But I didn’t say that. I was stuck in the limbo of wanting a fifth-grade relationship but not being able to admit it, even to myself. I mean, I wanted to do something before I graduated, but not everything. And the only thing worse than having sex or being a virgin loser forever would be having a mature conversation with a guy I liked about waiting until I was ready. The world would have ended.
Even though I remember high school as a never-ending barrage of rejection, I would feel dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that there were guys who liked me. Or at least one. Noah left a rose by my locker on Valentine’s Day and had to trick me into walking past it, because my locker was on the third floor and I didn’t use it. I panic-hugged him, said “No thank you,” and walked away before I had to look at his face. He was remarkably cool about it and made sure things didn’t get weird. We stayed close friends throughout high school, and when he asked me on a Friday, “You wouldn’t want to go to prom on Saturday, would you?” I wrongly assumed the late ask and casual tone meant “as friends.” I was grossed out and frankly kind of hurt when he drove me to a motel after the dance. I had to pull the old phone call to Mom where I loudly whine “Why not?” and say my mom’s being a bitch and I have to go home. (An excellent tool for getting kids out of situations they don’t want to be in. My mom always played along and I would recommend this trick to any parent.)
Some bitter boys reading this might accuse me of “friend-zoning,” but I’d like to say that even if a girl has misinterpreted a situation that someone else thinks was obvious, she does not owe her male friends anything.I
Noah knew me well. He knew I was a virgin, in every possible sense, and that I didn’t take it lightly. But the motel implied that he hoped we could fool around, even though we weren’t dating. He was a nice boy who did something skeezy, and it sucked. We stayed in touch for a while after I moved to LA. In fact, he and a friend once stayed on my couch for a week and left a lovely thank-you note on the refrigerator the morning they left. I woke up and saw the note and felt guilty for being irritated by the end of the visit. Then my roommate stuck his head out of our bathroom. “There’s an enormous shit sitting in the toilet.” Maybe you’re just destined to lose touch with some people.
* * *
I. Needless to say, this applies to every arrangement of gender and orientation. I mention males pressuring females because that’s been my only personal experience of it, but it turns out my personal journey isn’t an infallible barometer of the entire human experience. Weird, right?
i guess we’re doing this, or how does this scene end?
I met Landon through the internet. Not ON the internet like some kind of freak. No, I met him the normal way: Heather (my hot blond friend) met Brent (Landon’s hot blond friend) on Myspace and those two introduced us right around the time they were getting tired of having hot blond dry-humping sessions. Because hot blonds need breakup wingmen, I guess?
Landon was attractive and he knew Anchorman by heart, which at the time passed for really funny. He was kind of a jock, which made me want to turn my nose up at him—as I did with all jocks—so I could let the world know that not being with a handsome, athletic type was MY CHOICE. But he was persistent and a genuine romantic, and when I weighed my options logically it seemed silly not to date him. I wanted to escape the wasteland of being the nineteen-year-old loner and, to the naked eye, this guy was perfect. He was polite and punctual and my friends liked him a lot . . . and he was very handsome.
One day during our courtship, he dropped off a novelty trucker hat on my doorstep. I know we’ve all figured out that novelty trucker hats are hideous, but it was cool at the time. Today, that would be like a guy giving you a spiked ear cuff, or a turtleneck crop top (or for future editions: a novelty trucker hat, because fashion is cyclical). It was sweet and original and I could resist no more. Let’s be real: he had a pulse and he wanted to be my boyfriend.
On our first official date, he took me to a trendy restaurant. I rolled my eyes over how “LA” it all was. I’d never been somewhere so stylish, which should have made me nervous, but being openly disdainful of anything cool is in my comfort zone, so I still had a couple moves at my disposal. I really shine in a Taco Bell parking lot with a water bottle full of vodka, but I could work with this.
After dinner, we went back to my apartment and talked with my roommates for an appropriate length of time before retiring to my room and crawling into the luxury of my twin bed. We fooled around for a while, I employed a few suggestions from the early chapters of the Guide to Getting It On!, no one recoiled in horror at any point—a successful first-date-level encounter.