Ginny Blue's Boyfriends Read online

  Chapter 3

  Daphne called the next morning from work and woke me from a deep sleep. When I’m not on a job I tend to sleep in, and after a night of roiling about Charlie, I could have used some more. But I tried to be coherent, offering ums, and uh-huhs, and ohs where appropriate. She didn’t seem to notice. She was on the Starbucks early shift, which conflicted today with an audition for a chewing gum commercial, and she was bummed.

  “Last time I went on a chewing gum commercial I got a callback,” she revealed. “This guy and I were in this fake car and we kissed and kissed, passing the gum back and forth.”

  In the background I could hear people ordering coffee and the whir of one of those machines that pulverizes coffee beans to grounds. I squinted one eye open in the morning light. “And you’re sorry you’re missing that?”

  “We weren’t actually supposed to pass the gum, just make it look like it. But he was really, really cute.”

  I tried to look beyond that, but my Seinfeldish self reared its ugly head and all I could see were myriads and myriads of germs settling in all the little folds of the chewed gum. “He’d have to be really, really cute.”

  “He was.” She sighed. “I’m hoping to reschedule for this afternoon.” Her voice shifted to a tone of accusation, “I hardly got to tell you about my bad day yesterday. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with your friend Kristl and then Jill’s engagement.”

  Is Jill engaged? I wondered briefly, but then decided I didn’t want to revisit that conversation. Carefully opening both eyes, I was momentarily dazzled by the sunlight coming through my blinds. I took a moment to admire them. Wood overlaid with a white plastic coat of some kind of fabulous product that looked like paint and wore like iron. Really cool. I’d paid a small fortune for them but it made my bedroom seem far, far better than it was. And no Nate ...

  I cleared my throat, trying to get my voice to work. Half the time I can’t talk at all before—I checked the blue numbers on my clock’s LCD—nine A.M., especially if I’ve been out. And although I’d gotten home early last night, it felt like I was suffering a hangover. Nate’s doing. Breakups are pure shit.

  I wondered if Kristl had come back in the wee hours after work. Even with my restless night I hadn’t heard her. If she was with Brandon it was a bad sign.

  “Leo is just so distant. Like he doesn’t even know me. God, it’s awful. I feel just like a teenager who’s been dumped after sex!”

  “You had sex with him?”

  “Didn’t I just say so? Oh, God. There he is.” I heard her rustle with the phone, then apparently she was in a safe nook because I could make out every syllable even though she was whispering. “He hasn’t even looked at me once today,” she moaned.

  “Which date was it? The third?” I stretched my mouth. I didn’t want to think about what it tasted like.

  “Does it matter?”

  “No, it’s just we were talking last night and—”

  “It was the first date, okay? I know what I said, but it was the first date.” For a moment I really did think she was going to break down and cry, so I jumped in quickly.

  “It’s okay. No big deal.”

  “Then why is he doing this! He’s with her now!”

  “The mousy-looking girl?”

  “Oh, God, Blue.”

  “Maybe Leo’s just—just ...” An asshole, like Ian, I wanted to say.

  “Just what?”

  “Not ready—for someone like you.”

  “Well, he was certainly ready when we were in bed,” she reminded me as if I were extremely dense.

  “I mean he’s unformed. Most men are unformed. Their brains don’t work the same way. They’re more prehistoric. I’m not kidding. I read that somewhere.”

  “So, because he has a prehistoric brain he can’t be nice to me after having sex?”

  I paused. “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, that’s crap.”

  I grimaced in commiseration. I knew how much she liked this guy even though I’d met him once and thought he was a Huge Waste of Time. Leo possessed that shaggy California blondish hair that looks suspiciously as if it’s been forgotten to be combed after a day out surfing. This is a disguise, however, because I’ve known guys who spent too much of their hard-earned, or ill-gotten, disposable income on this “do.” It boggles the mind.

  “I thought it was a potential boyfriend evening,” Daphne said, sounding choked up.

  “How was the sex?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Sure you can. Was it bad sex?”

  “No.”

  “Okay sex?”

  “It was GREAT sex! Great sex. Totally, totally GREAT SEX!”

  I wondered how much of that hit the coffee drinkers’ ears as I had to yank the receiver away from mine. “And now he doesn’t even look at me!” her faraway, tinny voice accused. “For God’s sake, Blue, what is with men? Are they all just moronic juveniles who only want us for a roll in the sheets?”

  I actually debated answering that one, but then realized it was probably meant to be rhetorical. Instead, I mumbled something about giving him some time, not dwelling on it too much, how she was better than he was, and how it was always best to be the bigger person. A whole bunch of platitudes that had the effect of reducing her to tears. “Can I come over later?” she asked in a small voice. “I really need to talk.”

  “Sure,” I said, just managing to hide the inner groan. I needed coffee. I could practically smell it wafting over the line, but it was as far away as the moon. I didn’t, in fact, have any coffee in the house, I remembered.

  “And you can tell me about Charlie,” Daphne slapped on. “I know it was high school and I said that didn’t count, but maybe in your case it does.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Charlie.”

  “Well, you brought him up last night.”

  “I didn’t mean to, believe me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t count him.”

  “You don’t count that actor guy, either. Really, Blue. They either exist or they don’t.”

  “They don’t!”

  “Oh, God, there’s Leo! And he’s still talking to Heather!! What am I gonna do?” she wailed and hung up.

  Dropping the receiver, I covered my eyes with my palms and took several deep, cleansing breaths. I didn’t want to think about Daphne and Leo. And I sure as hell didn’t want to talk about Charlie. What gave her the idea I wanted to talk about him? Just because she was feeling low, vulnerable and miserable in her pseudorelationship didn’t mean I wanted to talk about any of mine. Okay, so Charlie’s a member of the Ex-Files. Fine. I’ll accept that. Charlie’s the founding member. Okay.

  But I sure as hell didn’t want to talk about him or anyone else in that not-so-illustrious list.

  Throwing back the covers, I padded to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth with alacrity, then splashed water on my face. I stared at my reflection. The grim set of my jaw reflected my thoughts.

  Charlie ... Charlie Carruthers. His name was wedged into one of my brain tracks and I was going to take a ride down that path whether I wanted to or not.

  I’d originally given him the nickname C.C. But now that I had a friend of the same name, I couldn’t go there anymore. He was simply Charlie. My first, and worst, lover.

  We had gotten together the night of the Homecoming game, a rivalry between Carriage Hill High and Western that bordered on lunacy. I was bored out of my skull and wondering if I was the last virgin left in Clackamas County. I was seventeen and I’d read enough True Sex Stories and watched enough R-rated movies to be convinced that I was missing something truly spectacular. All the secrecy. All the whispered gossip. Pammy Gracefield had been caught doing it in the back of her parents’ minivan and Mr. Gracefield had yanked the offender—what was his name? Oh, yeah, Richie Moltano—by his leg right out and onto the cement driveway. Richie’s pants encircled his ankles and Mr. Gracefield was so infuriated he bellowed at Pammy to get the hell out of the m
inivan loud enough that their nearest three neighbors turned their lights on. Or so the story went. To add to the tale, Pammy got pregnant and was sent away. The Grace-fields moved out of the area the end of that year and Carriage Hill High settled back down to soccer, football, a dance team that went all the way to the state finals, and, of course, the requisite schoolwork. I was deep into SATs and wondering why I didn’t have this incredible urge for higher education that everyone, kids and parents alike, seemed infected with. At the time Mom was really working on becoming the real estate maven she is today, so I was kind of left to my own devices. Not that she wasn’t there when it counted, but I had plenty of time to get into trouble, especially since I’d been pretty much a dream child up until my senior year. It was like I woke up one day and thought, “What the hell am I doing?” I really worried I was going to miss the whole “I was a teenage terror” thing, so I set out to drink, have sex, smoke, whatever.

  I decided to start with sex, because I had the most interest in it. I wanted to get laid and get it over with. I know this isn’t the most romantic view of the whole thing, but it was becoming such a BIG DEAL that I could hardly stand it. I wanted to KNOW. As Joel Goodson said in Risky Business, “College girls have knowledge.” Well, I wanted that knowledge and I wanted it before my first days of college, so I was sort of obsessed with the whole thing when Charlie Carruthers threw a wadded up test at me and gaily yelled, “Flunked another!” to the room at large. Everyone laughed, myself included. I’d managed a C. Terrible class, chemistry. Couldn’t imagine why I was taking it. Something about it looking good on a college resume. All it’s done for me is given me bad dreams.

  I picked up his test and surreptitiously stuck it in my book bag. Later, I smoothed it out to realize the reason Charlie had flunked was because he hadn’t bothered to answer half the questions. The ones he had answered were all correct. This prompted the question: had he simply choked? Been unable to answer them? Or, had this been some sort of Machiavellian way to undermine his own chances of getting into a good school? Maybe he was an iconoclast, breaking down established barriers.

  I immediately decided to fall in love with Charlie. He was my kind of guy. Never mind that I hadn’t been able to stomach him the year before because of all his gross, crude jokes and stupid, juvenile teen-guy ways. Sure, he was no Jackson Wright, but after my bedtime tête-à-tête with Jackson that had resulted in my Mom’s shock of white hair and no real sex—okay, I hadn’t been perfect—I was glad Charlie was simply who he was. I decided he would be the one to deflower me.

  This sounds a lot easier than it turned out to be. I mean, where were all the guys with raging hormones? Whose moral compasses couldn’t find magnetic north if they were standing at the pole itself? Here I was, ready, willing, and able and possessed of decent-sized breasts—all right, fine, they’re a bit on the small side but they’ve got a nice shape, okay?—and the only viable deflowerer in my sight was Charlie. This was skewed logic, but I was seventeen and not inclined to second-guess myself.

  Anyway, I decided to fall in love with him. At seventeen these kinds of decisions seemed to just pop into my head randomly. Like the time I was temporarily a vegetarian, a state I announced loudly to all and sundry at any given opportunity for about three and a half days until the smell of a sausage dog at a stand outside Costco—one inch in diameter and just shy of a foot long, grilling and sizzling away—did me in. I smothered the thing in mustard, ketchup, sauerkraut and a mound of rather suspect chopped onions—how long had they been sitting there?—and dug in as if I’d been starved for a month. It tasted so mouth-wateringly good I still mentally flip back to that moment upon occasion.

  But I digress. Falling in love was easy. Once the idea took root I simply had to make my plan. There are rules to this kind of thing. A nice girl, even one who’s hellbent on losing her virginity, can’t go up to a guy and say, “Hey, there, I just realized I love you, and so therefore it’s okay that we have sex, so let’s just skip the preliminaries and start thumping.” Even my teenaged logic knew that wasn’t going to fly. Sure, I might get sex out of it, but I would definitely be labeled a total wacko-hot-pants-slut-ho, so I had to run through a modicum of courtship to convince Charlie that he was the love of my life and then, and only then, could we have sex. As it turned out this courtship played out mostly in my mind because when my chance arrived, it came down to a do (me) or die kind of thing.

  There were, as it turned out, several drawbacks to my plan. Obstacles to this path of romantic bliss. Drawback one: Charlie had a girlfriend. Drawback two: She was someone I actually liked.

  How could that be? I had moaned to myself. How come I didn’t know? But I was utterly determined to have Charlie for myself, so I devised a series of plots to break up the happy couple and worm my way in.

  This is the lowest kind of behavior, I know. But to be honest, there was just no one else at Carriage Hill High worthy of my attention. As I’ve said before, I wouldn’t have Jackson Wright on a dare. Not that he seemed to want me after our aborted fumbling, but hey, I liked believing I was in the driver’s seat.

  But back to Charlie and Serena. They were absolutely wrong for each other. It was all so painfully obvious to me and my friends that we concluded something must be done. I confess that I obsessed about breaking them up and having Charlie for myself. When I think back on how much energy this cost me it makes me feel weary, but at the time it was all that mattered. Lucky for me, none of my plans had to be put into action.

  Believe it or not, Charlie was a football player. Don’t ask me what position because even if I knew I wouldn’t care. I know what a quarterback is, though why they’re called that still isn’t clear. They can pass the ball and somebody else catches it and everybody tries to push everybody out of the way and when someone breaks away and runs for the goal it creates mass cheering or booing. Football has never interested me, although at least I understand it better now. In high school, it was just an event to attend. I have always liked the uniforms, though.

  Charlie was on the team by default; his father, who owned a string of Quickie Marts around town was a huge supporter of high school sports in general and football in particular. Charlie wasn’t the best player. He wasn’t even a good player. He treated football kind of like he treated school: with an utter lack of direction, attention, and determination. He likely wouldn’t have played at all, regardless of Daddy’s financial support, but Charlie was blessed with one enviable asset: speed. He could run down almost anyone. I learned later that he started out on defense, but he was so awful at actually tackling anyone that they moved him to offense. So, once in a while, when the second or third string was in, Charlie would play wide receiver—this is a term I’ve actually since learned and somewhat understand—which meant that he would race away from the pack, wait for the quarterback to throw him a pass, and leap into the air, reaching for this spiraling bullet. If Charlie had possessed any ability to catch the ball at all, he might have made it to first string, but hey, you can’t have everything.

  I came to the Homecoming game dressed all in black because I thought it was moody and sexy. It was November in Oregon and I’d already lost all of my summer tan, such as it was. I’m sure the black looked just great with my lovely, pasty white skin. I certainly felt I was hot shit. My look, coupled with the fact that November is my middle name, made it seem as if I might actually get lucky that night. With romance in mind, I’d darkened my eyes with heavy liner and mascara—very 60’s which I thought was the height of cool—but then, when I looked over the playing field, my spirits sank. Charlie and Serena seemed as tight as ever, and when I glanced down at the cheerleading squad my depression grew. There she was, jumping and screaming and shaking her pompons with the best of them. I had a secret yearning to be a cheerleader, but it would have been a tough sell with my pseudo-intellectual crowd, so I contented myself with looking sulky and bored, all the while scouring the field for a glimpse of Charlie.

  He was number eighty-eight. I sp
otted him on the sidelines, goofing off with another player. Watching him, then glancing at Serena, I finally began to doubt the wisdom of my plan. They were football people. They were meant to be together. And I was playing at personae, trying to figure out who the hell I was and devising schemes that were born to fail.

  I probably would have left the game right there and gone home to soul-search and eat Snickers bars when two things happened, almost simultaneously. One: our team’s best wide receiver was jerked out of the sky by the opposing team, came down with broken ribs and Charlie ran in to replace him, and two: Serena got so excited she slipped, fell, and twisted her knee big time. Actually a third thing happened as well, which was really the kicker: Serena’s ex-boyfriend, who was a soccer player and disdained football, stepped up to help take Serena to the emergency room. She was last seen squeezing his hand as she was helped toward his car. Whether they actually made it to the hospital was a source of speculation for weeks to come, but the resulting aftermath was that against all odds Charlie scored the winning touchdown, Serena wasn’t around to congratulate him, he decided to celebrate by drinking about a hundred beers, and yes, he ended up with me.

  Lucky for Charlie he didn’t attend the postgame dance or he would have been caught drunk and thrown off the team and suspended from school. I ran into him at the local hangout, Louie’s Burgers. His friends were as drunk as he was; the designated driver might be eschewing alcohol but it sure as hell looked as if his cigarette was the funny kind, if you know what I mean. I took this in at a glance.

  “Hey,” I greeted Charlie. (My dialogue hasn’t improved with age.)

  “Yo, there, Ginny Blue,” he said, wearing the biggest shit-eating grin in the state of Oregon. “Where’s the kooky makeup?”

  I touched a hand to my face. I’d scrubbed off the 60’s-raccoon eyes in the stadium washroom in a fit of “I will never get laid” angst. “I’m changing my style.”

  “Really? Cool.” He struggled to stand up unaided and light a cigarette at the same time. His friends had all straggled back to the car, tumbling inside in a heap. The designated driver stood about three feet away, aloof and smoking weed with a devil-may-care, I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude that I instantly admired.