I’m more than halfway there before I realize I’ve forgotten my phone and it’s a big school so the chance of me finding her without contact could be pretty slim. I debate turning around and going back home to get it, but I’m almost there, so I figure I’ll drive around and try to find her.
Twice around the perimeter, and I’m not seeing her. She should be easy to spot: a little snip of a thing with jet black hair, in a black tank dress decorated with skulls, over top of a black v-neck tee-shirt that on anyone else would look modest, but not on her.
I realize I’m going to have to go back and get the phone, and this gives me a small spasm of worry. She’s an extraordinarily sweet, comely and slightly awkward girl of fifteen. I don’t want to leave her waiting for too long.
I call her from the house. She didn’t see me because she was waiting inside, she says, where it was cooler. When I get back to the school, she’s outside the main entrance talking to two boys. The one she’s laughing with is more than a foot taller than she is, and the other one, balancing on his skateboard behind her, also towers over her.
She sees me and waves. She puts her hand out to the taller boy. He shakes her hand, and then she leans into him as he stoops over to hug her. In the car, she tells me that while she was waiting inside, this boy, the one she’d been talking to, had come over and introduced himself. He’d told her he was a senior, and that makes it a practice to welcome sophomores to the school, and to show them around and help them get their bearings. He'd admired her gauges, and told her he’d recently taken out his piercings and had cut his hair short because his girlfriend is a straight-laced Mormon girl, and that sort of thing was important to her.
“He told me his girlfriend never swears or gets mad, even, except for this one time when she saw another girl give him an hug and a kiss on the cheek, and she told the girl to get the fuck off him before she ripped her face off.”
“Mormons are weird,” I say.
“He asked me if it would be alright to have my number, even though I have a boyfriend.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“Yes.”
Later, after we’ve been home awhile, she comes into the living room and tells me she’s been talking to this boy, Valentine, on the phone. She says that he thinks his girlfriend is going to break up with him because her father doesn’t approve of her dating a non-Mormon boy.
“Oh, really?” I say. “That sounds like a load of crap.”
"Yeah,” she says. “That’s what I thought, too.”
“Do you think he even has a girlfriend?”
“I doubt it.”
“And that thing about her getting mad when he gave some girl a hug, and then you gave him a hug. What was up with that?”
“He asked me for one.” She rolls her eyes, and I know that this is the part where she gets to feel ashamed for something she did not do.
“By asking for that hug, he put you in a double bind—a compromising position. It's a set up."
“I know,” she says. “I kind of wondered when he came up and was so friendly and all.”
“Next it’ll be, ‘Oh, woe is me! My girlfriend has dumped me, and I'm broken-hearted and I need someone to talk to, back here in this secluded little out-of-the-way spot where no one will see us…’”
She looks pained.
“If he calls again," she says, "I’ll just tell him I’m busy.” She’s not ready for this, I think.
“On the other hand, you could just tell him to fuck off. Or, when he gets around to asking you to go off somewhere alone with him, you could just look him in the eye and say, ‘Sure, and how about I give you a blowjob?’”
“What??”
“Yeah, because he’ll be thinking he’s this clever hunter with a cute little bunny rabbit in his sights, and you’ll just kick that slingshot right out of his hand. He won’t know what to do. And after he sputters for a few seconds, you say, ‘It’s never going to happen,' and then you laugh, and walk away.”
She laughs. “I don’t think I could do it,” she says. “I’d be too nervous.”
“Well, I’m sure you can handle it,” I tell her. “Hey—have you seen the Sarah Silverman movie, Jesus is Magic?” She has not. I pull it up on the DVR, and we settle in to watch it.
