Or doing it, or popping her cherry -- granted my index and pointer did accidentally take care of her hymen one day on the couch, causing me to stare at my hand and wonder how the hell I could bleed that much without feeling anything, and then to have a cartoonish Ohhhhhhhhhhh, followed by, well, I guess we don’t have to worry about ruining your sheets, come out of my mouth, as she turned about as red as the berry in question.
Not to say that we were one of those weird couples that just “really enjoys being in each other’s presence, and doesn’t need anything else” because we weren’t. When the adults were accounted for as having gone to bed, or out of town, or not in the same room, or not in the back seat of the Avalon while we were driving in a loop for fifteen minutes around Swann Circle, and we were left to our own devices, well, we pulled the devices out. More than we probably should have. But barrels of hormones and three years of pent up sexual tension tend to have that effect.
The idea of sex with her was different. No shit I wanted to have it. In all honesty, I wanted to fuck that girl seven ways to Sunday—I only had like five positions in the repertoire, but you get the point.
Unlike the last one though, it was never at the back of my mind, nagging me. When ya gonna do it? When ya gonna do it? Huh? Huh? Huh? There was just some sense of content. Like yeah, you might not ever be inside her. Chances are, you probably will, but if you don’t, you’ll survive. More than survive, because frankly, I think I kind of loved her then.
Not because of the sex -- but, like most things, it happened eventually -- but because she was the kind of person who made you like the person you were, even if, for a good portion of her life, she hated what she was more than most.
Maybe hate is a strong word for it. Maybe saying that she was uncomfortable with herself, or that she wished she could see something other than her reflection when she looked in the mirror, or just straight up that she wanted to trade bodies with one of the skinny girls (a body type that was in such abundance in South Tampa) would be a more correct way to describe it. I don’t know. I wasn’t the one with the eating disorder.
It was like having someone tell you the solution to a riddle or a brain teaser after they laughed and said, you’re going to hate yourself when you hear what the answer is. Her habits weren’t that noticeable at first, but when you saw them, you saw them. I couldn’t stop seeing them. For a while, I wished I didn’t hear about the worst of it.
If you saw her, you wouldn’t say she was a stick by any stretch of the imagination. You wouldn’t say she was fat or chubby or heavy set with any conviction either. I wouldn’t know how to describe her with any other word other than athletic. Even that only gives you a vague idea.
The girl wasn’t Serena Williams, but her quads, hamstrings, and calves made kids like me wish they could swap lower extremities with her -- even if those lower extremities could squat 275 for doubles—to escape the SpongeBob Squarepants comparisons, and her think that a slice of bread could sustain her metabolism for two and a half days. Spoiler alert, that’s not how cells work. For her though, they did. At least for a while. Until she passed out on her kitchen floor because of a lack of nutrients in her system. Girl had self-control. I’ll give her that.
And so, after watching her lose, in her estimation—or rather her meticulous calculation, attained from stepping on the little two by three foot bathroom scale twice a day every day, and looking at the red figures scramble to form their final approximation which she’d then compare in her head to the previous day’s—close to twenty pounds in two or three months over the summer, an idea gets in your head. It took some time to germinate, but after seeing her forget her lunch at home for the third day in a row, or watching her only eat a bag full of baby peppers—which might as well have been celery, which itself is basically water, for all the calories and legitimate nutrition they gave her—you more or less knew. You had an idea.
Some of the comments that people made (not to say that I was any less guilty. I let her know just how “athletic” I thought she was, and how, damn, I wish I could have cavs like yours. Mine are so freaking small. Those weren’t any less damaging than one of the Walkers asking her, what’s it like weighing more and being taller than Palmer? I feel like that’d be awkward positioning wise, ya know, or when Coach Mahon told her, when you first got to Plant I was like “yes, finally a thick girl” but I guess you’re trying to move away from that one these days. We were teenage boys, Mahon was just a girls’ basketball coach. We didn’t mean anything by it. We should have known what we were saying. We didn’t.) didn’t give her quite the thoughts that she needed to have.
On days one of us saw she wasn’t eating, me, or Marge, or Em, or Liv would give each other some pointed glances. Occasionally, I’d offer some of my lunch. She’d say, oh, no, I’m fine, I don’t like eating before practice, or I’ll just eat when I get home. I’d push it as far as I could until I knew it was about as pointless as trying convince the sandwich to eat itself.
When we were walking by ourselves, they’d ask, or I’d ask, she’s not eating is she?
The answer was a cumulative droop of the body, a sigh, and, nope, she’s not.
She saw a therapist or two, after that a nutrionist, after that some guy at USF whose exact title I never actually figured out. He helped the most, at least by her estimation.
She still weighed herself. She started counting calories instead of just foregoing them. She was eating. More regularly. So that was a win.
Not to say that she’d quit cold turkey. There were still signs of it. Occasionally, her memory would fail her in the mornings to bring the food she said that she packed the night before to school. Occasionally, you’d catch her running five miles on the track after practice, which was about four and half more than she should have, especially with her tendonitis—which still makes her knees sound like Rice Krispies when she bends. Snap. Krackle. Pop. Occasionally, when someone would tell her, hey, you’re looking really good lately, have you been running? she’d say thanks, but you’d catch her looking down and crossing her arms in front of her stomach, hiding its flat surface from everyone in the room, just after her lips went down.
It was still there at the start of senior year, but usually she’d bring the same spinach, chick pea, red pepper, quinoa salad. Sometimes shredded chicken would make an appearance.
When she didn’t make it, sometimes I’d convince her to take some of my leftover lasagna or Halušky. Sharing felt good.
In my mind, I think that she finally kicked it for real about three months or so after we started dating.
I’m not saying the relationship fixed, it, that I made her feel secure, and loved, and therefore she could finally love herself, or any bs like that. I’m not saying it was me at all. When I think about it, it wasn’t me asking her if everything was okay and telling her that if she was healthy then she shouldn’t have any preoccupations about her body, it wasn’t me getting her to finally understand how dangerous her behavior was to her, or how it could have affected her development—I didn’t do that—, it wasn’t me who made her stop going on the scale, it wasn’t me who gave her confidence and a sense of pride in what she looked like.
That all came to a slow fruition because of time. Some people kick it. Some people don’t. It’s just like any other disorder. It takes time. That’s all.
I don’t even really feel like I did much for her. Yeah I listened. I offered her advice. I did my best with something I really had no understanding of because I never experienced it.
But that’s not something anyone else with a third of a conscience—not to mention a romantic interest in the girl—would have done. And plenty of her friends and family did do that too. Plenty did more.
When I think about it, really, nothing anyone did would have done anything if she didn’t finally figure her own shit out.
However, when I had the all too inevitable, trying to find closure after we’ve been broken up for God knows how long, but I still have feelings for you like crazy talk, she let me know just what I did for her.
To say that we broke up on, let’s say uncertain terms, would be a relative understatement. She had been in Italy for two weeks with her parents. I lost interest in texting her back. With the time difference, it felt like a hassle, even though I was up til three in the morning anyway. When I did respond, I was about as disinterested as a person claiming to be in love with someone could be. Cool, sounds fun. Nice. Bet that was a good time. Yeah, miss you too. were pretty common responses. Factor in how fucked up I got at parties that Summer and how depressed I became in my inebriation because I realized I couldn’t hook up with any of the other girls there, in addition to how badly I wanted to finally go to a strip club with all the guys before they left for UF, and how she was, in her words, uncomfortable with the idea, and the solution came to me pretty easily. Break up with her.
Basically, I got bored.
But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t regret meeting her at Ballast Point at six in the morning on that rinky dink dock that splinters like you wouldn’t believe, listening to her holding back tears, telling me, we’re going to college in a month and a half anyway, so we might as well get this over with. I told her I agreed.
She must have regretted it too. A good two minutes after we came to that agreement, we had our mouths pressed up against each other’s on the dock. Five minutes later my hand was down her pants as we were en route to the third floor of a L.A. Fitness parking garage. Twenty minutes later she was on top of me, and we were going at it with the kind of intensity that makes you forget the hard floor of a Nissan Rogue that digs into your back and the metal latch that makes your neck bleed a little bit when it sticks you. Forty minutes later we made an agreement that we should still have sex regularly and hang out whenever we wanted, but not be in a relationship.
I told her, oh yeah, this never doesn’t work out. She joked back, oh for sure, this is definitely the healthiest option for us. Won’t be any repercussions at all. Nope, none, I said.
So we went on like that. Going out to dinner together. Playing tennis. Watching chopped marathons. Having jam sessions. Cooking together. Taking naps on the floor. Fucking on our parents’ couches every single chance we got—sometimes she’d just put on boxers and maneuver the fabric around so she didn’t have to worry about rushing to put on pants if she heard the impossibly loud steps her dad made when he came downstairs. Afterwards, I’d mention other girls I was interested in, being far too obvious about who I was messaging, making sure just she knew just how blasé I was about her. Sometimes I’d ask if she had anyone else she was going after. She’d always say no, and ask me how Caroline Gilhoul or Brooke Dorman was.
When everything turned to shit, and she told me, I can’t do this anymore. I sat in my room for a night crying, wishing I could have her back. Two weeks later, I texted her, asked if she wanted to see me before I left for school.
We sat through an awkward dinner at Bar Taco, talking more about how the guacamole was okay, but the shrimp bahn mi and pork belly were pretty killer, instead of how she was doing or if I was ready to leave Tampa in a week and a half. In any event, I asked her back to the house. The parents were out, but Mer was home. We ended up in the shed outside. The one dad and I made into a gym complete with dumbbells, a barbell, bumpers, homemade jerk blocks, and plumbers pipe we used for pull up bars—a far cry from the room’s original purpose, a way for the builder of the neighborhood to escape his family and drink like the mad man that he was.
If we were poles, I was S and she was N. Although we tried resisting the pull for a half hour, removing ourselves from the room, and practically banging our heads against a wall to get the urge to jump the other’s bones out of our heads, the attraction was a little too much—despite it being one of the weakest forces in the universe, just behind Hydrogen bonds. I ended up laying on the floor. Forming puddles of sweat shaped like my shoulder blades and lats. After, I pressed her up against the jerk blocks. In the dark, all I could see were her shoulders. Hearing her say my name gave me chills. Hearing her moan made me slap into her faster. That lasted until I left. Awhile after too, if you count her sending me pictures of her in that blue lace thong with her arms acting in place of the matching bra, or her telling me, I had a dream last night that we had sex. You wouldn’t believe how horny I’ve been since you left, or me calling her every time I was drunk or high, or three hours late to a four hour Chem lab, or just a little home sick. The day I called her about four times with no response, consequently it was also the day that she went to the beach with the guy she had just started dating, she returned a message at ten to tell me, this isn’t good for us to have to keep using each other as crutches. We have to move on. I just said okay, yeah, no, you’re definitely right, not listening to the rest of what she said, and wondering how I was going to go back into the room of guys that I had just met two weeks prior with eyes that looked about as vulnerably pink as could be. I decided to blame it on a joint if anyone asked. They didn’t.
So, I didn’t talk to her for a week, until I called her Sunday morning at seven fifteen, the only time that the born again Christians running her Jesus club retreat allowed people to use their phones. I told her that week had been good for me to think, and that I was pretty over her. Of course I wasn’t. But I did a decent job of convincing her and myself.
That is until I called her, white girl wasted off a bottle of Barefoot, after I decided I wasn’t getting anywhere on my research paper. The conversation sounded about as pathetic as the situation in question was. I told her, I hate it here. I lied when I told you I was having a good time. The people I hang out with are douche bags and I know they call me a fag for hanging out with girls. I’m one hundred percent transferring, when she asked how school was going. When she mentioned seeing me when we were home for break, I said, Sav, I’m not going to be around you. That’s not happening. I can’t do that. She asked me why, I paused, wanting to say, cuz I’m still in love with you. I settled for, you know why. She told me, Dodge, nothing’s going to happen. I said, I know. That’s the problem.
We did see each other when we got back home for that all too inevitable, “hey let’s meet up, I know it’s been god knows how long since we broke up, but I’m still in love you, and definitely need to find some closure at some point” talk that I texted her about when I finally came home for Thanksgiving break. We met at Fred’s—the place we used to park when we couldn’t find anywhere to be alone. I wore black jeans and boots, shoes clearly meant for any other state's weather than Florida's. The thin t-shirt I had on was drenched after five minutes of walking on Bayshore. Only adding to how much of an ass I made out of myself.
She skated around the existence of her boyfriend, whether she knew that I knew or not, I couldn’t tell, asked me if I had hung out with Morgan or the Walkers since I had been back about three times, and told me that she didn’t miss Tampa at all. She said she couldn’t wait to get back to Georgia. The last thing she told me was, you know Pete, you’re always going to be the guy who helped me get over my eating disorder, and I’m really thankful for that, but I think it’s good to move on. It sounded as patronizing as it reads.
I wanted to tell her, in the cold sarcastic voice that only Kat can really pull off, thanks, but you can keep the credit. Unsurprisingly, I just nodded and smiled. Is there ever really a good response to something like that?
In total I think I said about thirty words, none of which even kind of revolved around what I had planned to say to her. My sense of confidence that I had felt rolling into the parking lot had been replaced with the kind of nervousness and overwhelming self-doubt that I used to feel in middle school AAU games when our team would show up and find out we were playing against kids with muscle definition, full on beards, and ups you didn’t think a seventh grader could have. Like oh. I’m screwed. No surprise. That’s how these kinds of talks have always gone for me. I remember scoffing a little bit when she asked about seeing Morgan and the Walkers for the third time, and asking, don’t you think it’s funny how before we could have talked for days, but three months later we can barely get through like ten minutes of conversation?
A couple hours later she told Em, I never noticed it before, but he’s actually a huge dick.
I remember thinking the conversation went about as well as it could have gone. Awkward and uncomfortable as hell. About as good as it could have gone.
