PERSONAL ESSAYS

  

Mick Jagger is a big chicken, the way he squats and pokes his head out and jerks when he's singing. I don't care. I only liked the Rolling Stones for five minutes, in 1986, when Petra Schwartz told me Mick had fucked David Bowie, who'd been a transvestite, in the '70s. Yeah, and everybody did speed and wore nylon jumpsuits, she said, so

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I bought the Ziggy Stardust album and the Stones' Greatest Hits, and me and Petra lay next to each other on her bed everyday for a week, hand in hand, and tried to feel the music in our bones. Thump, thump, thump. But then Petra started wearing blue eyeshadow and hanging out with the cokehead debutantes, and I gave her up. Which wasn't hard, really, since she tended to boss me around and binge and purge and date anyone with a dick and a car. Instead, I stayed late at school, sitting on the floor down the hall from the cafeteria, near the library, eating french fries and reading surrealist plays about brightly-colored elephants and lonely Frenchmen and people who longed for something incomprehensible.

    

Which is just a long way of saying: high school sucked. All my friends were dating assholes and getting fake IDs and fading out of my life, and they made us take science classes all the way through our senior year. By that time, I was spending most weekends in somebody's backyard, watching a circle of boys with crystals hanging around their necks smoke hash. I didn't want to do drugs, and I didn't. But I needed friends who wanted to feel things, and the boys with the crystal beads and the hash were the smartest kids I could find. Tim Kang and Chris Bauer and Aaron Kleinbaum were stoners who got As, sometimes, and played their guitars in the school parking lot. Three lost teenaged boys — a Korean, a WASP, a Jew. And me. We were about as diverse as the suburbs got in those days.

    

One night after I watched my three stoner friends get baked, we lay on the grass, the four of us, in a circle, our heads all pointed inward, and talked about the crickets.

    

"What are those ones called?" Chris asked. "The ones that go ke-kee, ke-kee?" Aaron said they were ke-kees and I thought they were katydids and Tim was silent. Chris thought maybe they were just plain crickets. We lay there for a while, silent, feeling things we had no words for.

    

And then we stood up and brushed the grass off our butts and spread Carmex across our lips.

    

Bye, bye, bye. Later. Click, vroom.

I was the designated driver, and so I had to drive a very high Tim to his house on Bedford Road, which was flat and modern and built on one acre of land. The gravel driveway creaked and popped under my tires as I pulled in. I stopped the car and tugged on the emergency brake. Tim got out of the car, and then he leaned back down, rested his arms on the door, and said, "C'mere a sec, Rach."

    

And I said, "Why?"

    

And he said, "Come on."

    

So I said, "Oh, alright," and turned the keys around in the ignition until the motor stopped. Tim was wearing chinos and some sort of Oxford shirt, maybe it was black, or maybe it was green, and the moonlight cast his shadow giant on the grass beside the car and made his black frame eyeglasses twinkle. He looked just like the prep school kid he'd been until he got kicked out of Andover two years ago, hands in his pockets, eyes bloodshot, hair spiky.

    

I was scared. This was the wrong emotion for this scene, a suburban, moon-filled driveway with a sweetly cowlicked guy looking at me. I knew it and I felt ashamed. I looked at the pebbles on the ground and leaned my butt against the car door I'd just slammed shut.

    

"Look at me," he said, and thinking back on it, this seems so poignant, like such a clear request for what we all wanted then, when we hung out in the parking lot and sat on the floor eating french fries and lay in the grass talking about crickets. It was especially what Tim, one of the only kids at our school who wasn't white, seemed to want. But I wasn't thinking that right then. Right then his words sent the red from my neck shooting up past my cheeks and into my forehead, and the elevator in my chest dropped down into my gut.

    

I started to smile. Nervous and rigid. And I thought, Oh, great, Rachel. Now everybody feels like an asshole, and he looked at me and maybe in that second I wondered for the first time about my body and my desire. Maybe the wondering was the dull throbbing I felt in my cheeks as I smiled. The moon was still in the sky above us and the tree leaves were quiet and I knew, I knew that Tim was going to kiss me and that I was not going to like it.

    

And then he did kiss me. He leaned forward, tender and awkward with that teenage way, and his lips tasted like spit and felt like two flat sardines pressed against my mouth and he brought one hand to my shoulder. His cheek was softer than anything else I could imagine. I wanted to kiss him back, and did, for a minute. I even moved my head a bit from side to side like people do when they kiss other people, but I felt lonely and the moon shook and I pulled away.

    

I said, "I really like you Tim — " and I meant it. I liked him and I was sort of moved by his hand on my shoulder and his need. But saying I really like you always makes it sound like really you don't and then Tim wasn't looking at me anymore. He put his hands back into his pants pockets and closed his mouth. I think I winced. And then the wind started up again and the leaves rustled and Tim sucked some air into his chest and did something that was supposed to sound like laughing. And then he walked toward his house.

    

And I stood there, my butt pushing up against the car door, my mouth dry and half open, and watched him walk away. I wish I could have told him I liked girls, and let him hurt a little less. But these words were stuck in my cheeks and I didn't know about them, and so I just felt cruel. Wait, come back. I wanted to tell him how soft his cheek felt next to mine. I wanted to tell him that his lips tasted like salt and friendship. I imagined he thought I didn't want him because he wasn't pink and freckled like most of the boys at school, because he was the only Korean guy who'd ever kissed me. I remembered him sitting in that circle an hour before, not talking about crickets. I wanted to erase all the distance between us.

    

But I didn't.

    

Instead I got into my car and turned on the lights and backed out of his driveway. The streets were quiet, and so was my car, no tape shoved in the tape deck, no flipping through the stations, not a single drum beat the whole way home. I pushed my foot against the brake at the railroad tracks and bounced carefully over the four bumps. And then I sped off toward the traffic light and my parents' empty house and the end of the night.

For more Rachel Mattson, read:

Boygirl, Boygirl

The Sum of the Parts: Showtime's "Sex in the Twentieth Century"

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