Young Writers Society

Prologue:

Sometimes you feel so connected to those people you can't help but notice in ordinary situations. You introduce yourselves, and bam! - your lives are forever tied together. It might take a couple weeks, months, years - whatever - to get on the same page or to see the bigger picture, but that person never once left your mind completely - if at all.

That's sort-of how it was with Luke. He just came along and planted himself inside my skull and never left. I mean, he physically left for a year or so, but he never left completely. It's like I already knew at 15 that I was supposed to help him, though he admittedly saved me. I could actually see sadness sitting in his pretty eyes. That rum-fueled sadness weighed down his eyelids and closed him off from everything other than music.

Maybe I just happened to be the only one who looked hard enough - who listened hard enough, for once in my life. Maybe he saw something in me, too. Or Jesus, maybe it all boils down to the timing.

But you never really know.

You never really know if it's timing or fate or big magnets buried underground interlinking our lives that force us to move in the directions we do, to meet the people we fall in love with forever. It's uncanny, really.

It's like we're all mere characters in a story that is our lives. Sometimes characters come into the story and leave quickly. Other times, they don't appear until the very end. But then there’s those characters that show-up and stay beyond the very last page. The Holden Caulfield‘s, if you will.

Luke's one of those characters in my life.

It wasn’t always this way, though, and I’ll let you in on a little secret:

In my limited experience, true love never comes easily. Instead, it builds up slowly over several years of birthday-cake wishes and crossed fingers. It bugs the hell out of you, like mosquito bites on Memorial Day Weekend or the puss-filled pimple that just had to ruin your first decent high school photo. It infests your brain and your heart and your soul until nothing is satisfying anymore, nothing is real. It pushes you down, down, down before it ever begins to build you up. It makes you confront yourself, strips you into your rawest form and shows off every inch of what you never intended to be. Before true love ever makes you smile, it makes you cry.

And if true love doesn’t absolutely torture you, if it doesn’t leave you feeling like a puzzle with missing corner pieces, than I can’t say I’d ever trust that love.

I’ll leave that love to Cinderella because it always scared the hell out of me.

***

It was an ordinary kitchen with stained cupboards and chipped countertops where we’d line up cups of liquor and beat-up our livers until 12-ops-2 o’ clock A.M. Then we’d shuffle into the back seat of so-and-so’s car, always late. Or if things got too sloppy, we’d have Megan’s mom pick us up and beg her to buy us McDonald’s with drunken smiles and lips lined with gossip.

It’s the kitchen where we drank ourselves into our first hangovers and spotted our first lines of cocaine. There was always weed to smoke and good conversation, but mostly I remember the drums.

Someone was always playing those damn drums.

That’s where I fell in love with my life, really, because it’s impossible not to feel totally alive when people are making music nearby. Impossible for me, at least. But I didn’t know that then and there was actually very little I’ll admit to having known at age 15.

It was the summer I started falling face-first into my own decisions - some of which tasted like shit, but all of which were worth the opportunity to grow.

And it was the summer I met Luke.

He was wearing a turquoise shirt that read “Jamaica”, leaning against those shitty kitchen countertops I’d love to own for the sake of knowing they were there the moment my life changed forever. Sometimes I wonder if every loving couple can pin-point the moment they met down to the very countertop and a specific shade of blue. I’ll admit to being psychotic, but I’ve always had one of those memories that knows how to swallow up and regurgitate the things that matter most, even those seemingly miniscule moments.

His hair was bleached, which suited him well and I’ve yet to see another man pull off that look who wasn’t Eminem in the late 90’s. (Don’t judge).

But it was his facial hair that really caught my eye.

Boys in the 9th grade weren’t very good at facial hair, but Luke was two years older than Megan and I and he’d managed to perfect a chin-strap that can reasonably be blamed for my subsequent attraction to slightly older men. (One of which had hairy feet that left my friends in fits of giggles every time I mentioned his name).

Anyway, that’s the way Luke looked the night we met, or the way I carefully chose to remember him. I was wearing something pink with teeny-tiny shorts, crimped hair and excessive make-up, if you’d like a more complete picture. I was flat and frizzy and fresh-out-of-braces. Not completely horrendous, but never the one to look in a mirror and believe myself to be beautiful, not that many 9th grade girls I knew felt much differently about themselves at the time. I was young and naive, but internally confident as hell and the moment I saw him I knew I had to find a way to make him mine.

Megan and I were always on the prowl for a boy to kiss or maybe more, what with those hormones and all or whatever it is that makes 9th grade girls act like mild sluts. But she was the Italian and I the blonde and we rarely ever butted heads when it came to boys because we were attracted to different types and different types were attracted to us. I can’t help but admit that her C-cups still out-perform my barely-B’s that were, at this time, nonexistent, but the kitchen lighting, the crimped hair or the alcohol (perhaps all three?) must have worked in my favor.

(Note: I haven’t entirely ruled out that magnets concept, yet).

“I look like a bum from Mississippi.”

Those were his first words. Well, the first of which I heard him speak, which subsequently turned into a conversation about fishing, mom’s and orchestra. Fishing - a hobby we’ve both been raised to love. You know, what with us living in Ohio and all. Mom’s - he predicted (correctly) that I would love his. Orchestra - he played the cello and maybe it’s just me, but a sexed-up, bleach-blonde version of Mozart sounds almost porn-worthy. In fact, it was more than fine. I’d always been the type to take a drink or two or five, but I took gifted classes and held an almost 4.0 GPA. So my pre-pubescent alcoholism was justified, right?

Or so I told myself.

Then I came to the conclusion that we were put on this complicated Earth to be together and if I didn’t marry him or at the very least let him swipe my V-Card after a few more months of fish-talk I would epically fail at life. (Note: We are not currently married, but we’ve been dating for three years and let’s just say I screwed myself out of option two a long time ago. No pun intended).

Of course this all took place before I ditched Cinderella’s definition of love, but beginnings are always the best part of anything amazing so I’ll set myself up for a love-story, or something like it.

But before I get into the juicy stuff, I have to go back.

***

Freshman Year:

I was 14 and it was my first day of high school.

Whenever I think back to the first day of high school I can’t help but laugh at how utterly clueless I was; so desperate to fit it and grow-up, a philosophy that ironically flipped itself inside-out when I began college four years later. Armed with nothing more than my carefully selected outfit and six pounds of make-up mixed-with-glitter I caked on my face each morning at 5 a.m.

I’d only begun to style my thick hair a couple months earlier, which had spent much of Junior High hidden beneath a notorious messy bun, and I’d recently had my braces removed leaving behind a perfectly aligned set of pearly-whites.

In my mini-skirt and tight white tank-top fitted with a large letter “L” (pink, of course), I admittedly felt hot. Or something like it.

At 14 there were two things I feared most in the world; bad grades and pregnancy. My first fear was pretty self-explanatory seeing as how pretty much everyone likes to go through life as a big success, but the second one was definitely conditioned. At least that’s what I think they’d call it on Oprah.

You see, my older sister had three kids by age 21 because of this thing called the pull-out method. We’d been discussing that method since sixth grade in health class, but I found out about it at age nine. That’s when I overheard my sister talking to a friend on the house phone in a hushed voice, which meant that I just had to listen because it was probably a juicy secret.

And it was.

My sister, who was seventeen and counting down the days until she could apply for a part on the Real World show, was pregnant, and no, she had not told Mom and Dad. I didn’t know too much about being pregnant back then, aside from the belly thing and all, but I knew that pregnant was not something you were supposed to be at seventeen. My sister seemed like a grown-up at the time, only a couple months away from her high school graduation, but on that first day I realized she’d been nothing more than a kid.

Two weeks after I listened in on my sister's juicy phone conversation she came home from high school with a smirk on her face and told our mom she wasn’t the only one expecting a baby in our family. Since I was just a kid at the time and my mom had one of those surgeries that make it so you can’t have babies anymore we all knew she meant our older brother. He was twenty back then and had just gone on Spring Break to Florida with his girlfriend, who was a Senior at my sister’s high school. That’s where he got his girlfriend pregnant, except we didn’t know about it until my sister overheard some gossip on the bus.

So then my mom was stressed out and crying about how she was going to be a grandma twice when she didn’t even have any gray hair yet and how could my brother and sister have been so stupid when there are so many ways to protect, though I didn’t really know what needed protecting because like I said, I was just a kid. I felt pretty bad for my mom because she was so stressed out, but I didn’t cry because I was going to be an aunt twice and I was anxious to tell everyone in the third grade.

After the first babies came, and then the two other babies seeing as how my sister had three kids by age 21, I was always given talks about sex and protection and being the smart one in our family because my sister and brother had screwed up their whole entire lives.

I didn’t really know what to think about those conversations at the time, which usually took place around breakfast, but once I started high school and my friends began to do stuff with guys I always heard my mom’s voice in the back of my head. I heard her telling me to wait for someone I loved and wanted to marry and to be the smart one in our family. I also heard her telling me about protection in case I didn’t wait because that’s the just way most teenagers were, plus she knew I was a curious person.

But mostly she made me watch those Lifetime movies where a young girl has sex and gets pregnant or develops a disease down below.

I’d have to say I was pretty well-informed.

A couple days before school started I’d moved to third base for the first time with the most popular boy in tenth grade. It was a pretty stupid idea seeing as how we were just bored with making out and decided we would both move to third base at the same time. I mean, he’d already had sex before but he hadn’t, you know, used his mouth. I only did it for a couple seconds in the front seat of someone’s car because a lot of the other girls tried over summer break, but it really freakin’ sucked. Plus he went to the bathroom right before it happened and I had to ask him to wash his thing off. He used a washcloth, but the whole time I just kept thinking about the taste of pee and diseases down below, which really grossed me out. So I quit.

He wanted to try using his mouth on me, but I made up a lie about being on my period because I got nervous. I hadn’t figured out how all of that shaving business went just yet or which design boys preferred. I was pretty sure I had to make it naked down there first.

Afterward I told my best friend what I did because she already knew on account of the look on my face. She laughed and told me I was gross; he told everyone in tenth grade, who told everyone in ninth grade; then my mom overheard me talking about it on the phone one night and cried and said I’d end up just like my older sister, who got pregnant at seventeen.

So that’s what I was thinking about on my first day of high school, which is what almost everyone thinks of every day during high school I suppose.

***

Three weeks into high school I developed a new crush. At this point in my life I changed the boy I liked more than I changed my newly purchased “adult” underwear, so this didn’t come as much of a surprise.

He was handsome and athletic and we talked on the phone every night for hours. He even asked me to my first homecoming dance, which created quite a controversy seeing as how he had dark skin.

See, my Dad wasn’t overtly racist or anything (so he said), but when I told him about the dance he said his daughter wasn’t going to homecoming with a black boy and I cried for hours that night. I wrote my dad a three-page letter begging him to reconsider because I was asked to homecoming by a nice guy and why should it matter if he’s black or white or purple with pink polka dots?

I think my Dad felt pretty bad about the whole ordeal, but I decided to go to homecoming with a group of girlfriends instead.

Our “relationship” never moved beyond the phone and a couple second-base sessions on someone’s tattered basement couch, but it did mark a significant change in my life. He was first of an endless list of insignificant hook-ups and almost-boyfriends who came and went throughout my high school career. He taught me how to like someone a lot and not give a shit about them at the same time, a dating philosophy that stuck with me for subsequent years.

Afterward I decided against trying to form serious relationships when friendships with benefits were less work and more fun - or so I thought.

And I decided against listening to my parents thoughts and opinions altogether. My Dad had proven to be wrong and out-of-touch. My Mom submitted to my Dad’s every word, which disgusted me and went against my newly formed philosophy.

From then on the only person I listened to and genuinely cared about was myself. It would be a long time before this selfishness dissolved.