I used to be one of those guys who played hard to get. Not because I was shy or lacked confidence—Christ, I knew what I was capable of—but because I just wasn’t interested in their game. To me, high school relationships were a waste of good drinking time. A bunch of kids playing house, practicing for a life of quiet desperation they couldn’t even imagine yet. It was all a goddamn dress rehearsal for the morgue, and I wasn’t buying a ticket.
My world was different. It was about parties, about drugs, about making the kind of stories that other guys would still be laughing about years later, long after the prom queens had gotten fat and the football heroes were selling used cars.
We had our own church, right there by the school entrance. Me, Scott Lyons, and Lewis Becerra. We’d stand there, kicking a hacky sack until the last possible second before the bell rang. We got good at it, too. A thousand hits before the damn thing touched the ground. It was stupid, but it was ours. A small, perfect, and completely useless kingdom.
Then one day, just before the bell, they showed up. Two of them. Blondes. Hair done up big, makeup caked on like armor, dressed to kill. They looked like a couple of Barbies that had wandered out of the toy box and into the real, dirty world.
And something in me, some old, stupid, animal part of me that had been sleeping, just snapped. The “Mr. Alpha who didn’t need anyone” part of my brain said, Cash in your chips, you dumb bastard. So I did.
I chased one of them down as the other kids shuffled off to class. I got a hint of a connection with this one, a flicker of something in her eyes that wasn’t completely made of plastic. I walked her to the admin office, hung around her locker like a stray dog. She was new, a transfer from Cerritos High, which was like a different country to us. That’s where the rich kids came from, the ones who all had their own goddamn cars.
Next thing I knew, I was in her car after school, a machine that was probably worth more than my whole family’s house. We were making out, a clumsy, desperate thing, and I was getting my finger wet in the process, a small, pathetic victory that felt like the whole goddamn world.
And just like that, I had something I never wanted: a public girlfriend. She’d intentionally grab my hand in the halls, making a big show of it, a public declaration of ownership.
We were Barbie and Ken. And I was the one made of plastic.
It didn’t take long for me to become her goddamn puppy. Carrying her books, racing between classes to get a two-minute glimpse of her, catching shit from the guys who said I was “pussy-struck.” They were right, of course. She wasn’t interested in my world of rusty bridges, cheap booze, and late-night trips to the cemetery. She was responsible, polished, richer. Her room looked like a page out of a magazine. Mine smelled of surf wax and jerk-off rags.
We’d been running the bases for a month, a slow, clumsy dance of fumbling hands and sweaty palms. We had plans to go to a football game at her old school, a public presentation of me as her new, shiny toy.
We were in her room, and she was teasing me like crazy, changing her clothes right in front of me, her body a beautiful, soft promise that I was too stupid and too scared to know how to cash in on.
Then the phone rang.
She picked it up, started talking to some girlfriend, all while blow-drying her goddamn hair, the noise of it a perfect, indifferent soundtrack to my own execution. I could hear my name, and then I heard the words, clear as a bell, even over the roar of the hairdryer.
“Yeah, I’m bringing him,” she said. “He’s cute, but he’s so… immature. You know? Sexually and mentally.”
That bitch.
She didn’t just kill me; she performed a goddamn autopsy on my corpse, right there in front of me. But I just stood there. I walked it through. I was in way over my head, and the only thing I could think to do was to keep swimming, even if the water was full of shit.
And when it finally happened, lying there in her perfect, clean bed, with the sound of her parents giggling at some stupid TV show downstairs, my love life lived up to its own pathetic reputation: thirty-seven seconds and a goddamn sprinkler system.
Yep. Humiliation. Pure, uncut, and served on a platter.
She needed a man. I was just a kid with a hard-on and no idea what the hell to do with it. And now, she knew it too.
The next Monday at school, there were no high-fives from the guys, no victory laps around the hacky sack circle. There was just a quiet, greasy shame hanging in the air.
It was a silent, mutual agreement. Her with her friends, laughing their perfect, plastic laughs. Me with my hacky sack, back in the gutter where I belonged. We just acted like the whole pathetic, thirty-seven-second tragedy never happened.
A couple of weeks later, she was on the arm of the quarterback, climbing the next rung on the high school ladder. And I was moving deeper into drugs, finding my own way to the bottom.
A fair trade, I guess.
Years later, after I’d joined the Navy, I was eighteen and on leave. A kid in a sailor suit with a pocketful of cash and a thirst that could drain a goddamn brewery. I ended up wandering into the L.A. Street Scene, a big, stupid, beautiful music festival where the whole city had come out to sweat and scream together.
People were dancing in the street, their faces turned up to the sky, worshipping at the altar of U2, who were blasting their holy noise from a rooftop. Helicopters circled overhead like vultures, filming the whole goddamn circus for one of their music videos. It was a perfect piece of manufactured rebellion.
And in the middle of all that beautiful, expensive chaos, I heard it. A voice from a different lifetime, cutting right through the noise like a piece of broken glass:
“Are you Jim from Artesia High?”
I turned around.
And there she was. At first, she just looked like one of those women you see hanging around the naval bars at last call, the ones with the dead eyes and a story they’re tired of telling. But then she started hinting about our connection, about school, and the pieces clicked into place.
“Holy shit,” I said, the words just falling out of my mouth.
It was the same girl. Only she wasn’t the dream anymore. Time, life, whatever the hell it is that chews us all up and spits us out, it had hit her hard. She was heavier, older looking, stretched thin around the edges like a cheap suit that’s been worn in the rain too many times. Her makeup was caked on thick, a desperate attempt to plaster over the cracks.
But I could still see it, underneath all that wreckage. The echo of that blonde I once chased through the halls, the one who tasted like cheap beer and a future that never happened.
She hugged me, a desperate, clumsy thing. And I could feel it, the whole sad story of the years between then and now. The feel of a body that had been used and abused. She started talking to me, her words a little slurred, like I was the black guy she’d been with just before, another interchangeable part in the machinery of her life. I could barely get my arms around her.
For a second, it was all there again, the whole stupid, beautiful, ugly story, dredged up from the bottom of a memory I thought I’d buried for good.
Then it was gone.
No phone number. No “we should get together sometime.” She just turned and started bleeding back into the crowd. And just like that, she became another apparition from a past I didn’t want anymore, drifting away into the noise of U2 and a city that never really gave a damn about either of us.
