Even before she was a teenager, Lizzie discovered novels like Double Date and Going Steady and Fifteen at the library and read and reread them regularly. Set mostly in the 1950s and early 1960s, they described a world that she couldn’t quite relate to but that was totally fascinating. She learned from them that it was always a mixed blessing to have a steady boyfriend in high school. Yes, you sometimes got to wear his football varsity jacket (Lizzie did) or his ID bracelet (Lizzie didn’t, but that was because by the time she’d read those books, in the middle of the 1980s, no one wore ID bracelets any longer). The main characters in those novels, who were all named Jane or Sally or Penny, loved the fact that they knew who was taking them to the sock hops and spring flings and who’d they share lemon Cokes with at the drugstore, but in between the lines on the page there was always the lurking problem of sex, specifically, how far to go. Jealousy ran rampant in those books. Girls you thought were your friends became enemies whose goal in life was to get your boyfriend away from you. And breakups always broke your heart.
But none of this was true for Lizzie and Maverick. Instead, it was all good fun. Because they’d known each other since kindergarten, everything was familiar. They started dating because they found themselves always laughing at the same jokes in class, because Maverick could help Lizzie in trig and Lizzie could help him in English comp, and both of them really liked listening to duets, although neither could carry a tune, a fact that they both lamented. “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” and “Somewhere Out There” were two of their favorites. They had sex because it seemed silly not to. They broke up when Maverick went to spend the summer with his dad’s family in Baton Rouge and wanted the freedom to date other girls; he didn’t want to feel he was sneaking around behind Lizzie’s back. That was Maverick, blond and sweet and fearless, an Eagle Scout always insisting on the truth.
Lizzie had (still has, in fact) a less-than-comfortable relationship with honesty. By the time Maverick told her this, she’d been feeling a little burdened with twosomeness. She’d started to think wistfully of weekends without a date; she wanted to spend some time by herself. She’d grown tired of football and football statistics, at least for a while, but she never would have told him that. She drove Maverick to the airport; she enthusiastically kissed him good-bye and went home, completely fine. The year that she was seventeen and Maverick Brevard’s girlfriend was the lightest of heart Lizzie would ever feel, but back then she thought it was just the way her life was supposed to arrange itself.
Once she’d decided to go on with the Great Game, even without Andrea, Lizzie thought she should move Maverick up to the second week, right after Thad Cornish, since the Game involved also having sex with his brother Ranger, which would be a little awkward. She wanted to explain the situation to Maverick and see what he thought. When they met on the Wednesday night of his week and she told him her plans for the next twenty weeks or so, Maverick immediately responded that he thought playing the Great Game verged on lunacy. Plus it didn’t sound like the Lizzie he’d dated all last year. Because Lizzie couldn’t explain why it wasn’t an insane thing to do, there was little left to say. There was no flirting involved. Thursday night they picked up the argument right where they’d left off. Lizzie finally told him what a stick-in-the-mud he was being. She’d slept with him, hadn’t she? And he enjoyed it. A lot. Hadn’t he?
“That was different,” Maverick said. “I’m pretty sure Ranger’s a virgin. It’s not fair to him that the first girl he’s going to have sex with is someone who doesn’t love him. You were the first girl I slept with, but we were dating, we loved each other. Don’t you see how different that is?” There was no fooling around that night.
Friday night after the game, when they were due to have sex, they drove out to the park and walked along the river. “Can’t you just go along with it?” Lizzie pleaded. “Just because we were happy together?”
“Oh, crap,” Maverick said, “you are certifiably nuts. I know I’m going to regret this,” but he gave in, as she knew he would.
*?George’s Childhood?*
By any objective standard, George had a pretty wonderful childhood. In fact, there were only three downsides to it that he’d ever been able to identify: his conflicted feelings about his father, his conflicted feelings about his older brother, Todd, and the frustration of riding the Hebrew school bus.
He lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Elaine, his mother, occasionally tutored students in French, but was mostly a stay-at-home mom. His father, Allan, was the Jewish orthodontist. What this meant was that whenever the sons and daughters of members of the Jewish community needed orthodontia—which was almost always—it was Allan to whom they turned. He understood the importance of teeth in bat and bar mitzvah photos, and it was not unknown for him to remove a set of braces for the big day and then reattach them when the festivities were over. For no extra charge, of course. Because he deserved his excellent reputation as an orthodontist, a large number of Tulsa’s non-Jewish community also brought their offspring to him when they were in need of braces. It was not uncommon for George to see someone from middle school, his bowling league, or his Sunday school class whenever he went to his father’s office.
It was because of his father’s profession that George hated pain. Even though Allan was the soul of generosity, kindness, and care—he’d purchased three large arcade games so everyone, parents included, would have something to do while the kids waited to be called into the treatment rooms—he still inflicted a great deal of pain on his patients. George never forgot those awful monthly appointments when his braces needed to be tightened. He understood even as a kid that while the shoemaker’s children may go barefoot, the orthodontist’s sons must have perfect teeth. Hence those dreaded visits to his father’s office.
George likened his father’s smile—fake, false, and totally fearsome—to the grin left behind by the Cheshire cat. And who smiles like that when they’re about to hurt you? Sadists, that’s who. He knew, even at thirteen, that Allan was smiling in order to try to reassure each patient that it would all be okay, it might hurt a little, just for a second or two, but that straight teeth were a necessity for a certain type of young person in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1980s, and this small step, done every four to six weeks, was a necessary part of the treatment. George knew this, and knew for certain that his father loved him, but he couldn’t get over the fact that the torturer/orthodontist was his own father, coming toward him in order to dispense some not inconsiderable pain on his own son. For his own good.
George didn’t read the ne plus ultra example of dental malfeasance, William Goldman’s Marathon Man, until he was in dental school. When he did his hands shook so much that he had trouble holding the book; he found it so distressing that he never finished it, although he never seriously considered changing his career plans.