“Can you give me a jump?” she asks in her hoarse, smoky voice. I stare at her, not understanding.
“A jump?” She hits the hood of her car. “My battery’s dead.”
I’m still not sure what she wants me to do. I know how to drive a car, but no one has taught me yet about car maintenance. “I’ve never done that before,” I say.
She laughs, that loud laugh. “Drive your car to this spot, and I’ll do the rest.”
I do as she says, and she pops my hood and attaches her jumper cables. Once she gets her car running, she drops my hood and thanks me.
For an instant I consider saying something to her, something about what’s happening to me, or maybe about Justin’s friend. But what I want to say has no shape to it. It’s just an amorphous feeling, a sense she might release me from my loneliness and the ways I try to quell it. Besides, this is the first we’ve ever spoken. She probably doesn’t even know my name. Anything I say will sound wrong, too intimate. So I just smile.
“No problem,” I tell her.
When I see her again, passing in the crowded school hallway, I keep my head down, relieved I never said anything.
Every so often, Tyler comes home from college. She doesn’t visit often, since Mom is on the other side of town from her school and that’s where she goes now, so when she does arrive, looking calm—happy, even—I eye her tentatively, an exotic animal moving through the apartment.
In the middle of the night on one of her visits, I get violently ill. I pull a blanket and pillow into the bathroom and spend the rest of the night on the cold tile floor, alternating between vomiting and restless sleep. In the morning, Tyler finds me. My father is not around, a common occurrence, so she calls the pediatrician and then puts an arm around me to get my weak body down the elevator and into her car. I hold a paper bag, in case I have to puke again, and lean back with my eyes closed. My mind is blurry and exhausted, but I listen to Tyler’s soothing: “You’ll be OK. The doctor will help you. You’ll feel better soon.”
On the way home, after learning I had food poisoning and getting antinausea medication, I do feel better. I glance over at Tyler, grateful, aware that simply being cared for makes me better. The doctor’s attention, Tyler’s kindness—these are the things I crave. In the spring, I apply for college. Some of my friends, like Jennifer B and Jennifer C, are nervous about this impending change. They worry about leaving friends and family and, in Jennifer B’s case, her boyfriend. I am looking forward to getting away. The past few months have been torture because there are no boys. The parties I go to with the Jennifers every weekend are filled with the same cast of characters, the same beer, pot, and cocaine. Drugs and alcohol don’t hold my interest the way they do for many others. It’s boys I want. Most boys in my school are in long-term relationships, or I know them too well to find them attractive, or I am too embarrassed to have the Jennifers know I find them attractive. Worse, Heath shows up to some of these parties, and he is now dating one of the blond girls from school. I see him drinking a beer with his arm around her waist, and I feel worthless, a discarded piece of trash. There are no boys. And when there are no boys, I get anxious and bored, like I am waiting for my life to begin. I apply to five colleges, as suggested by my guidance counselor. I pick three, and he picks the other two. I am not attached to where I wind up, as I have no real aspirations at this point. I haven’t thought enough about it, my mind always set solidly on boys. I think maybe I’ll study English. This year I’m taking an elective called Minority Literature, and for the first time I have found myself between the pages of a book. Almost everything we read, from Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, reveals characters wrought with loneliness and unfettered desire. In their pain I find a depth of feeling I cannot allow for myself. My own is too much to bear alone.
Dad takes Nora and me shopping. We try on piles of clothes, Nora encouraging me to buy things I’m unsure about. Dad sits on that bench, watching us enjoying ourselves, enjoying it himself. I don’t know enough about Nora’s financial situation. I know she lives in this unbelievable rent-controlled apartment near Gracie Mansion, and she has some family money from the oil industry. But Dad treats her the way he does me, lavishing her with clothing, jewelry, whatever she wants. I can’t help but think of his parents. His father yelled at and demeaned his mother daily, while she twittered and accommodated whatever he wanted. Maybe Dad feels like he has to make this up to his mother by taking care of the rest of us. Maybe every woman is really just his mother in some way. When the college verdicts come in, all three I chose reject me, and I am accepted by the two my counselor suggested. I decide to go to Clark University in Massachusetts only because the other one was my safety school. College isn’t about the academics. It is solely about getting away, about having more freedom. Mostly it is about having access to a whole new crop of boys. Every change in my life is exciting and hopeful, an opportunity to start over, to shed my tiresome, needy self and become a lovable person. This change is no different.
The summer before we all leave for college, two of the Jennifers rent an apartment in Long Beach Island. They will be there for July and August. They invite me to come for two weeks of that time. I am honored, but also a little disappointed. I wanted to be included for the whole thing.
Mid-August, I drive down the Garden State Parkway, watching as the oaks change to pines and sand scatters into the highway edges. Seagulls call out. Summer, with all its promise again. The apartment is in a weathered building about five blocks from the beach. The Jennifers’ rooms have full-size beds, but mine, the guestroom, has two twins. I hang my clothes in the closet, trying hard not to feel like an extra. My first day I walk down to the beach with Jennifer A and dip my feet into the icy water. That is the last time I see the ocean while I am there.
That night we drive to a club that juts out onto the bay. The Jennifers know a few of the guys, and around midnight we wind up at one of these guys’ houses. There is beer and pot, and more important there is a boy I find attractive—a scruffy guy with black curly hair and thick, dark eyelashes. He’s nice enough, and by the time the sun is starting to rise we are naked and tangled in a sleeping bag in someone’s bedroom. I don’t sleep until I get back to the Jennifers’ later that morning, and when I wake in the late afternoon, I find the Jennifers have been sleeping all day too. We eat cereal, light up cigarettes, and drink coffee. And then we start all over again: drink some beer, go to a club, hang out at some guy’s house, have sex with a nameless someone.
Except Jennifer C’s sex is with a particular someone. She has a boyfriend here. Jennifer A also has some kind of ongoing drama with a boy. I am really the only one having random sex. Because of this, I urge Jennifer C to call Heath. They are still friendly, and almost every weekend friends have been coming down to visit. If Heath came, and we were stuck together again in this tiny apartment, maybe I could get him back. Maybe I could be having sex with just one person again. So she calls, and to my delight he agrees to come in for a night.
He arrives that first Saturday. My throat clenches with desire when he walks in, tan and lanky. His charming smile, that body that used to be mine. He brings cocaine, which everyone is thrilled about, so we open up bottles of beer, light up cigarettes, and snort lines. After a few hours he goes out to see the ocean, and the Jennifers and I sit cross-legged on the brown carpet to strategize.
“He has to sleep in your room,” Jennifer C says. “It’s the only other bed.”
“Unless he decides to sleep on the couch,” I say.
“We won’t let that happen.”
“And then what?” I bite my nail, anxious.
“And then you lure him into your bed.”
We smile. There’s no question in our minds that this is all it takes. Men are so easy that way. If they have sex with you, they can be yours. Even though this hasn’t been the case in the past, I still believe it. It’s written across every ad, every movie, every love song. Sex equals ownership.
In the early morning hours, Jennifer C shows Heath to my room.
“You can crash in here,” she tells him.
He nods, uncomfortable. Until this point we were all just bud - dies. Now he was going to be alone with me. I brush my teeth and change into a T-shirt and sweatpants in the bathroom. When I come into the room he is already under the blankets and facing the wall.
“Are you asleep?” I ask as I get into the other bed.
“Almost.”
I stare at the ceiling, nowhere near sleep. I hold the blankets against my chest and my heart pounds beneath my hand. Having him so close yet not near me is torture. I want him so badly. It is not a sexual want. I want him to love me again. I want to know I’m worthwhile. I take a breath.
“Heath?”
