It was all so ridiculous and more than a little depressing.
The funny thing was that I absolutely knew Shannon had started those rumors, or at least she didn’t defend me, because she was popular enough to make them stop, but I kept pretending that Shannon and I were friends anyway. She did the same. She racked up assists on the soccer field. I scored a lot of goals. Our coaches and parents said we were the perfect team, and so I tried not to do anything to upset our “on-field chemistry.” And all the adults in our lives pretended not to notice that Shannon was routinely drunk and having sexual experiences with a different boy every so many weeks. To be fair, many of the kids in my middle school were doing the same exact thing. Who knows? Maybe giving blow jobs is a natural rite of passage that can be a wonderfully rewarding extracurricular activity, and I was missing out—I was one of the weird ones.
But it wasn’t even about the sex. I had nothing against sex. I wanted to experience it just like everyone else. What I initially resisted was the crowd mentality of it. Blow older boys because everyone else is. Drink because everyone else is. If it had been “ride a live two-hump camel to school because everyone else is,” I still would have resisted because I don’t want to be like everyone else. And I love riding camels! Shannon hates riding camels. I know because we rode them at the zoo when we were in second grade. There is a funny pic. Me waving and smiling in between two humps as Shannon screams and cries on a camel behind me. And if I’m being truthful, there was a part of me, even as a little kid, that enjoyed the camel ride simply because Shannon didn’t. I was so tired of doing everything she liked that it felt redemptive to be doing something she hated, or, more accurately, not doing something she loved.
“You should go to more parties, Nanette,” Mom would say when I stayed in and read on the weekends. “You need to be more social. Like Shannon.”
The lesbian rumors suddenly stopped when we started high school, and I’m pretty sure that Shannon had something to do with that, too, because it was the year her mother came out as a lesbian and left her father. Shannon and her mother moved across town and in with a woman lawyer whom Shannon’s mom met, ironically, via “the middle school sex scandal.” Around this time, Shannon stopped going to parties and spent a lot of time in my room crying and telling me all her secrets—such as which boys she’d blown versus which she had actually fucked. I mostly listened because I thought that was the right thing to do.
Regardless, she earned more assists and I scored more goals, and our varsity team won a lot of games, and my father cheered like a madman on the sidelines and my stock portfolio grew.
After I kissed Mr. Graves and he stopped meeting me during lunch periods, Shannon kept asking me what was wrong, saying I was clearly depressed. There were a few times I was actually tempted to tell her the truth, but then I would remember all the homophobic comments I had to endure during our middle school years, and I’d juxtapose those with the fact that Shannon was now the president of the Gay-Straight Alliance in our high school, of which I was also a proud member, representing the straights, and somehow I knew better than to let Shannon see any real part of me.
Shannon got pregnant during our junior year.
She wasn’t even sure whose kid it was, so she didn’t tell any of the boys she had slept with. According to our math, there were three candidates. I know, because I was the only person she told about her pregnancy, and she told me everything. Her last period had been at least eight weeks before, and she’d been secretly terrified for almost two months. She cried ferociously when she told me. We stayed up all night one weekend making a pros-and-cons chart so she could decide whether to have an abortion. By morning, she had decided that she would indeed “terminate the pregnancy,” and so we went to the kitchen and showed her two moms the pregnancy tests.
Shannon’s biological mom completely lost her mind, only she didn’t yell at Shannon for being pregnant, but for “allowing” it to happen.
Shannon’s stepmom, Joyce, was calmer about it and pleaded with Shannon’s real mom, saying, “They even made a pros-and-cons chart. How many kids would do that in an effort to prepare for this conversation?”
Shannon was sobbing by this point, and I was staring at my hands.
I went to the abortion clinic with Shannon and her moms, only to find out that Shannon somehow had a “silent miscarriage” and didn’t know it—apparently, a tiny baby’s heart can just stop beating—which everyone agreed was “a blessing,” so we went out for an expensive dinner in the city, a French place called Parc, and then we never talked about what had happened ever again.
My friend went on the Pill and kept saying I should be on it, too, even though I wasn’t sexually active.
The funny thing was that we all had to sign a contract at the beginning of every sports season that said we would not drink alcohol, do drugs, or use tobacco products, and yet almost all athletes at our high school broke that contract weekly and made fun of me for taking it seriously, because they didn’t know about the mimosas I had with Mom on Sunday mornings.
My father once told me that he drank beer in high school, and then he added, “There’s nothing wrong with a beer or two. Just stay away from liquor, okay?” And I knew that he was giving me permission to drink, but I didn’t anyway. I didn’t really want to drink, and I didn’t like going to the parties where Shannon would get so drunk that she could hardly stand and would end up having sex in the bed of someone’s parents.