She turned out to be right, because the treatment ended up giving me a decent head of soft waves. Thank God, because otherwise, I would have spent the summer looking like Weird Al Yankovic.
Throughout our relationship, Lisa has always loved the challenge of introducing me to a new movie. She’s responsible for some of my all-time favorites, including the aforementioned Grease and The Outsiders, where my girliness finally kicked in enough to swoon over Danny Zukko and Sodapop Curtis, before graduating to actual films like A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun, where our crushes matured enough to include Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift on our wishlists.
She knew everything about everything and tried to impart her all-encompassing wisdom to me on a daily basis. Such relevant bits of knowledge on topics ranging from fashion to mascara to French-kissing etiquette. The latter of which led to my first real kiss with Brian Hollander in the basement of Lisa’s house during a game of Spin-the-Bottle.
It was a setup, for sure, because lucky Brian was the only boy in the room at the time she suggested the three of us play. We agreed, and Lisa, ever the best friend, argued the direction of the pointed bottle any time it landed in her vicinity. On the two times she wasn’t able to dispute the call, she merely pecked old Brian on the lips, allowing me to be the only one to swap actual spit with him. Of course, Brian’s joy in the revelation that I was the easier conquest prompted him to lead me into the bathroom for a real makeout session. I even let him put his hands into the back pockets of my jeans! It was quite a memorable afternoon.
Even though kissing Brian should have been unforgettable enough on its own, there’s another reason that notorious day sticks out in my mind.
It was the day my mother left us.
After all these years, it’s still difficult for me to flat-out make that statement.
When you’re a child who’s been abandoned, it’s the very center of who you are as a person. It’s like having a parent die, but without any sort of finality. You suddenly turn from being a regular, everyday person who nobody blinks an eye at into That Girl Without A Mother.
To make matters worse, while there are the multitude of questions swirling around in your own head, there are the inquiries from friends and acquaintances and people you barely know. You try to be polite and accommodating toward anyone who asks about the situation, but really, you just want to slap them and tell them to mind their own business.
But worst of all are the people who don’t bother asking anything at all. They are the ones who think they’ve got it all figured out and don’t need to bother finding out the real story. They’re the ones who will say pitying things behind your back like “Oh, that poor, little girl” or “The man aged ten years overnight when that woman left him”. Sometimes, I’d overhear someone say something about “that Kate Warren woman”, which always made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
There was a lot of talk that summer but mercifully, I wasn’t privy to the majority of it until my teen years. I think I was so caught up in my own feelings on the matter to have been aware, or to have even cared, about what anyone around town may have thought. I was too busy dealing with it myself, trapped in my own head for the weeks following her absence.
Ultimately, I had a pretty bad spell at one point that summer, and I credit Lisa as being the one who brought me back from the edge. It seems she has been there for every single moment-whether epic or trivial-throughout my entire life.
One of our more monumental moments was that I was due to turn seventeen about a month into our senior year, lending even more distractibility to my mind on that particular September day back in 1990.
It was a beautiful, sunny day outside and my head was consumed with thoughts of my impending vehicular freedom.
Therefore, I was ill-prepared for the bomb that was about to hit my English Lit class on an otherwise unremarkable Monday afternoon.
Chapter 2
TRIPWIRE
I was sitting in Mrs. Mason’s fifth period English Literature class when it happened.
It was only the second week of the new school year, my senior year (finally!) at über-prestigious St. Nicetius Parochial High School-since it was the only Catholic school in town, it was less formally referred to as “St. Norman’s”- and already I was counting down the days until graduation. Five down; one-hundred-and-seventy-five to go.