When I woke up the next morning and looked at the screen, it was blank. Must have shut off in the middle of the night. I wanted to call him immediately to continue whatever it was we had started. And then it hit me: For the first time, I felt like I knew why girls so often lose their minds when they were in lust or love and how Shannon could get pregnant and how my parents came together so many years ago.
Love and lust were a madness that threatened everything, and yet, if you were in heat, you did not care.
11
The Sexual Tendencies of Teenage Boys
I met Shannon at the Rainbow Dragons’ first soccer practice. Our parents had signed us up. I was standing off to the side, waiting for whatever was about to happen, and this small girl with long, shiny black hair walked over to me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the flock of girls waiting for the balls to be released from the coach’s net bag.
“My name is Shannon Welsh. Let’s be friends,” she said, and I nodded.
Shortly after that, Shannon’s picking me out seemed sort of fated, because she would go on to develop the best cross on the team. She was one of the first girls who could actually lift the ball into the air and send it with any accuracy, so our coaches quickly paired us as a team within a team.
The strategy for much of our early days was to get the ball to Shannon by sending it past the defenders and toward the flag (or the other team’s corner), and then Shannon would outrun the defender while I ran toward the goal. She would cross the ball to my head or foot, and I would score. We did this hundreds of times, all throughout town soccer and then on the traveling teams and finally on our high school’s varsity team, which we both made as freshmen.
Shannon has often said that I am her best friend, although I have never formally agreed to take the job. Unlike me, Shannon is as girly as they come, constantly experimenting with makeup, different hairstyles, and tanning products. She’s beautiful off the field, but she’s most beautiful on the field, with her hair pulled back into a simple ponytail and her jersey soaked with sweat, and minimal makeup—only she doesn’t believe it.
I always knew Shannon and I were different. She was very talkative in groups and I wasn’t. She was the first girl in our class to have a boyfriend, and that happened when we were in third grade. She even made me her maid of honor in a pretend backyard wedding, which felt as though someone had stuck live electrical wires under my skin, although I did not protest.
And by the time we were in the seventh grade, Shannon was performing fellatio on older high school boys who only seemed to come around when they wanted blow jobs. She’d tell me all about it in great detail, almost as if she were trying to make me jealous or prove to herself that she really enjoyed it, when all the while it was painfully obvious that she was being used.
The worst part was that she knew she was being used and everyone knew the boys were complete assholes, but Shannon claimed to love the sex. And maybe she did love it—not just the attention from older boys and the alcohol they gave her as thanks, but the actual feeling of sex. And if I’m being honest, maybe it’s why I tried to kiss my English teacher, too. It felt good.
Regardless, the older boys told their friends about how easy it was to get middle school girls to give head and then all the high school boys were cruising past our middle school on a daily basis, asking if we car-less girls needed rides home and maybe would like something to drink. Shannon and many of the Rainbow Dragons got into those cars until the parents figured out what was going on and someone’s father got a lawyer involved.
My mother asked me if I ever got into “one of those boy party cars that were cruising by your school looking for BJs,” and when I told her I hadn’t, she asked me why not, which confused me.
“Shannon’s mother called. Your best friend was a regular, apparently. But she said you never went. Why?”
“Did you want me to go?”
“Of course not.”
“So why would you ask me that?”
Mom looked at me for a long time and then said, “Do you like boys?”
“What?” I said, even though I realized my mother was asking me if I were a lesbian.
“It’s okay if you don’t. I just wanted to—”
“Can we not talk about this?”
“Fine,” Mom said, and then stormed out of the room like I had offended her. And I’ve thought for years about that conversation and what it meant. She never said she was proud of me for not going with the older boys, nor did she say she thought any less of Shannon, who was a regular at our home and clearly one of Mom’s favorites—they used to talk a lot about beauty tips. And then I realized that not going along with the crowd—even when it meant not performing oral sex on older boys—could make you seem odd or weird.
My dad never said a word to me about what my friends were jokingly calling our “middle school sex scandal.”
But, of course, Shannon asked me why I never went along with them. It was maybe a month or so after the parents put an end to the sex rides. We were in her room and she was halfway through one of the many small bottles of peach schnapps her high school hookups had given her in exchange for blow jobs.
“Do you really think you’re better than us?” she said, a little tipsy, and then laughed. “Just because you’ve never had any fun with a boy? Or is it that you just don’t like boys?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“Okay.”
The lesbian rumors began the next day in school—boys coughing into their hands and then quickly saying, “Um, dyke.”