a normal year, I would spend most of my time
at camp hiding, reading The Silmarillion in a
top bunk until the counselor dragged me outside to play
capture the flag. The other kids, sophisticated preppies
from the city, thought I was weird, and you could hardly
blame them. My happiest times were when I stole away
to walk in the fir woods alone, singing, pretending
to be a fleet-footed elven maid, full of lore and woodcraft.
In actuality, I was anything but fleet-footed.
But that summer I was taken up by a girl
who, despite her rather striking ugliness, had secured
herself a comfortable position in the middle-school
pecking order. Terri was thirteen, in the tent above
mine, and her personality was so compelling that nobody
seemed to notice her appalling complexion or buck teeth.
She wasn't sought after by the boys, but she was everybody's
pal-- and nice to everyone, popular kids and fleet-footed
elven maids alike.
I didn't expect to see her after camp
ended-- I assumed that she had befriended me out of
pity-- but that September she called, thrillingly, inviting
me to spend the night at her house.
I don't suppose most parents would let
their daughters stay the night with complete strangers
these days. But in the seventies, we had a lot of freedom.
My friends and I used to roam the wooded ravines behind
our housing development after school, and our mothers
had no idea where we were until we came in for dinner.
Terri's bedroom was in the basement,
where the middle class kept its teenagers in those days.
She had a kind of dank underground suite all to herself,
in fact, with her own TV and bathroom. We had dinner
with her parents, went downstairs and watched The
Love Boat and Fantasy Island, then lay in
bed in the dark, talking for a while about boys from
camp, counselors we hated, songs by Journey and REO
Speedwagon. I felt satisfied with my performance so
far, reasonably sure I had managed to impersonate someone
Terri would call again.
It must have been about eleven o'clock--
I was nearly asleep-- when she got out of bed and started
getting dressed. I sat up, confused.
"We're going out," she said as she slid
open the window above her bed. "Get dressed. Don't turn
the light on."
I got up and put on my yellow painter
pants and King Tut sweatshirt. The sleepovers I'd been
to before had included activities like board games,
hair styling, and discussions of which character in
Little Women the attendees would most like to
be. It had never occurred to me that you could sneak
out of the house at night, and I had no idea why you
would want to. But I knew what I had to do. If this
night was going to be the first rung on my social ladder,
I had to act like I climbed out of my own bedroom window
at least three nights a week.
At the entrance to the cul-de-sac, an
old red truck pulled up. As we climbed into the truck
bed, I caught a glimpse inside the cab: at the wheel
was a young man of about 18, with unkempt shoulder-length
hair, sideburns, a denim jacket over a black t-shirt.
He leaned forward to turn up the volume on the radio
as we got in.
"Where are we going?" I asked nonchalantly
as Terri pulled me down next to her.
"Lie down. That's Keith, my boyfriend.
We're going to his place," she whispered. I wondered
why we had to lie in the back of the truck, but I knew
that this could be my chance to catapult out of my dreamy
childhood into the world of boyfriends and rock concerts.
To make the transformation permanent, I might have to
discard a couple of my less-presentable friends (Andrea,
who was in the Dungeons and Dragons club? Heidi, who
wore rectangular granny glasses and cowl-neck sweaters?).
This was something I was fully prepared to do.
We drove onto the freeway, over a bridge,
past the Pancake Corral, where I sometimes went for
breakfast with my family. After about twenty minutes,
we turned into a gravel driveway and stopped. Terri
and I sat up, shivering, and Keith unlatched the tailgate.
The truck was parked alongside a mobile home surrounded
by coniferous forest. It was dark under the trees, and
they dripped water on our heads.
"Well, here we are, ladies," Keith said.
"Hop out."
As I followed them up the steps into
the trailer, I saw him place his hand on the small of
Terri's back. Inside, a dark-haired young man sat on
a brown naugahyde sofa watching TV. He was also 18 or
19, and wore a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, faded jeans and
had his work boots up on the scarred wooden coffee table.
His hair hung down over his eyes, which were dark and
sleepy-looking.
"Hi, Terri," he said, glancing in our
direction and then looking back at the TV. Saturday
Night Live was on. Terri plopped down onto the couch,
took a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table.
"Let's go for a walk in the woods, Terri,"
Keith said, taking two cans of Miller out of the refrigerator
and stuffing them in his pockets. She looked at him,
then at me.
"I'll be back in a little while. You
can stay here and talk to Mark," Terri said, and followed
Keith out the door.
Mark shouted after them, "Shut the door,
Keith, it's fuckin' cold enough in here already!" Then
he got up and kicked the door shut. He sat down on the
couch again, and took a baggie out of his pocket. I
was still standing by the door.
"What's your name again?" he said, noticing
me for the first time. "You want to get high?" I sat
down on the couch and watched Mark fuss over the contents
of his baggie, removing pieces, pushing piles of green
around with his fingers. I was fascinated by the careful,
expert way he combed through his pot.
"Well?" he asked.
"I don't know. I've never done it before,"
I said.
He didn't say anything for a minute,
loading his bowl. Then he looked up, his solemn brown
eyes holding mine for a minute. He gave a short laugh
and took a book of matches out of his pants pocket.
"That's cool you're so honest," he finally
said. "Most people wouldn't admit that they never smoked
before." He struck a match, held it to the pipe, and
inhaled deeply.
I didn't know what he meant, but the
compliment gave me the same kind of pleasure I felt
when I got a good report card. He was too old to seem
handsome to me, with his hint of a mustache and dirty
fingernails. I had no idea why we had left Terri's house
in the middle of the night, why we had come to this
place, or what was expected of me. But I wanted Mark
to take me in his arms, kiss me, stroke my hair. If
he had, I would have done anything he said.
But he just sat there at the other end
of the couch, taking hits off his pipe, watching Weekend
Update and laughing occasionally. I felt a sense
of urgency. I had to think of something to say, edge
closer to him on the couch. But I just sat there, my
eyes on the television and my heart pounding, stealing
sidelong looks at him.
After a while-- it seemed like a long
time, but must only have been 15 or 20 minutes-- Terri
and Keith came back in. She was laughing, breathless.
There were grass stains on the knees of her pants. He
lit a cigarette and leaned on the kitchen counter, looking
at Mark.
"Time to go, girls! It's past your bedtime!"
Keith said, jingling his car keys, still looking at
Mark. He gave a short laugh. I got up slowly, willing
Mark to say my name, to say goodbye, just to look at
me before I went out the door. He kept his eyes on the
TV.
Terri and I lay back down in the truck
bed, and as we turned out of the driveway she rolled
onto her side to look at me. "So, what did you and Mark
do?" she asked, her voice sly.
"Oh, nothing, just talked," I said. "He's
pretty nice."
"I just lost my virginity," she said,
looking back up at the now clear sky.
We rode back to her house in silence,
and I never saw her again after my mother picked me
up the next morning. For a couple of months after that
night, as I lay in bed at night waiting to fall asleep,
I told myself stories about Mark. I imagined meeting
him by chance at the Pancake Corral, slipping away from
my parents on some pretext to give him my phone number.
He would call, say that he had been thinking about me
since that night, about how honest I was and how rare
a quality that was these days. He would pick me up after
school, and the other kids would watch as he put his
arm around my shoulders, casually possessive, and then
we would drive away.
Juliette Guilbert is
Literary Editor of Lime Tea, and is a correspondent
for Agence France Presse, which is probably based somewhere
in France. She also holds a PhD. in American Studies
from Yale University, which, plus 4 bucks, will get
her a cup of coffee. Juliette lives with her two children
and her husband, Ben, in New Orleans, LA.
Note: Juliette did not write this
bio, and she really wants me to take out any mention
of her PhD. Ha ha, sucks to be her.
