All You Need Is Blonde

I’ve known you less than five minutes, and already I’m thinking Well this is a colossal mistake.

Paul Driscoll asked me to meet you: the exchange student from Norway, staying with his family for a year. A new “big brother” for Amelia. “He’ll be going to Roosevelt; he doesn’t know anyone,” Paul said. I empathize with being the new kid; I’ll be new too, an incoming sophomore. But at least my boyfriend Jay will be there, and my best friend Sam; I won’t be completely alone on the first day. It’d be awful to not know anyone. So I’m here, half-invited to this late-summer welcome party where I don’t know anybody else, because of you.

You’re tall and very blond. Lanky. Thin and angular, with a prominent Adam’s apple and cropped hair, slightly wavy. Your eyes look green. I thought they’d be blue. You look a year or two older than I am. You shake my hand before Amelia demands your attention, drawing you away.

Some of the partygoers have been toting athletic equipment to the back of the house. The yard has become a makeshift volleyball court: I’m drafted into playing. Paul assigns places: You and I are on a team with the Driscolls. The opposing side all look like fraternity brothers, which doesn’t seem fair; I’m the youngest, smallest person out here.

“Do you know how to play?” you ask.

“Yes,” I reply, not exactly lying. I’ve played in gym class, reluctantly. A forearm pass hurts and leaves bruises, even with long sleeves, and my serves are unpredictable. But this is supposed to be a friendly game, not for a grade, so I try.

When the other team volleys, the ball hits the court before I can run to it. You turn to me and say, “You missed that.” Your accent’s strange; I can’t tell if you’re asking a question or stating the obvious.

When it’s my turn to serve, I don’t clear the net and we lose the offensive. I apologize to everyone, but the only one who seems to care is you. “You know what would help?” you say. The sun beats down on us. I feel myself sweating from the afternoon heat and the embarrassment, waiting for your tip. “Go play for the other side for a while,” you suggest.

Before the next match I’ve had enough and decide to go home. You practice your serve and don’t notice I’m leaving. What an ass, I think. Now I have to avoid him for the next year.

The two most important people in my world: Sam and Jay. Sam is a version of a person I’d like to be: effortlessly funny, playful. Never struggling with that chronic sadness, always lodged in some dark corner of my brain, like a reclusive spider. Sam’s already written a collection of witty and bitter short stories our English teachers love. Every after-school trip to Gravity Records ends with my arms full of his recommended music: New Order, Electronic, Morrissey, Kate Bush. Despite these virtues, his platonic friendships with pretty girls and obvious discomfort with boys fuels cruel rumors. “He’s so weird, I don’t know why you hang out with him,” Jay says. His own musical inclination is for N.W.A. and Geto Boys; he doesn’t read what he isn’t forced to. I pretend I don’t hear. The relationship is still new. Jay looks at me in a way Sam doesn’t, like no boy has. If he thinks this about Sam, he might think it about me too.

That Friday I see you in the hallway between classes at a red locker close to the exit. In this environment, survival depends on camouflage and you couldn’t possibly stick out more: an ostrich in a chicken yard. You wear a strange-looking shirt with a vibrant print, nothing like what other boys here wear. Your shoes look like Chuck Taylors but aren’t. You’re a head taller than the student with the locker next to yours. You’re alone, getting your books. I’m about to walk on, but stop because I’m thinking about another school, in another country far from here, where there’s another locker just like this, and it isn’t yours because you’re here. That theoretical locker is in a school where your friends go, friends who aren’t with you now, because you wanted to come, for some inexplicable reason, to this godforsaken place and experience what life is like for us. Just how far you are from everything you’ve known your whole life, up until now, is clear to me. It’s farther than I’ve ever been from anything.

I wonder if these first few days here have been hard for you.

But this only lasts a moment as I watch you walk down the hall. It doesn’t make you less of an ass, and I can hold a grudge better than I can hold a conviction.

I’m in my bedroom reading Gogol. I’m certain that if I’d been born in the right part of Ukraine 160 years ago, Gogol and I would’ve been fast friends. My literary heroes all are white, male, and dead, and I especially like the Russians, how their characters wander in and out of the story as if they stumbled there by accident. Most people I encounter in life do the same. I sometimes cut class to go read in the bathrooms: while other girls smoke or get high, I’m locked in a stall with Bulgakov or Dostoevsky. If anyone asks, I say it’s Stephen King.

The phone rings in the hall. My mother answers it; I hear her through my bedroom door. A few moments later she swings it open without knocking. “The Driscolls want you to babysit tonight,” she says, and then adds, “That boy will be there too. Their student from wherever-it-is.”

I lay down Dead Souls, annoyed by the interruption. “If he’s going to be there,” I ask, “what do they need me for?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe his English isn’t great and they want you in case something happens.”

Your grammatically perfect insult springs to mind. “His English is just fine,” I say. The thought of spending a whole evening in the same house with you makes me want to ram a nail into my own skull.

“I don’t know what they want you to do,” Mom says, “but they’re still on the line and need an answer. Do you want the money or don’t you?”

I do want the money. “Fine,” I say. “Whatever.”

I walk the half-block over to the Driscolls’ with a tote bag full of CDs and my copy of Gogol. I’ll listen to music on the stereo in the living room once Amelia falls asleep. I assume you’ll stay in your own room somewhere upstairs, doing whatever creepy things Norwegian boys do in their rooms at night while I spend my evening alone on the first floor, immersed in the Cure and Russian lit. I’m surprised when you open the door. “The Driscolls already left,” you inform me. “It’s just you, me, and Amelia tonight.”

You wear another of those oddly patterned shirts, different from the one at school. Newer. I’m conscious of my own clothes, the scuffed black Doc Martens and oversized shirt stolen from Sam: my armor. You stand there in the doorway, and you seem awkward, uncertain. I know this feeling so well: never sure I’m saying the right thing, or thinking the right thought, taking up too much space or committing some other social sin, the constant monitoring of myself exhausting. I consider this as you walk in front of me, your hand holding Amelia’s.

Amelia dresses you in whatever parts of her costumes she can pull over your head and arms: sparkly peach and turquoise tulle, a pair of huge pink plastic sunglasses. Fairy-princess-mermaid-monster. You invent a game: you’re a wolf, chasing Amelia through the house, still wearing her tulle. She dodges you, running to me for protection; you try to persuade me to hand her over, promising not to do terrible gustatory things. Amelia turns on you: a tiny Brutus with a plastic pirate saber. The wolf dies a dramatic, outsized death. I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this. You do the lion’s share of the work.

You ask, “Do you want to listen to some music?”

The Pixies: Bossanova. I’ve never heard of them. You crank the volume and wild surf-side chords take over: you and Amelia frenetically crash around the living room as I stand there, soaking in the sound. It’s exactly how I feel inside—excited, energetic, wanting to shout. I imagine everyone I know from school—Jay, Sam, the kids in homeroom, my AP Spanish class, everybody—peering through the living room windows like voyeurs, judging what they see; judging me for being there and part of it. Finally, I think Fuck it and join in; rarely have I felt anything like this. The track changes; you scoop Amelia up and try to whirl her in time, the tempo like a waltz on speed. I can’t understand anything Black Francis is screaming but it doesn’t matter. Before the month is over, I’ll own everything the Pixies ever recorded.

Amelia’s upstairs, asleep, the contents of my tote bag spread on the Driscolls’ white carpet. Every jewel case open. You like the Cure and REM, are less impressed with Depeche Mode, the Smiths, and Joy Division. You listen to the Velvet Underground, the Dead Kennedys, the Clash. A Norwegian band called The September When. At home in my room there’s a black Kenwood HiFi on my nightstand, towers of CDs and cassettes on the carpet like stalagmites on a cavern floor. At night, I lie in bed playing The Church, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Sisters of Mercy, the songs coursing through me like rivers, my heart pounding in the dark. I wonder if you ever do the same.

As you tell me about the Cramps, a band I know slightly, you say, “You like Songs the Lord Taught Us.”

I notice, again, the unusual way you talk: accentuating certain words by elongating them slightly, like you’re sifting through a lexicon in your brain, making sure the next word you choose is right, careful not to make any mistakes. Like, lord, taught. Your statements can sound like questions; your questions are declarations. I’m unsure if you are telling me I like it, or asking me. I wonder if I’ve misjudged you, taking offense where none was meant: if the fault was in my ear and not your speech. I decide you’re probably asking.

“I don’t know,” I say. “What’s on it?” You sing a few bars: Midwest monsters, teenage girlfriends and their scars. Your awkwardness, for that moment, suspended.

As I put my CDs and the unread Gogol back in my bag, the bookmark I’ve been using falls to the floor. It’s a crude greeting card Sam passed to me in the hallway: a sheet of notebook paper, folded in half, the fringe from the spiral along the bottom. On the outside, in clumsy block letters: The Horror… On the inside: a primitive cartoon of a diabolical hairstylist forcing a terrible haircut on a hapless Sam; an obscene joke about her need for a “tension release.” The left side of the card has song lyrics from REM: the words a code for me to crack. On the back he’s drawn a bar code, added a price tag of $100, and copyrighted Why I Didn’t Call Last Night.

The card is part puzzle, part joke, part art. You look interested. “Be my guest,” I say.

Three of your cards sit on Sam’s desk. You pass my locker each morning, not making eye contact as your card finds its way into my hand. Since that night at the Driscolls’ I’ve tried to draw you into my small circle of friends, Sam’s acceptance of you crucial to me.

“Wasn’t he, like, really mean to you?” Sam asks, confused by my sudden ambassadorship.

“That was before,” I explain, though I don’t say before what, uncertain even Sam would understand the importance of dancing to the Pixies in the living room, of you singing. Instead, I offer your cards as proof of your worthiness.

The drawings are elaborate: a disembodied head swirling in a background of riotous pattern; a series of disjointed film stills, each with a miniature vanitas. All of your lyrics from songs I don’t know: the message a mystery.

“Wow,” Sam says. His own card has stick figures and sloppy handwriting: amateurish. “Imagine being trapped in that brainpan.”

I look at your drawings again and try to do just that.

Yours is the guest bedroom on the second floor; you keep it in a state of hotel-like tidiness. You haven’t been here long enough yet to make this space your own. It’s so different from my own room, with glossy posters of the Cure and Bauhaus tacked above the narrow, unmade bed. Clothes, shoes, and books scattered like shrapnel after a bomb detonation.

The first time I visit you here, we listen to Boys Don’t Cry and I look through your copy of Tommy og Tigern. I’ve never seen a foreign-language version of a comic before, and I love Calvin and Hobbes. I want to see if I understand what happens in the panels despite not knowing the words, so I’m “translating” the story for you and you tell me if I’m right or not. The Driscolls insist you keep the bedroom door open. Paul walks by and, finding it shut, opens it wide, sticking his head in and smiling at us. We hear him go down the hall; you get up and close it again, the defiant streak in you surprising me. What does Paul imagine we would be up to in here, without that open door to prevent it? Knowing he’s pictured you and me copulating in his guest bed while he and Amelia are right down the hall makes me feel thoroughly embarrassed. Why would he think I’d do such a thing? With you?

As though reading my mind, you say “He wants to protect your virtue”—elongating wants, your, virtue. Somehow this makes it so much worse: I feel myself blushing and wish I could sink into the floor.

“What, from you?” I say. “As if.”

You smile and say “Well, we European males can be very”—you carefully choose your word—“Seductive.”

Oh, God, he did not just say that, I think, covering my face with my hands. Please let me die right now. Is this how you see me, some helpless girl with a body that needs protecting?

“You and Paul know fuck-all about my virtue,” I reply.

“Aren’t you homesick?” I ask. “Don’t you miss your family?” You won’t see them for an entire year, your only communication with them through expensive, trans-Atlantic phone calls.

“Why should I miss them?” you ask. “I’ll see them again. It’s only a year.”

I’m astounded. How very adult—completely free from the control of your parents, on the other side of the world, feeling nothing about it—no guilt, regret, or need. But you aren’t an adult. You’re just hovering near the edges. Is it possible that our concept of time is so different—a year to you, like nothing, while for me it’s interminable? An old Explorer globe sits on the desk in my room, with mountain ranges in relief and obsolete Soviet borders, showing me all the places there are that aren’t here. Daring me to get to them. I wonder if I can.

“There’s something wrong with a kid who can go a whole year without seeing his family and not miss them,” my mother says. “That’s a sign of sociopathy.” I say nothing. She doesn’t understand. It’s bravery.

“How do you say ‘virgin’ in Norwegian?” I ask. It’s mid-September, and we sit on the swings at the elementary school. I push myself in circles, twisting up the chains supporting my seat, then holding my legs out and spinning fast as they untwist back into place. The links are rusted and make a tired sound. I think nothing of asking you candid questions like this. Our friendship: quick and deep.

I think how unpleasant that particular word sounds in English, vinegary and sour. “Jomfru,” you say. It sounds awkward and thick as you say it.

“So, it’s ugly in both languages,” I reply.

“You think it’s ugly to be a virgin?” you ask.

“It’s not ugly to be a virgin,” I say. “Just too many ugly words for it.”

You don’t say anything for a while, then you ask, “Are you a virgin?”

I stop mid-twist. I’ve never discussed this with a boy before, not even Jay. My confusing feelings about my body, my curiosity, especially my fear. How I can yearn for something so badly and still be terrified of what it means—the consequences so much more momentous than the thing itself. Jay wants it, my friends all seem to be having it, and here I am, alone at the starting line, not running even after the gun has gone off.

“Yes,” I finally say. “Are you?” I think you are, but I’m not certain. If you’re like every other boy I know, you’ll lie to me about it.

“Yes, I am,” you say.

“Virgin everything?” I ask.

“Everything?” The question confuses you.

“You know,” I explain, “Virgin hands? Virgin tongue?”

“Virgin tongue?”

“Virgin tongue! A ‘VT’,” I say. “Haven’t you ever kissed anyone?”

“Oh!” You connect my scattered dots. “No, I’ve never kissed anyone.”

This surprises me: despite your oddity, you don’t seem completely un-kissable. I don’t say anything.

“And you?” you ask. “Do you have a virgin tongue?”

In this one area, I have something on you. “No, no VT,” I say. I leave out that this just happened a few days ago in the passenger seat of Jay’s blue Camaro, U2 on the radio, the interior thick with stale cigarette smoke. Even though I knew it was coming, when Jay began to kiss me, I felt so inept and, embarrassed that I might be doing it badly, I pulled away from him. The whole encounter lasted only a few seconds, but still, I reason, this counts. “I’m a virgin without a VT,” I say. “But, please don’t say anything to anyone about it.”

The following day, you pass me a card. I scurry into the bathroom and lock myself in a stall to read it. Outside, in block letters, you’ve written All You Need is Blonde…

Inside: an advertisement for “Scandinavian Blondes”—a direct-to-your-door escort service. You’ve included the Driscolls’ phone number and starred the claim that All our products are pure. The card is a part of Nocturnal Activities, Inc. No lyrics at all.

I sit there in the stall, a mixture of feelings inside me. The card is funny; I smile as I re-read it, but I think about the playground the night before and what a different tone that conversation seemed to have. Did I misunderstand? I stare down at the card in my lap. I think, maybe, you might like me a little, and I feel a tiny jolt inside.

We watch Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Even though we both find the movie uproariously funny, I can’t stand the “Live Organ Transplants” scene. Gore disturbs me: seeing Terry Gilliam disemboweled by Graham Chapman makes me curl up into a little ball next to you, my face buried in my crossed arms. I hear you laughing hard at the dialogue over the shrieking; I peek and see the splatter of fake blood, a hand reaching for a quivering liver. I duck my head back down.

“What?” you say, “It’s hilarious!”

“It’s too horrible!” I say, voice muffled.

You’ll taunt me mercilessly for this, I know, and you should. For the past several weeks, sardonic humor has been the touchstone of our relationship. We make fun of each other constantly, our foibles and idiosyncrasies fair game for the other. It’s childish for me to be so squeamish about something so over-the-top—but I can’t help it. You put your arm over my head, holding me down so I don’t look again. I feel the weight of you, see the colors shifting behind my shut-tight eyes, the scene feeling endless. Finally, I hear Eric Idle start to sing about the ever-expanding universe. You say “There, it’s over.” You take your arm away.

We cruise down Esplanade in Sam’s mother’s old Lincoln, Sam behind the wheel and you crammed in the back. I’m the girl so I always ride shotgun; it doesn’t matter that I’m a foot shorter than you. Sometimes I scootch the seat as far back as it will go and then recline it, just to box you in as much as possible, amused you let me do this without complaining to Sam about your contracting space. We sing obscene Clarence Carter songs and honk at the other cars full of teenagers passing us in the opposite lanes: a weekend rite of passage. I glance at you in the rearview mirror, watch you watch the oncoming traffic, headlights passing over you and then leaving you in shadows. You belong right where you are, there in the backseat: one of us now.

You’re so strange. I think this as I sit on your bed next to you, listening to Too Dark Park and staring at the life-sized cardboard cutout of Hannibal Lecter in his grilled mask and straight jacket, strapped upright to a gurney, salvaged from an Old Town Video display. Hannibal stands eerily close to the foot of the bed; he looks like he’s staring back at me. The Skinny Puppy vocals add tremendously to the haunted-house atmosphere your room’s starting to take on. You have a taste for the macabre and a sentimentality I’d call Gothic, if you weren’t so ridiculously foreign and gawky and blond. How can someone who looks so golden be so dark? “Shouldn’t you be playing chess with Death or something?” I asked you once; you smiled wickedly.

But Hannibal’s a bridge too far: the other boys at Roosevelt just have pin-ups of Playboy centerfolds or Lamborghinis. “Seriously,” I say, “how can you sleep with that thing so close to you? Doesn’t it give you nightmares?”

You laugh and say, “I thought you liked that movie!” That unusual accent: you linger on the word like.

“I do liiike the movie,” I say, trying to imitate you. “I liiike Jodie Foster. But I wouldn’t want her staring at me while I sleep.”

“Maybe she should stare at you,” you say. “You would have some interesting dreams!”

I reach over and smack you hard with your pillow. “Why’re you so fucking weird?” I ask.

You just shrug and say, “I don’t know.” Then: “Why are you?”

I don’t have an answer for you, the source of my own strangeness a secret even from myself.

I walk through the corridor between classes, and I hear someone mispronounce your name, then laughter. Two seniors at their lockers. They have a class with you: one’s repeating to the other something you said, the unusual syntax of an answer you gave. What you said sounds smart to me, but the way he mocks your words makes it seem pompous, his imitation of you exaggerated and cruel. “Did you see what he was wearing today?” his friend asks.

When someone wants to tear apart a girl, they go after her looks—how ugly her face is, how unshapely or inadequate her body might be. They talk about her sex life or the lack of it, dismissing her as an undesired thing. But when they go after a boy, they go after who he is—what’s wrong with the way he thinks, the way he navigates the world. The core of him, making him nothing. You’re unlike anyone I’ve ever met; these idiot boys make a caricature of that. Afraid they’ll turn their laser-like attention on my own flaws and crucify me next, I’m too cowardly to defend you. I walk past, quiet, an undelivered card for you in my clenched fist.

We walk along the railroad tracks toward the cemetery, the journey and destination making us introspective: a pair of novice philosophers.

“Do you think swans are beautiful creatures?” you ask.

I’ve never thought about it, but you must’ve asked for a reason. “Tell me why you don’t,” I say.

You tell a story about a family of swans on a lake in the summertime, soon after the cygnets hatched. The swans shared the lake with a flock of ducks, and when one dove for food too near the cygnets, the adult swans attacked it. You tried to intervene, throwing stones from the shore to scare the swans away, but they were too far out in the water. You watched as they ripped the duck to pieces.

I imagine you at the water’s edge, helpless, distraught. I understand powerlessness. I think again of those two seniors in the hallway.

“I don’t think swans are beautiful creatures,” you say.

Back home, you have a cat named Pushkin. “After the poet,” you explain. I’m on my back on your bed, telling you about the new puppy my mother brought home, another animal for her overcrowded menagerie. You sit on the floor with your photo album.

“Of course you’d name your cat after a poet,” I say. You inform me only the most refined, sophisticated people name their cats after poets. This may be true; however, if I had a supply of cats that needed naming, I’d choose characters from the books I’m reading: Chichikov. Jensine. Winston Smith.

“Winston Smith is a terrible name for a cat,” you say, though I didn’t ask your opinion. Rolling over, I see the album open on your lap: angelic faces of Nordic teenagers. I haven’t seen these pictures before. “Sometimes I miss my friends,” you say. This makes me sad, because I think we’re your friends, Sam and I and a few other people you talk to at school. I no longer think of the ones you left behind you, though of course they’re there. One especially: a pretty dark-haired girl in a track jersey, about my age. She resembles me a little: happier.

“Who’s she?” I ask.

“Berit,” you say, though this tells me nothing.

“But who is she,” I want to know. Do you miss her?

“She’s a friend,” you say, “a girl I used to run with.” You’ve tried running with me, but my track skills are on par with volleyball, so now when you run, outside of practice, you do it alone.

“Was she any good?” I ask.

“Yes,” you say. “She was pretty good.” I look at your face as you look down at your pictures: there’s a whole history inside you I know nothing about. A “you” that existed before the you I know.

When I get home that night, my parents are in an escalating argument over the still-unnamed puppy. My mother wants cute and generic, my stepfather wants ferocity. Not a single poet in the suggestions of either. “Does she like to run?” I ask.

“Of course she likes to run,” my stepfather says, like I’m an idiot. “She’s a dog.”

“Her name’s Berit,” I say. For once no one argues with me.

We talk over the phone late at night. You’re only two doors down but your voice seems to come from miles away, the staticky signal reminding me of ocean waves. The darkness shapes my thoughts. I tell you things I don’t say in the daylight:

I wish I were anywhere else.

I want to create something beautiful; put it in the world for someone else to find.

I hate my stepfather passionately. Sometimes, I hate my mother for forcing us to be a family, for her weakness in needing a man so badly she will accept one as damaged as this. I also feel shame, because I know she stays with him because of me: I am too much for her alone. “Being a parent is the hardest thing there is,” she says, but what she means is: being your parent.

I will never have children.

As I lie on my narrow bed and look out the window onto the dark lawn, the receiver from our cordless phone cradled between my neck and shoulder, able only to hear your voice, I feel safe. I trust you with my unhappiness.

Once, my mother intercepts our conversation and listens silently on the extension: a troll under a bridge. In the morning she informs me of this and tells me, “That boy is not your psychologist.”

“Maybe he should be,” I retort, mortified by what she must have overheard.

She says, “Trust me, it’s not your mental state he’s interested in.”

At school, I tell you about this, afraid our late-night calls are over now the illusion of privacy has shattered. Later that day, you hand me a card. The cover says, in big ballooned letters: Have you ever wanted to get rid of them? We can do it. Inside you’ve written: Car crashes, Fires, Suicides. Unmotivated Killings. Disappearances. Contact us to have your parents removed. Beneath that is a guarantee, the terms offered. Your phone number with the extension RUBOUT.

Not a psychologist, I think. An accomplice.

Having fun is our raison d’etre. We act like children, holding hands, skipping down the street, singing absurd Pixies songs, delirious. Energetic as puppies. We know every word to every Cure song, even the B-sides. Your anthem is “The Hanging Garden,” mine is “Charlotte Sometimes.” In playgrounds after school hours, we push each other on the swings. We laugh so hard it’s difficult to breathe.

We spend hours up in your room, listening to music, sometimes lying in silence as the songs pour over us, the lyrics speaking for us. We make loud commentary through bad movies and talk about the nature of art. We ask bizarre hypothetical questions and then psychoanalyze the answers. We take ourselves, and each other, so seriously yet somehow manage to make everything a joke. Sometimes, I think you’re happy. Sometimes, I think I am.

“I don’t think anyone has understood me,” you tell me, “the way that you do.”

I know what you mean. I feel it too.

You teach me some Norwegian, almost all of it ridiculous, obscene, or both. “How is this going to be helpful when I go to Norway?” I ask after you teach me something raunchy: slang for genitalia and the infinitive å slikke.

“You don’t need to know Norwegian when you get to Norway,” you say. “Everyone speaks English. Unless they’re really old,” and I picture hyper-blond forty-somethings in garishly printed shirts, flummoxed by my attempts to communicate in English. I ask if you like English, if you think it’s a pretty language. You read in English as voraciously as I do; you quote Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson as if their words were your own. I think my native language is beautiful, but you say it’s just okay. The problem, you tell me, is that in English we use the same word for things when we shouldn’t. Loving ice cream and loving your girlfriend are very different things, yet the word is the same. “It’s not this way in Norwegian,” you say.

You teach me the difference between “glad i deg” and “jeg elsker deg.” You make sure I say both correctly.

We sit outside the Driscolls’ front door as the street darkens and the lamps turn on. You’re quiet. You won’t look at me, you stare down at the steps. This isn’t like us. I feel strange, uncomfortable: like you’re waiting for something. Finally, I ask “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you talking to me?”

You look at me and say, slowly, like you’re working out a complicated problem, “Do I have to spell it out for you?” Your cadence, stressing the words have and you. You sound so sad: I want to protect you from your sadness, like you protect me from mine.

I say the first thing that comes to me: “I-T… O-U-T… F-O-R… Y-O-U.” I pause between each spelling, hoping hard you’ll smile, and you do a little, but not in the way I wanted you to.

You look at me and say, “I am in love with you.”

I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.

“I have a boyfriend,” I say.

“I know,” you tell me. “But…I don’t think he loves you. Not like this.”

What can you possibly know about this? He’s a year younger than you, but he has a job, a car, he drinks at parties and smokes pot with his friends. He introduces me to older, more popular kids; their mild interest in me as his girlfriend makes me feel absurdly special. He takes me on dates, spends money. Afterwards he takes me somewhere alone; his unmade bed in his basement bedroom, the cramped back seat of his car: all proving grounds. I let him touch me, learning from it, and he pulls me further from the childhood I’m desperate to shed. After, he always says he loves me.

I try to picture you, instead of him, next to me in the tangled bedsheets and my mind shuts the image down. You’re two years older, but you seem younger than me, so much less experienced. I often feel like I’m guiding you, teaching you how to fit in, to be “American,” to know the difference between what is socially acceptable, even cool, and what is merely weird. You intrigue me, you scare me a little, you make me want to run from you and seek you out at the same time. You remind me of the part of myself I’m trying to escape. Jay’s nothing like me. I’m convinced this is a good thing.

“You think he’s more attractive than I am.” You make it sound like both a question and a claim. I don’t know how to explain. He’s like a movie still; you are like a painting.

“You think he’s smarter?” you ask. You’re so much more intelligent, to even consider this feels unkind. I wonder if you’re trying to hurt me, forcing me to think these things. It can never again be like it was between us before you said these words. I want to shout at you, Why are you doing this: to yourself, to us?

“Of course not,” I say, a new fracture inside me. “It’s not about that.”

You look back down at the steps and say, “Then I don’t understand.”

You can’t know what it’s like to be me, to have so little power over your own life, to be painfully aware of this. I think of my father, who fought for custody of my brother, but didn’t want me because I’m not a boy. My brother, who left us to go live with him. Even my mother, her need for my stepfather eclipsing my need for her. Everyone I love goes away from me; nothing I do stops that. Next year I’ll be sixteen and living in this same house, on the same street, but the window in the Driscolls’ guest bedroom will be dark in the evenings.

“You’re leaving,” I say. “I can’t feel that way.”

In winter, Jay breaks up with me and won’t say why, but I learn it’s because I haven’t gone all the way. He’s tired of the frustration, the wasted effort. The junior who tells me is someone I barely know, but he knows this about me and I feel exposed, shamed. In my backyard I drag the leaf-burning barrel from our garage; into it I stuff Jay’s sweatshirt. I ball up the notes he’s written me on notebook paper and punch them down in the barrel. Then I go find the lighter fluid and matches. When I return, you’re standing there; you must have seen me from the second floor of the Driscolls’ house.

You stay with me as we set the fire and watch Jay’s remnants burn.

Soon after, Paul comes over. He’s never paid us a social call before, and it’s late. My mother invites him inside. I go for a walk and when I return, he’s gone and she is livid. Paul is concerned about my influence on you, because you’re now reluctant to go back to Norway. You spoke to the Driscolls about finding a scholarship to stay in the States and study because you think, this way, we might be together. Paul suggests I put you up to this and told you, “You’re too smart, with too much going for you, to jeopardize your future over some girl.” They think it best if I don’t come over anymore. My mother’s upset because of the judgment this implies—that I, and by extension my family, including her—aren’t the right sort of people for their family, and by extension, you.

As I stand in the living room, reeling from this new revelation and listening to my mother rant about the Driscolls, I think Paul may be right. What am I really? A misfit girl from an unstable home in a dull little town in a flat rural state: completely unexceptional and conscious of the fact. Sometimes I am so sad inside I’m sure I must be broken. And while I’m smart—as smart as you, even—the difference between us is that nobody cares if I am. No one expects me to light up the world or worries about me jeopardizing my own future. I dream of escaping, vague aspirations of a bohemian life as a writer or an artist in Manhattan or London or some other place I’ve only read about. But my family’s been here for generations, and we’ve always lived as we do right now. I’ll probably marry young, like all the women in my family, wandering through some nondescript and blurry future until…nothing. Until nothing. And inside I feel like so much nothing, I’m astounded there can also still be oxygen and furniture and my angry mother all in the same room where I’m standing. Of course the Driscolls don’t want me near you. At this moment, I don’t want me near you.

The next day there’s a card crammed into the vent of my locker. No drawing, only text. The outside says Don’t tell me…and the inside says This isn’t very good. The lyrics are The Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and Jim Morrison’s “Unhappy Girl.” I am furious: the triteness of a card like this in light of my banishment; you must’ve known what would happen. I confront you at your locker, so angry I’m practically in tears.

“What did you do?” I demand. “They think I want to make you stay! Why did you say that to them?” You look bewildered: clearly, whatever you intended wasn’t this. “I never said anything like that to you,” I insist. You don’t respond.

In spring, you begin to give me things; you’re arming me for your absence.

One of your blank books for my poetry. On the blue flyleaf, you write Flicker, twinkle, burn or shine—playful with my language, making verbal fireflies.

Your bandana, the repeating print of cracked crania bright white against the black fabric. Your black trench coat, several sizes too big. Both carry the dim scent of your room, your locker: a mixture of soap and sweat, a trace of something else, undefinable.

A three-box set of Depeche Mode singles you know I’ve been wanting for over a year. You don’t share my ardor for the music, you just want to make me happy. It’s the best gift I’ve ever received from anyone. I’m beside myself with excitement and disbelief that you did this for me. As you hand me the boxes, one by one, you say “Happy Birthday” … “Merry Christmas” …and, finally, “See you later.”

“When we first met, what did you think of me?” I ask. It seems so long ago now. We sit cross-legged on the floor in my room, our default hangout since Paul’s visit months ago. I make an effort now to keep it more orderly, nicer for you. It’s May. The school year is ending. Soon you’ll walk in commencement with the other seniors, receive an empty diploma case, shake the principal’s hand. Just like a local boy—one who might head off to college in the fall but could come back for breaks and long weekends. Someone rooted here.

You laugh at my question, about to confess something unflattering. “I thought you were cute,” you say, the Cute a little too long… “But not very interesting.”

“How dare you!” I say, laughing too. “You’re clearly a terrible judge of character.”

“Yes,” you agree, “I’m apparently a very terrible judge of character. I’m sorry.”

I try to picture myself through your eyes. How childlike I must have seemed, all boy’s clothes and bookish: clumsy, naïve. I turned fifteen just three days before the Driscolls’ party. Not long from now, you will be eighteen, your last link to your childhood severed. You’ll be gone before my next birthday. I realize that, whenever you think about me in your life after this, I will be perpetually fifteen. The idea makes me feel strangely trapped.

Early summer. We lie on the carpet on my bedroom floor, the room growing dark around us. Above us, on the white textured ceiling, a galaxy of plastic phosphorescent moons, stars, and comets. I placed them up there years ago; they’ve long since grown dim, but even now some still have a faint yellow-green luminosity. We listen to Disintegration on the Kenwood, and “Untitled” starts. It’s a melancholy song, different from the darker tracks on the album. I keep my eyes fixed on the fading universe above us and I ask you, “Why is it me?” I’m so not anything. Surely you know that by now. As you always do, you know what I mean without my needing to explain.

“Because it is,” you say.

“What can I do to make you stop?” I ask.

“Nothing,” you reply. “There’s nothing you can do. I could live another ninety-five years and I’ll still feel the same.” I point out that in ninety-five years you will be one-hundred-twelve and probably long dead. You agree, but add, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll feel like this long after I’m dead.” Your accent, still not lost entirely after a year of immersion here, emphasizing feel, long, dead. The words suspended there.

The song ends: it’s the last track and there is silence. In the dark beside me, I feel you take my hand. You place your fingertips in the hollow spaces between my fingers, your thumb lies curled in my palm. For two people who spend so much time together, we’ve never touched like this; it’s the first time you have ever reached for me this way. In my mind I picture us as two elderly people, walking a narrow cobblestone street together in some dimly envisioned European town, the years of my life trailing out behind me like the train on a wedding gown. Decades of time in which I could hurt you, decades in which you could disappoint me. Plenty of years in which to argue, to embarrass one another, to grow bored. Enough time to stop being ourselves and to become people we no longer recognize, our adulthood demanding things of us, responsibilities restraining us as surely as if we were shackled to them. Our faces and bodies changing in ways we don’t like, our memories of our time together now growing dim and then vanishing altogether. I can feel your pulse in your fingertips. And if I turn to you, place my head on your chest and listen to that strange, dark heart of yours beating beneath the bones of your ribcage, my cheek against the fabric of your shirt, what would you do? Do you want me to? I know with certainty, despite what you say, that not long from now the cards and phone calls and letters will stop. That you’ll learn to love others and you will stop loving me. I know, too, that for me there will be men: already there are men. They’ll look at me, see one thing and never know I am really something else. Some will be kind and understanding; some will even love me, perhaps more strongly and completely than this.

But not one of them will ever know me the way you do now.

The last night. We haven’t spoken of this; the words for things make them real.

Even so, I know you’ll come.

I see your shadow lengthen beneath the street light outside before I hear your rap on my window. I lift the glass and help you through, careful to make no noise that could wake my parents in their room next to mine. There’s so much I need to tell you; it’s so important that I say these words. You pull me to you; you are not gentle, and I do not care. Your mouth is on mine. Your tongue, sandpapery, like a cat’s. I taste you and I cannot protect myself: such profound pain, such loss. It shatters me: I am annihilated. You’re so like me. In a way I can’t explain but can only feel, you are me, but you aren’t mine. And I’m not yours.

But I can give us this.