Frozen
I lost my virginity at 18 and a half to a guy named Ryan who was in college in the midwest at the time. By at the time I mean there, actually at his school. I flew out to see him and to do it. It, the proverbial — but everything else that was wrapped up in the deal too.
“You’re not going to lose your virginity,” my friend Brenda crowed. “You’re going to leave it there.”
The first boy who really did it for me in high school was a senior who wowed me the second I laid eyes on his curly black hair and perfect nose. His name was Lucas Lamont, but he went by Luke. As a freshman I’d sit in class, doodling an endless series of looping Ls, indicative of our sure-to-be eternal love for each other.
Then Ryan came along. His hair was thick and sandy brown, and he had a perfectly nice nose, but really it was his grin. Big, sometimes of the self-satisfied variety, more often of the uninterested in me variety. I stopped writing Ls and started listening to The Smiths basically all the time.
We circled each other for the two years we overlapped in school. Mostly it was me orbiting him, but he felt a gravitational pull too. I was a tender new planet and he was bigger, harsher, less forgiving, more like a distant sun. Filling me with light when the mood struck and then mostly leaving me in the dark.
The boys on the bus, all his friends, would serenade me with “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby.” I would blush furiously, then try to laugh it off. When he asked a girl in his own grade to prom I cried for days.
When I’d been miserably in love with him for five years, I made up my mind. He’d gone off to school and I had too, but no matter who came my way I couldn’t get over Ryan. So I left California to go to him one winter.
It was the quickest of trips — arrive Friday, leave first thing Sunday morning. He took me on a tour of his school because I was considering transferring somewhere, or running away, whichever came first. That weekend was so bitterly cold we couldn’t stay out more than a few hours. No sense in going anywhere but home to get warm, so we did.
In his bed that night, Ryan said everything I’d wanted to hear for years. Every detail perfect, as if he’d read the dreadful, yearning poetry I’d written about him. He confessed feelings for me, told me I was beautiful, made me feel safe.
The next day he woke up. He looked at me with the same distant expression he’d thrown my way in school. Unwilling to go outside, we sat in his living room reading, sidled past each other to the kitchen. By early evening he declared, with a mix of relief and something I couldn’t place, “I don’t care how miserable it is outside. I’m going to a bar to see if friends are there.” I said I couldn’t, I had an early flight, and anyway I couldn’t get into bars. He zipped up, disappeared into a cavernous hood. “Well, I’m going. I’ll come by your hotel in the morning to drive you to the airport.”
I lay in bed vibrating with a quiet anger and desperation, staring at the phone, willing him to change his mind. In the morning I waited until the last minute, then took a cab. I arrived home to a message. He’d overslept, woken up with a hangover, realized it was too late to drive me. He would not call me again for five years.
As I sat in the cab heading to the airport, I looked straight ahead through the windshield. When I glanced up at the rearview mirror, there was nothing to see. It turned out I didn’t leave it there after all. I just kept it somewhere else now.