Well, the big move (such that it is) is complete, and Alex is now a resident of Berkeley, California. Over this past weekend, the very last of the buttondown shirts and the latest issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities made it into the little studio, and the sleeping nook has been turned into a temporary wardrobe/overflow space for Al’s stuff. He set up his Xbox and the obscenely large television that goes with it, and almost immediately started playing FIFA 20 “to make sure everything works properly.” This setup is really only sustainable for at most a couple of months — what little space I had in here I have kept scrupulously tidy and clean. With another person’s treasures (ahem) it feels overly full, like it needs to be held over a nursemaid’s shoulder for a good winding.
And tomorrow the countdown to Jamie and Bex’s wedding commences, with Alex’s departure for a week in the London office before the pre-celebration parties and dinners and rehearsal kick off. It seems hardly possible that the day is almost upon us, after an entire summer of feeling like I’ve had Julian breathing down my neck, both figuratively and literally. I’ll be in East Sussex next week (next week!) myself, getting there in time for Bex’s hen night on Thursday night, though I suspect the jet lag may make my appearance there a short one. Jamie’s stag do is the same evening, and Al is mulling over whether his attendance is really as compulsory as Jamie insists, given that Julian has made it clear he’s going, Alex or no.
For the first time in all of this mess, it’s Julian’s good behavior I can count on more than Alex’s. After our brief run-in at my parents’ house, Jules and I have been corresponding again, almost cordially. He’s still “courting” (his word) Fenn, and has promised me that even if he can’t be the man for her, he will treat her fairly. “Have I ever done anything to Fenn that put her in danger?” he wrote to me. “Have I ever given you reason to think I would be the monster to her that you fear? All I’ve done for her, year after year, was show kindness and concern, give her help in the ways I could. Be reasonable. If I not am the man for her, so be it. It is her decision, but until then I will do whatever it takes to make her happy. She deserves it alone of all in that family.”
My dad has also shed some light on what occurred in Burbank. He’d thought the best thing for Alex, Julian and me was to get in a room together under parental supervision (may I take a moment to remind everyone we are all 34 years old) and “just be polite for a change.” I get you, Dad. There is nothing I would like more than all the old enmities to die out, for every last ember of pain and betrayal to be soot in the grate. But in the meantime, we are still three people who loved each other, and will remain raw from the wounds we have inflicted on each other.
And of course we are not the only trio causing each other pain. After our disastrous confrontation on the streets of Pasadena, Jen and Mack’s summer romance seems to be over. Mack did the right thing and told Kayla he’d been catting about with Jen since June, and girded himself for another divorce. Kayla surprised us all by forgiving Mack’s transgressions, even when he made it clear he was still in love with Jen, even when he assured Kayla that he would not challenge the pre-nup. Kayla’s an idiot — she said all they need is therapy, and all will be well. Therapy — and I’ve had enough in my life to know — can only help people who sincerely want to change their behavior and ways of perceiving the world. The only change Mack wants, Sean reported to me, is Kayla out of his home and Jen back in it, but Mack’s too weak to speak up for himself. He’d rather life just happen to him than make a stand. And Jen has left for Santa Fe, a month in New Mexico with her cousin Carly to “get her mind together.”
Selfishly, I’m pleased that I’m not the biggest fuck up in our group right now. We’ve all jockeyed for position over the years, with Caitlin frequently leading the pack until I got mixed up with Julian and Alex. Sean’s had his moments — before Greta, whose #yogadawn and #freshbakedveganbread posts still populate my Instagram feed, there was Monica, the hottest mess any of us have ever dated or married, including Julian. An aspiring chef, we all enjoyed Monica’s fresh gnocchi and homemade cannoli whenever she brought them to a dinner party. Even Julian was impressed, and hired her to cater a dinner for clients from Rome, who insisted on meeting the chef.
But Monica loved drama more than she loved Sean. She got blackout drunk once a week and threw DVD cases or office supplies or once a pomegranate at his head, which she claimed she could not recall. One weekend when he was up in Seattle, interviewing at Amazon, she called him, panicked, from her apartment before he even made it on the corporate campus. Thinking of moving to Seattle with him (he hadn’t invited her to join him, bear in mind) drove her to attempt taking her own life, she claimed. Sean rushed back to LA, cancelling the interview, to be by her side. Later that day, he sent a picture via group text: “Does this look like suicide to u????” It was three scratches on the back of her wrist, barely enough to break the skin. I reserved judgment, since Julian was thinking about hiring Monica again, but Jenn did not hold back. “Looks like her cat was mean to her.” (I could not disagree.) Sean soldiered on with her until the scratches healed, and dumped her. It took him another two years to get a second shot at Amazon.
Caitlin… oh, well, that’s a story for another day. Some people think she thrives on fiasco, but the biggest of her calamities, well, it was too much, even for our very own B.A. Baracus. But through all of our flops and catastrophes, our coups and our triumphs, we are united, we are six, and we are one.
***
Our little group of friends from elementary school has stayed close, a tighter group than our parents expected when most of us met in kindergarten nearly 30 years ago. At first, it was Jen and Caitlin, Mack and Sean, and me. I knew Jen and Mack (back then, known as “Jeff” — Jeffrey Mackenzie became “Mack” in sixth grade) from nursery school, where Mack was known best for wetting his pants during naptime, and Jen was the first girl to figure out how to whistle. Caitlin and Sean lived next door to each other, and came to class already a couple in love, committed to marrying each other when they graduated from high school and were therefore grownups.
Over time, Mack figured out how to control his bladder, Jen learned how to turn that embouchure into playing the oboe, and Cait and Sean realized that choosing a life mate at the age of five is rarely a good idea. I learned that the best way to keep someone’s attention is to learn how to tell stories. It’s the first thing I can remember being praised for in school. (It certainly wasn’t for my behavior, since I was prone to dissolving in fits of tears at any frustration or disappointment or passing angry thought.)
To my parents’ delight, I was an exceptionally early reader, parsing words at 20 months, reading simple books on my own at three years old. I can remember even now the moment, aged three and a half, when I figured out how to read to myself instead of out loud. I asked my mother how she read but said nothing, and if I could learn how to do it, too. She told me, “Well, you know how you say out loud the words as you read them, and you can hear yourself say them? Just keep doing that, but do the saying in your head and hear the words inside.”
The switch flipped, I began reading faster, and the faster I read, the more I wanted to read, and the more I read, the bigger the books I could read with at least a basic level of comprehension. My parents let me be an omnivore in the house when it came to books and periodicals and anything I could lay my hands on. My father remembers coming into the kitchen one morning to find seven-year-old me reading his copy of C.P. Snow’s “The Masters” over a bowl of Grape-Nuts, asking him to explain what a college master was, and where I could find Cambridge on a map. I read National Geographic and Beatrix Potter and medical treatises and the Ramona Quimby books and the H.P. Lovecraft stories my dad tried to hide from me but failed. (Nightmares for three months after that misadventure.)
It wasn’t very long after I learned how to read to myself that I wanted to tell my own stories, too. I wasn’t given to oral storytelling, even though this would have been the simplest route for a young child who could barely scrawl her name. I wanted to write — I wanted to be an author, and I told this to anyone who would listen, and just as many who wouldn’t. My handwriting was atrocious, but I didn’t let this stop me very much — the pencilled letters looped and swirled dreamily over the wide-rule paper, forming words that were more frequently than not spelled correctly after the age of five. (Thank you, Dad, for buying me my first Merriam-Webster so young, and Mom, for thinking me reading it before bedtime was not too bizarre for a grade schooler.) The most important thing, my teachers told me, was that I kept writing, even if it wasn’t always in the lines.
By the age of six, I was keeping a diary in which I chronicled my grade school existence. The very first of these volumes was covered in denim and had a rainbow on the front, on which my mother had written “Melissa” for me in pink sparkle paint. I made inventories of my Barbies’ wardrobes (“pink skirt, blue dress, tutu, red shirt, pointe shoes”), who was on and off my shit list at any given time (though it was not entitled “shit list,” it always featured Rachel), and brief movie reviews (“I saw Beauty + The Beast. It was good.”).
It took me three years to write my way through my first diary, the entries getting longer and angstier as time passed. The shit list expanded and contracted, and was soon accompanied by longer character sketches of the boys I was crushing on, sorry, in love with (such love was never reciprocated). Jonah: blonde and blue-eyed, loved soccer and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and not me). Tony: Korean, into cars and swimming (and not me). Kieran: a new arrival in third grade, from Philly and not pleased with me asking him if people ate a lot of cream cheese there (and also not pleased with me, in general).
Jenn joined us in fifth grade — as I mentioned before, she was glamorous and sophisticated, a native New Yorker. By then, I was filling books of every color and dimension, from turquoise Chinese silk to vinyl Hello Kitty to squat leatherbound volumes with little brass locks, at a rapid pace, usually three a year. My writing was neater and smaller and generally in the lines by then, the diaries a catalogue of my daily disgraces and less frequent victories as I progressed finally into the agony of middle school. As I experienced each day in real time, I was also thinking how I would later compose an entry. It was a level of remove I felt comfortable in, like a great big stretch and a yawn distancing myself from having to put into spoken words my true emotions. Those words I saved for home, scribbling away after school, tucked in my window seat with a glass of chocolate milk and a toasted English muffin with strawberry jam.
School? Oh, at school I was encouraged and cosseted and urged into writing farther, writing faster (my apologies to Elizabeth Bishop there) — short stories and villanelles and book reports and even once a play about the history of Burbank. “Melissa, you are a writer,” my teachers and my parents and even my friends told me, but I never truly believed it. From my hours reading the dictionary, at 13 I was familiar already with the word “dilettante” and to me, that was all that I was — a dabbler, insubstantial, a silly girl writing about silly girl things. True writers spoke of truths universal (that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife), or glass bead games, or of madness or bravery or deep, black Gothic desire in sultry southern climes. (Such was the fruit of being allowed free rein in my parents’ eclectic library.) I wrote — when I was not writing of my own daily torments in my diary — of the slow frustration of suburban life, of the awkwardness of a girl’s body, of being the lesser of two sisters. Small things, domestic things. No great slashes through the literary landscape, no Don Quixote, no Brothers Karamazov but the Sisters de Mornay. And though I was only 13, I hated myself for my lack of ambition.
There was talk as I headed towards high school of sending me to Harvard-Westlake for a better chance at getting into a top college, but I wanted to stay close to home, and closer to the Jen(n)s, Caitlin and the boys. I didn’t really have a college plan, except that I knew it was going to happen for me — what else was I supposed to do? Despite all the years of ballet, I was too clumsy and distracted to be anything close to a dancer (and was asked politely to leave class at the age of 12, for being so depressingly bad a pupil that I was discouraging the others). I was still awkward and prone to tears at the slightest provocation, but I was kind, (mostly) dependable and engaged in the pursuit of making those around me feel loved and safe. I made a show of not caring whether these efforts were returned, but I wanted so badly to be told I was cherished, to be named the most important person in someone’s life. Considering this now, I see I was preparing myself to be Julian’s wife — I would have been happy then with merely the words of love without the depth of emotion, as I would eventually come to be in my marriage.
Things changed after Columbine. A rising high school freshman, I’d spent the summer before high school reading about the shooting, about the shooters, about their journals. And while I never expressed any desire to kill others in my writings, my diaries contained more than my longings for James Van Der Beek or musings on whether Rachel’s breasts could really get any bigger (yep, they did). My diaries were the fields in which I sowed my secrets shallow (I lied to Caitlin when I told her she looked good in that crop top) and deep (my concerns that Rachel was trading sexual favors for better grades). But the ripest rows in these fields were the ones in which I carefully tended my worries, watering them, weeding them so that they flourished sufficiently well to luxuriate in their misery.
Chief amongst my worries was my perceived inability to live up to my early promise — my writings were trifles, insubstantial mutterings of a child, girl’s work. Useless, worthless, meaningless, overwrought drivel, the non-barbaric yawp of a useless, worthless, meaningless, overwrought girl. I could barely inflict these scratchings on my diary, by now kept in a password-protected document on my Gateway desktop, so how could I bring them to my English teacher? I kept much of my writing inside my own diaries, out of fear that the insecurities and inferiorities and self-hatred that leached from the margins of each page would rise to the level of “likely to kill.” My creative writing for school may have had some flair — my report cards and regular inclusion in the school literary magazine as high school progressed indicated that it must have — but the truly dark thoughts I tended to far away from the sight of others.
It wasn’t dumb luck that Rachel contrived to open the lid on the pot stewing in that Word file back in late 2001. Don’t let the blonde hair and the impressive cleavage and the bee-stung pout fool you. She’s the canniest, shrewdest, slipperiest bastard I know who isn’t Julian. I knew she’d been reading my diaries for years — no hiding place I could craft ever held them safe for long. She enjoyed slipping in vague references to events about which she could not have known but for her spying. (Of course when called out on this, she claimed I was suffering from “juvenile Alzheimer’s” because I had totally told her everything about whatever calamity I had committed to my diary in confidence.) When Rachel and I both received desktop computers of our own in the summer of 1999, I migrated happily to typing out the events of the day, not least because I could keep my writing obscured but tantalizingly within Rachel’s reach. It drove her crazy, which I savored with only the slightest tang of guilt.
Like most other people, I underestimated my sister’s tenacity when faced with a challenge she actually cared to meet. And what she wanted was access restored to my interior life, a sweet little nut of self-loathing she’d enjoyed nibbling on for years. I once came upon her sitting cross-legged in my window seat, drinking a cup of tea and eating a Kit-Kat, chuckling to herself. She was licking a chocolate-stained index finger to leaf through the pages of my volume for April-July 1998, one of her professed favorites, for she’d read them all again and again. “Oh, it’s you,” she said by way of greeting. “I love how you spend four pages in April going on and on about your worry that you’ll never get your period, and then in July — wait, let me get to the entry, because I really should quote you — when you actually get it, you say: ‘Today I am a woman, or so society and biology tell me. My period came, the marker, the stain, but the flow (what there is) is brown and not red. Am I dying?'” She laughed so hard she ended up spilling tea all over the violet-sprigged seat cushion, thankfully missing the diary (though I had to clean up the mess, no way Rachel would take care of that).
But soon it was not enough for Rachel to read and re-read my younger embarrassments. As a condition of keeping them in our rooms, our parents insisted upon access to our computers. They never mentioned anything about documents, however, and since I was the “good” child, my conduct was rarely observed closely by either my mom or dad. I was trustworthy and boring enough to be left to my own devices (quite literally). And of course with an unlocked computer, Rachel felt free to help herself to a snoop through my file folders. I had one marked “School,” one for “College Prep,” and the third I named “Interior Designs,” since I knew its opaque title would pique her interest. The only file in that folder I named “MLDMv2,” and it was here that I continued my diaries under the lock of a password.
I knew Rachel would attempt to force her way into the document, and she wasn’t exactly subtle about it. I’d regularly find her at my desk, screwing up her face in frustration as she pecked out another unsuccessful password. She even kept a notebook filled with her guesses, everything from “mattdamon” to “iamadumbslut” to “1985jokeoftheyear.” I didn’t even bother to change it, because the reference — though pretty obvious to any 14-year-old dork who’d been forced to watch a lot of Orson Welles films on Turner Classic Movies with her dad — was one that never would have occurred to her.
“It’s a famous movie allusion,” I told her once, when I was feeling generous.
“An illusion? Is it ‘davidcopperfield’ all one word?”
***
The world began to turn sideways for me in spring of 2001, a couple of months before Rachel put on her tiara to serve as a member of her class’s prom court. At almost 16, I was waiting for life to begin, for some boy to discover me, uncover me. I wanted to be seen as more than a child, to be alluring, to be coveted by another. By March, that other revealed himself to me. “Something in you changed,” the note he’d slipped next to me in the library said. “If you want to know what, find me. — Joshua K. Brookes”
I hadn’t even noticed him leave it; it was Jen who saw him slide it partially under my copy of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and pointed it out to me. Josh’s handwriting was precise, small caps, controlled. By the time I’d read it, and re-read it once more, he was no longer in my line of sight but had slipped somewhere into the stacks.
Jenn grabbed the note out of my hand and scanned it. “Ugh, what a terrible pickup line. Ignore him. Maria said he’s a gross kisser anyway.”
Jen shot Jenn a filthy look before filching it from her hand. “Maria’s a snob. And I happen to think Josh is cute. If I had gotten this note, I absolutely would go find him. It’s an invitation.”
Sean looked up from his Geometry homework, a slash of green ink across his cheek and a streak of red pen in his blond hair. (He always has been the worst pen-chewer.) “What’s going on?” Jen shoved the note across the round table the four of us were sharing during study hall. Sean looked at both sides of the piece of notebook paper and passed it back to me. “Stay away from Josh, Mel. He’s an asshole.”
Jen balled up a piece of notebook paper and chucked it at Sean’s head. “Your problem is you can’t just get over yourself and admit you looooove Melissa and you want to keep her all to yourself.” This was a frequent refrain of Jen and Mack’s at that time. When Sean and I finally did date for three weeks in senior year, it was so wretchedly awkward, not only for ourselves but our friends as well, that we were advised to put everyone out of their misery and just stop.
Sean stared at Jen, his expression unreadably composed. “Trust me. He’s not right for Mel. He’s not right for anyone.” Briskly shoving his textbook and pens in his backpack, he pushed back his chair and barged out of the library exit.
“Clearly he’s dying of love for you and he doesn’t want you to be happy with anyone else.” Jen tipped her head to one side and crinkled her nose at me. “Go find Josh. Don’t you think she should find out what’s changed at least, Jenn?”
Jenn grunted, not raising her head from her own copy of Coleridge, where she was making notes in the margin about loneliness and despair in pink and purple felt tip. “Whatever.”
Coleridge in hand, I walked over to the stacks to find Josh. All I really knew of Joshua Brookes was that he was a junior, on the staff of the literary magazine, generally considered his class’s finest writer, and Maria Gonzales said he was a terrible kisser. From observation, he was physically a type I’d now call File Under: Carr, Alexander. Dark haired, tall, slim and slouchy, yet almost aggressively well-groomed (unlike Alex), he seemed to my casual glance like the kind of boy who could pick you up from your house for a date and not scare your parents. He’d show up in his olive chinos that sat at (not below) his waist and a perfectly pressed dress shirt, yet in his car he might enjoy nothing more than chain smoking Camel Lights and reciting Baudelaire, the top three buttons of his shirt by then undone. He’d drink his French Roast black and get his sweaters dry cleaned regularly. He probably eschewed N*SYNC and Blink-182 and enjoyed Rachmaninoff and math rock. If I’d cooked up a better match for myself at that time in a fever dream, I’d yet to meet him in my ravings.
With this in mind, I had a fairly good idea where in the Dewey Decimal System such a boy might hide. He was likely to be in 821 — English poetry — with Shelley and Wordsworth and Byron, oh, especially Byron. I carefully looked down every aisle as I passed, though, in case I had miscalculated and he was instead in 787 (stringed instruments) or 393 (death customs). I was not wrong, as I found him leaning with his back against the Romantics, turning the pages of a slim blue volume.
“Hi,” I said, with a little wave, though he did not look up from his book. “What are you reading?”
Josh pushed his dark-rimmed glasses up from the tip of his snub nose and turned his head towards me. “Keats. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes.’ Do you know it?”
I shook my head and lifted up my Dover Thrift Edition of “Rime” before me. “Besides this, the only other Romantic poetry I’ve read is ‘Ozymandias’ and some Wordsworth last week in class. I tried to read Byron last year because I thought I should like him, but I thought it was a bit boring and not nearly as sexy as I’d hoped. Oh. That sounded weird.”
Behind his glasses, Josh blinked at me. “No, it doesn’t sound weird at all. You probably need to be a bit older to get some of the nuances. You might like Keats though. Can’t believe you haven’t read ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ yet.”
“That’s next week,” I explained.
“Would you like to hear some of ‘St. Agnes’?” I nodded. In a clear but quiet voice, one that had already firmly broken, unlike Sean’s, he read me this stanza:
“Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.”
His recitation was dreamy yet regular in metre, and in my mind’s eye the maiden rose before me, her hair obscuring her breasts as her clothing drooped in a heap at her feet. I saw myself as that maid, my own long hair covering the bust that had by now expanded out of my old small bralettes into something almost womanly.
As he spoke the last line, he closed the book softly between his palms. “Could you see her as she unwound the pearls and took off the jewels? As she slowly shucked off the heavy clothes of the day, disrobed and became another creature altogether?” His dark blue eyes were trained on mine and pierced me, even through the lenses that covered them.
“Y-yes. Yes, I could,” I stumbled.
Josh took a step closer to me. “I’ve read some of your work this spring, Melissa. You’ve changed from last fall.” Another step, until there was barely any space between us. “You’re becoming a writer.”
“I already am one. I can’t remember not being one.” It slipped from my mouth so easily, possibly because it was true. I didn’t know yet that a young lady shouldn’t brag, but Josh would teach me soon.
“You’ve a few years yet to… grow into it,” he said, looking me up and down. “But you’re getting there. I have a lot to work with with you, if you’d like to join me.”
Was this a come on or an invitation to join the literary magazine? I wasn’t sure how to say the former, so I asked the latter, but Josh was far too close to me that the former wasn’t equally possible.
“I’m editing the magazine next year. I’d like you to join the staff.” He touched my hand, then brought it to his chest, where I could feel his heart beat rapidly under his baseball ringer tee. As he held it there, I could feel through the fabric the light spring of his chest hair beneath my palm. Even at 15, I knew this was a strange way to interview recruits. I could feel every blood vessel in my hand pulse as he kept it close to his heart, and a rush through my body of what I now know to be desire, but back then it was a pure and terrifying thrill I’d never experienced before. My throat constricted and my breathing came in brief, irregular bursts. I wanted desperately to run back to the Jen(n)s but in my brain raced the words, what next, what next.
Josh leaned down to whisper in my ear, “You will, won’t you?”
“Yes.” My voice was a tinny rasp barely escaping my parched mouth; I felt foolish and very, very young. I knew I was unsafe next to Josh, but I wanted to know what next. In this moment, menace and lust twined themselves around each other in an unstable double helix, a molecule that entered my bloodstream and changed my expectations for desire for years to follow.
Josh brushed my hand from his chest. “Good. But we have work to do. I’ll pick you up at 6:30 tomorrow evening.” He walked away from me, towards the boys’ room. “I can find out your address before then,” he said over his shoulder. “Be ready. No jeans.”
“But I have dinner at 7 with my parents,” I protested to his back. I knew he could hear me, but he made no response.
By the time I staggered back to the study table, only Jen remained. “So? What changed?”
“Everything, I think.”
***
That afternoon, I locked my bedroom door and committed every detail of our exchange to my diary file — his glasses sliding down his nose, the derisory and desirous manner in which he’d treated me, the pull I’d felt towards him as he pushed me away, the prickles and throbs in parts of my body mundane and sacred and profane. I’d been summoned to him, I wrote, as if he were some priest about to deliver the sacrament to me, but whether that wafer was tutelage in writing or desire I did not know. But I wanted so badly to find out.
At dinner, my sister was the first to detect a shift in me. (She always has been the best at reading me, whether or not she deemed anything she found in me worthwhile.) Mom was running late, so it was just my father, Rachel and me eating a chicken and broccoli stir fry. Dad was talking us through a case he’d taken on that day, a breach of contract between two billionaire cousins who’d started up a business importing women’s leggings from China. It sounded incredibly boring, even the part about one cousin siphoning off funds to buy his mistress lingerie in Paris.
“Sorry to interrupt you, Dad,” Rachel butted in. “But I think Melissa has something to tell us.”
I looked up from my plate, where I was pushing florets of broccoli around in a figure eight. “I do?”
My sister batted her eyelashes at me. “I think you know what I mean. There’s something… different about you. Don’t you think, Daddy?”
I quickly pushed a piece of chicken I’d been stabbing at half-heartedly in my mouth. “There’s nothing different about me,” I said as I chewed.
My father squinted at me. “Nope, looks the same to me. Ask your mother when she gets back.”
Even with no mirror in sight, I could tell a blush was spreading from my cheeks down to my shoulders and up to my forehead. “See, Dad? She’s blushing. Liar. Cough it up, Mel.” Rachel’s Cheshire cat grin spread slowly as I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
“You do look guilty, baby. Did something happen today in school?”
Resistance to my father was as futile as to my sister’s pesterings — like Rachel, my dad was fantastic at ferreting out the truth from obstinate witnesses. (But Rachel usually gave up when she got bored.) “I got asked to join the staff of the literary magazine next year. That’s all.”
“That’s terrific! And very much deserved. What else?” My dad was holding his fork lightly in his right hand, but it was pointed in my direction, like he was subconsciously trying to jab more truth out of me. “I think there’s something else, Rachel, don’t you?”
“Oh yes, Daddy. I’m sure you’re right.” What smarm! Most of the time, she kept my father at arm’s length when it came to affection, which made him want her love even more. So when she turned it on, it was a dopamine hit straight to his brain, bonding him closer to her on one side firmly against me.
“The incoming editor asked me to meet with him tomorrow evening to discuss some of my work. That’s it.” That was completely true. “I was going to mention it privately to you when Mom got home, to make sure if it’s okay that I miss dinner.”
Rachel gasped. “You have a date with that John or Jonah or whatever Brook and he’s spinning it as a editing session.” She started laughing so hard my dad had to slap her on the back once because it had turned into choking.
“His name is Joshua Brookes and no, it’s not a date.” I was mortified that I’d even said Josh’s name in such a pedestrian setting as the dinner table. He was far too sophisticated, I’d decided, to have someone like my sister mention his name. “He said we have work to do before I join.”
“Oh, you definitely have a lot of work to do.” Rachel made a vulgar gesture with both hands. With the full weight of my maturity, I stuck my tongue out at her.
Dad put down his fork and looked directly at me. “I’m going to consider this a date, Melissa. Joshua will need to come inside and meet whichever of your mother and I is here. Those are the rules we’ve always enforced with Rachel, so you’ll need to play by them, too.” (“Rules”? “Enforced”? Dear lord, my parents were completely deluded about Rachel’s behavior.)
I nodded. “Can we please talk about something else now? Like, what makes you decide to take on a case like this one, besides money?” My dad was relieved to change the topic back to himself from discussions of his youngest daughter’s burgeoning sexuality, but my sister wouldn’t let go of the bit. “We’re not done,” she mouthed to me, then turned her focus back to my father.
Later, as I struggled a little with the text of Candide for my French Literature class, Rachel knocked once on my bedroom door and let herself in, shutting the door quietly. “Hey slut, we should talk.” She was carrying two mugs of herbal tea on a tray, an uncharacteristically generous offering from her, which immediately put me on guard. Passing one to me, she settled herself on my window seat and poked a little at the tea stain on the cushion there (I’d never been able to get it out fully).
I put my Voltaire down and moved to the other side of the bed to face her. “If this is about Josh, this isn’t a date, even if Dad says it is. I’m just getting up to speed on the magazine and my role there. Josh says I’m becoming a writer but I need some work.”
“Of course you’re a writer, dum-dum. You don’t need that guy to tell you you are. Why the fuck do you think I read your diaries for years?” Rachel wasn’t smiling. “Josh Brookes is taking you out on your first date and you need to be prepared.”
“Are you kidding me? You want to give me pointers on how much of a whore I’m expected to be on the first date? Not that this is a date.”
Rachel’s brow furrowed a little. “I’m being serious. I don’t want you making some of the stupid mistakes I did. And whatever Josh tells you, this is a date. Where are you two going to ‘study’? Did he tell you to bring any of your stories with you? Pens? A notebook?”
I froze. “He told me not to wear jeans.” I felt like an idiot. Of course this was a date.
“So he’s taking you somewhere nice-ish, probably.” She rose from the windowseat and pulled me up from the bed. “What are you wearing?”
“I don’t even know if it’s no jeans. Those black combat trousers and the burgundy boatneck top?” (I think now of these items of clothing, both very shiny and probably completely flammable in their synthetic glory, and wonder how I had gone so wrong in fashion sense.)
Rachel made a little noise of disgust. “No. No. Not too casual but not too slutty either.” Sliding open one of the mirrored doors to my closet, she started pawing through my wardrobe. “No wonder this is only your first date. You dress like a child.” She threw on the bed a pink floral skirt with green ribbon trim on the hem, a cropped black cardigan and a strappy black camisole. “Wear this. It says, ‘I’m not fucking you on the first date because I’m not even 16 yet’ but it also says ‘but if you’re lucky I might let you reach down my shirt.'”
“RACHEL! I would never let him do that. Anyway, I don’t think he’s going to be that pushy. Josh is too… intellectual.” Actually, I had no idea what Josh was like but I was happy to project on his body and mind an image of what I’d prefer him to be.
My sister snorted. “Sure, sure, smart guys like Josh don’t like to fuck. They just read classic literature deep into the night and never, EVER think about sticking their hands down your shirt. Wake up, loser.” She dug around in my small collection of jewelry, and tossed me a simple black velvet choker. “This is good too. A little kinky but sweet enough. The idea is for him to think about what it would be like to have sex with you, but that idea needs to be… what’s the word I’m thinking of… not completely formed.”
“Amorphous?” I offered. I scrambled quickly into the outfit, including the choker, and my sister nodded in approval as I turned around for her sign-off.
“Sure, that’s a nice big SAT word. And you need to NOT be letting him have whatever he wants. Here, talk with me. I’m not going to lay out the rules for you again so take advantage of it.” I sat down next to where she was patting the windowseat. “You can kiss him on the first date. He is 100% going to expect this, and you’re probably going to want to, too. Have you kissed anyone yet? And don’t count any time you played spin the bottle with your loser friends.”
I shook my head and looked down in my lap. As depressing as it was, I was the only one left of the Jen(n)s, Caitlin and me not to have kissed a boy. Sean and Mack swore they had heard from male classmates that I was hot (I did not feel hot at 15, I felt ungraceful and flustered by almost every aspect of being an alive human being in the world) but even the biggest perverts had steered clear of me.
Rachel let out an exasperated sigh. “Well, just go with it. It’ll feel nice and then it will feel gross when he sticks his tongue in your mouth, and then it’ll feel nice again. You’ll figure it out pretty quickly.”
That was the least romantic description I’d heard of kissing. However, I recognized this was probably the most practical advice I was ever going to receive on dating, since it was coming from a girl who’d been letting boys (and men) run their hands all over her since she was at least 14.
“You need to take control of what happens next,” she continued. “I cannot stress this enough so listen to me, bitch. Decide NOW how far you will let him go and stick with it. If you don’t, he’s going to expect more and push for more, and I know you. You let people walk all over you. He’ll tell you it feels good, and yeah, it WILL feel good. But you are not ready for anything really heavy yet. So where are you going to tell him to stop?”
I had no vocabulary for this; I didn’t know where lines got drawn in these sorts of games. “Can you suggest something?”
Rachel tapped her pouty, lip-glossed mouth with a manicured fingernail. “Over the clothing groping. That goes for both of you. Don’t let him stick his hands up your skirt, and do not put your hand down his pants, though I bet you $5 he’s going to try to stick it down there for you.”
“That’s… disgusting. Why would I ever want to do that?” I hadn’t even thought much beyond kissing. Though I knew from all the shitty romance novels I was reading alongside higher-toned books that sex involved touching a man’s penis, I hadn’t considered that I might have to do that as well. From sex ed, I knew a penis could be flaccid (another good SAT word, but quite nasty to say or write) or erect, and I understood the biology behind engorgement (another SAT word, equally foul). But I had no intention of touching Josh’s private parts at any stage of arousal.
My sister patted my hand and tucked a strand of hair that had fallen out of my ponytail behind my ear. “Good. Don’t touch it. Or at least not the skin. You can touch it over his pants.”
“Ew.”
“Whatever, prude. That’s your limit this time, and be firm. You can tell him no. If you like him enough, and he’s interested, you can figure out if you want to do more later. If you don’t like him, no biggie. Nobody’s going to think you’re a slut for getting just about to second base on a first date.”
Something like a flash of affection streaked over Rachel’s face, a slightly wistful cast to her expression, and it passed almost as quickly as it had appeared. “We’re done for now. Come see me tomorrow night after he drops you off. I want to know everything since I can’t read your fucking diary anymore.” She swept out of my room, leaving only the slightest scent of Calvin Klein Contradiction.
“Love you, too, Rach,” I yelled at the door as it slammed behind her.
***
I’ll pick this up again next week — with Alex gone, and wedding preparations under way, there’s little likely to happen between now and my trip to the UK. I’ve just… been thinking much about how I got to where I am right now, how Josh Brookes was the template for all the mistakes I’ve made with men again and again in nearly 20 years. If there had been no Josh Brookes, I am certain that I’d never have been Julian’s wife. I am certain that I would have waited for Alex to trust himself that he deserved me. But I am also certain that had I spoken up at the time my life went sideways with Josh — this is not right, won’t someone see this? — I still would not have been believed.
meandering again 