loss of innocence

5/18/99

Interesting typo in yesterday's entry. When talking about beer, I typed "bock" instead of "block." "Three bars per bock." I'm so funny.

I'm reading Anne Lamott's novel, Crooked Little Heart. Didn't much like it at first, but it's engaging and I need to decompress after the past semester. I'm a little uncomfortable with it-this book is forcing me to relive my adolescence. The experiences of the character and the things her mother remembers of her own early teen years have pinpointed parts of my life that I'd buried.

I never wanted to remember the time when Amy told me she'd lost her virginity. Never wanted to remember Amy at all, really. She was my best friend in junior high--the kind of best friend with way cooler friends than me. She'd hang with the cool girls and the nasty, ignorant boys and then call me when she got home. Guess I was a good listener back then.

Amy dated some asshole named Frank who had no eyebrows. Said he'd burned them off in a Satanic ritual; I think it was really about a rash or chicken pox or something. When he dumped her, she hooked up with his best friend, Randy, and then she dumped Randy to "go with" Frank again. Randy cried. Frank and Amy and her friend of the week--I think it was Kami--walked to County Market and Amy and Frank had sex in the deserted warehouse behind Arbor Drug. She was in 8th grade, he in 7th.

Pause

I went to try to find the journal entry where I first wrote about this, back in 8th grade, and I found this instead:

(sometime in 8th grade)

I hereby state that I solemnly vow to be cool calm, and collected and never lose my temper in school or public. I will be nice to everyone (excluding Dyana Guerrero and Denise Barnhart, and anyone else who's snotty to me.) I will save all screaming fits and tantrums until I get home.

Sounds like a good plan...however amusing it is to hear it from a 13 year old....

When Amy called and told me she'd had sex, our friendship had been on the brink of disaster for months. She had those cool friends; I had too many "good-girl" activities like volleyball and band. We were destined to grow apart.

She called and I answered on my princess phone in my blue flowery room, probably sprawled on my homemade quilt, surrounded by stuffed animals. My best friend called from her top bunk, surrounded by magazine pics of Jon Bon Jovi and Kirk Cameron, that top bunk being the only place to sit upright in her trailer park bedroom. The only place where her coke-addicted mother couldn't snoop through her Esprit bookbag.

Know what, she probably called me from Kami's house. Amy didn't go home unless she had to.

She told me she'd walked down to County Market with Kami and Fwankie. (I once made a little sign that said "Amy loves Fwankie." Amy's mom found the sign and misread it as "Amy loves to Fwankie" and Mom slapped the crap out of her little slut daughter. Amy and Fwankie hadn't even had sex yet.)

My memory drawer from 8th grade is all jumbled. I pull one thread and it drags out the middle of a different one...that one's twisted around another.... Anne Lamott will pay for my therapy.

So I lay on my bed as my distant friend mumbled "we did it" over the phone. I kept a poker face and said, "Really. Wow." I'd been punched in the stomach. I was young and self-centered and judgemental. I acted as though nothing was different.

I don't know how she wanted me to react. It wasn't as though we had a long conversation, hell, by that time we had only a shell of a relationship. We didn't even change the subject and move on, just a little "my mom's home" and "see ya later" and I got off the phone and lay in bed for a while. Didn't run down and gossip with my mom, like I normally would have. I grieved for my own childhood.