I found it all so very depressing.
I used to try to talk to Mr. Graves about it and he would say, “I don’t want to know,” and then cover his ears, which was when I realized that there was nothing he could do about it. He had to pretend that his students were really smart, conscientious kids destined to be the type of adults who would make a positive difference in the world—his belief in the power of teaching required this—and I started to understand that it was hard for a teacher to spend the entire weekend grading essays and lesson planning for a bunch of sex-crazed, alcoholic kids.
“Do you know what most sex-crazed, alcoholic kids grow up to be?” Booker once said to me. “Their sex-crazed, alcoholic parents.”
And I thought about how everyone knew that Shannon’s dad was always at the local bar drinking and, according to my parents, “hitting on anything and everything with boobs.” He had become sort of notorious after Shannon’s mom left him for a woman. It was almost as if he was trying to prove his manhood or something. And Shannon’s two moms drank a lot of wine, too. There was always at least one open bottle and glasses poured whenever I visited Shannon’s home. I assumed Carol and Joyce probably hooked up while Shannon’s biological parents were still married.
I got this crazy idea that maybe if I refrained from sex and drinking—maybe it would mean that my parents weren’t sex-crazed alcoholics.
Maybe they would remain married and be happy.
Maybe my mom wouldn’t hate the way my father chewed his food, and maybe my dad would put his arm around Mom again the way he did when I was little.
I knew it was an inane thing to believe, but it helped.
It was something I could do.
And it wasn’t even hard—until I met Alex.
Ironically, Alex didn’t seem all that interested in sex. I had been to enough parties sober to know the sexual tendencies of teenage boys—the way they would try to rush things along the same way they would bang on the bathroom doors when their bladders were full of beer and say, “Come on, I really need to go!” as if we girls might be filing our nails in there or maybe just reading a book. I’d watched them lean in too close during conversations. I’d watched their hands casually land on the thighs of my teammates, and I’d watched my teammates pretend not to notice. I’d even seen boys adjust their genitalia in the middle of conversations with my teammates because the boys were aroused, and I’d watched my teammates pretend not to notice, even though they all talked about the boys’ dicks in great detail when the fellas weren’t around. And I had never been interested in any of it.
I used to worry that I was asexual or something, but as Alex and I got to know each other, taking long rides in his Jeep with the top down, going to art house movies, reading each other poetry on park benches in the city, I started to realize what sexual attraction was all about. I found myself glancing at different parts of Alex’s body and wanting to explore—not because all the other girls on my team already had, but because it all suddenly felt so right, natural, real. And I also started to worry because Alex wasn’t putting his hand on my thigh or leaning in too close or grabbing me. He just listened to everything I had to say, and I could tell he was really interested, which made me worry he didn’t think I was pretty. That was a new fear for me. Suddenly, I wanted to be attractive, adored, desired.
12
Dozens of Deadly Laser Beams
“I want to quit soccer,” I told Booker as we were sitting on his backyard bench next to Don Quixote and his windmills. We were drinking ice-cold glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade garnished with mint leaves picked from Booker’s garden. “I really don’t want to play my senior-year season.”
“I can’t have this conversation again. If you haven’t quit by now, you never will. You’ve been thoroughly brainwashed by the soccer community.”
It was true that I had told him I would quit all through winter indoor and then after spring soccer and then after the summer sessions with the young semipro trainers from England who always ended up at our parties and sleeping with my teammates, who all fell in love with their accents. But that was all before Alex.
“I’m going to quit tomorrow. I’m calling Coach and telling him I’m done,” I said rather defiantly, but I didn’t do it.
It was a speech by Shannon that finally pushed me to the breaking point, on a blazing-hot August day, the first official practice of our senior year. Coach Miller had run us hard through conditioning—full-speed dribbling and passing sprints; long, seemingly endless attacking and defending drills; and my least favorite, where he made squares out of cones and you had to play keep-away for twenty minutes, and if anyone stopped moving for even a few seconds, the whole team had to sprint a mile and start over. Coach always caught at least one person, and we had to sprint two miles that day before we got our full twenty minutes. The whole practice, I kept thinking about Alex and how I would much rather be somewhere alone with him, expressing myself and discussing literature, than conditioning with girls I didn’t really like or understand, all in an effort to kick a ball into a net more times than girls from other schools did.
At the end of each practice, we’d sit between the goalposts and Coach would give us a talk before he allowed the captains to take over, at which point Shannon and I were expected to give motivational speeches and address any concerns that other girls didn’t feel comfortable bringing up directly to Coach. Shannon always assumed that leader role very easily, which was almost comical, because anywhere else in her life—when she was not addressing shin-pad-wearing girls in a soccer goal—she was prone to follow boys with seedy plans for her. And I wondered if she was just following Coach’s plans for her the same way she got into those cars full of high school boys back when we were in middle school. Maybe Shannon would do whatever an older man told her to do.