We had to write a paper for educational psychology explaining an emotionally significant event from high school. And since I love to talk about myself so much, and because I think my paper is so good, I have decided to share it with you. Peace out...
The Fourteenth
I was out the door way before the bell rang. Around me, teachers held up dozens of students. “You know you can’t leave until two o’clock.” No one said a word to me. I kept walking. They weren’t going to stop an academy student. I pushed open both of the double doors and picked up the pace as I made a beeline through the student parking lot, grabbing the car keys out of my left pocket and repeatedly tossing them in the air. I opened the driver’s side door and fell into the seat, putting the keys in the ignition and turning them until the car started several seconds later – starting my 1994 Ford Taurus was typically a bit of a struggle. Puddle of Mudd’s “Blurry” was already blasting on the CD player, halfway through the song. I started it over. Pushing my long blond hair back behind my ears, I opened the glove compartment and retrieved the contents, shoving a pack of Camel Lights in my left pocket and two strawberry flavored condoms in my right. I sped through the parking lot, ignoring the speed bumps, and gave a half nod to the security guard on patrol as I illegally left school grounds. Confident and entitled, I turned the corner, rolled down my window, lit up a cigarette and smiled. It was Valentines’ Day.
About a half mile down the road, I stopped at Seven-Eleven and picked up two blue raspberry Slurpees – one for me and one for Matt. Matt Green was more or less my boyfriend that year, my senior year of high school, more so because we spent nearly all our waking and sleeping moments together and less so because almost nobody knew about it. From there, I headed to Matt’s house, past the school, past the Seven-Eleven, past the deaf child area sign, past Timbaland’s house, and into one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Virginia Beach. I parallel parked on the left side of the street, grabbed the Slurpees, and opened the garage door. There wasn’t much time – Matt’s mom, a teacher at our school and my former chemistry teacher, would be home in under an hour.
“Poat…” he said when he saw me. I can’t exactly remember why he called me that, but I’m pretty sure it was some derivative of “pot”, which we happened to enjoy smoking together frequently. Sometimes he called me “Goose” or “Meester”. At school, he called me Robbie.
“How ya doing?” I asked him, “And how was your day off?” Yeah, Matt hadn’t gone to school that day, big surprise. Not to worry, though, since I brought home all his assignments for him, as I did probably two or three times a week. Sometimes I would even do them for him – it’s what you do for someone when you’re in love, I figured.
I smiled at his cuteness. His face, his eyes, his voice, his demeanor… everything about him made me smile. Matt’s the kind of guy who would either make a great motivational speaker or a great con artist. He could make you believe almost anything he said, even if he didn’t believe it himself. I believed him when he told me that he loved me and that I was perfect and that I shouldn’t be so nice to him. I have no idea if he meant any or all of it, but part of me still believes a lot of what he said. “So you want to light up?” he asked me, as if he even had to ask. “Why do you waste time asking me that?” I asked him – though my question was also a waste of time – he was already opening the air conditioning vent above his bed and before I knew it, he pulled down a heaping Ziploc bag of green goodness. “Do you have the spoof?” I asked, referring to the device into which we would blow the smoke so as to make it smell less like marijuana and more like fresh laundry.
He lit up first, opening his bathroom window with one hand as he held the bowl with the other. My cigarettes, condoms, and melting blue raspberry Slurpees sat on the counter, all three looking increasingly delicious with each hit I took. “Oh my God, Matthew Clay, you should have seen it today. Bethany tells Kaitlyn that she’s a bitch in the middle of math modeling, and Kaitlyn is all like ‘No, you’re a bitch!’ She’s so clever with her comebacks, that one,” I told him, trying to be funny and persuasive at the same time, at least as best as I could in my altered state. Matt just laughed, apparently not having processed a single word I just said, and kissed me. “You’re cute,” he said. Well if he said it, it must be true.
“Thanks for the Slurpee, Meester,” he said. “I’m sorry you have to buy everything for me, though.” A puzzling comment considering I turned over the vast majority of my paychecks to him to fund his thriving drug trafficking career. “Oh Matthew Clay, I’d do anything for…”
A loud engine. “What was that? Did you hear that?”
“Oh my God… oh my God…” I tried to whisper, sweat dripping down my forehead. My first instinct, upon hearing what sounded a lot like Mrs. Green’s Chevy Tahoe pulling into the driveway, was to ditch the cigarettes. “Get out of here!” Matt yelled at me, no longer smiling, no longer especially cute. “Go downstairs and don’t let her come up here!”
“How am I supposed to…”
“Hurry up!” he roared. I grabbed my Slurpee and ran out of the bathroom, my left leg half asleep, so I glided down the stairs more so than actually stepping. I took a deep breath and put the straw of the Slurpee in my mouth, as if to convince her that we were simply drinking frozen beverages in the bathroom, but certainly not smoking weed. I opened the door leading from his room over the garage into the dining room and peered around the corner. As far as I could tell, no one was there. Just to double check, I looked out the dining room window – no Tahoe in sight – and opened the garage door. She wasn’t there either. Phew, false alarm. Everything was okay.
“She’s not here,” I shouted as I opened the door to his bedroom and began to climb the stairs. “Everything’s fine.” Still sipping on my Slurpee – it was especially tasty and the perfect level of frozenness at this point – I tripped over an overstuffed plastic bag on the landing between the first set of stairs and the second. “Oh, shit,” I said and started to pick myself back up. The head of a stuffed bear was now sticking out of the bag, and underneath it I saw a box of chocolates. “Hey is this for me, Poat?” I asked, smiling, somewhat shocked that he had actually gotten me something for a special occasion when he had never done so before, despite my frequent gifts and constant adoration. “I didn’t know we were doing Valentines’ Day gifts! Come on, you know I don’t like chocolate, but I do like the bear…”
“Hey, come back up here,” he called from the bathroom. “That’s good that no one’s home. I think this is cash, you wanna smoke some more?” Maybe he hadn’t heard what I said. Or maybe he was upset I ruined his surprise. I decided to ask again. “Is that for me on the stairs? You really didn’t hide it very…”
“No, that’s for Kaitlyn,” he said, so devoid of his usual charm that I forgot for a brief moment where I was. “For Kaitlyn?” I asked, quite puzzled, quite aware of who Kaitlyn was – that bitch in all my classes, that dyke who had a big nose and wasn’t particularly smart, that whore who didn’t get along with Bethany. “Yeah, that stuff is for Kaitlyn. I thought I told you that we’re going out now.”
Okay… it must be the weed, I thought. I was hallucinating or being delusional or whichever one it is when you hear and see crazy, fucked-up things that couldn’t possibly be true. Maybe that entire exchange didn’t just happen. Or maybe it was a joke. Yeah, it could be a joke, not a particularly funny one, but as long as it was a joke… I slurped my Slurpee.
“Yeah, Kaitlyn and I are going out. I mean, I like her and all and she really likes me, and I just don’t want people to think things. I mean, it doesn’t change anything with us or anything,” he said, a little too polished, as though he had practiced this speech before I even discovered the bag.
“I think that changes a lot, actually, I mean… if you’re going out with her, she’s going to expect to, you know, do stuff…”
“Well we kinda messed around the other night, but it’s not like you and me…” he said, so matter-of-fact, so not realizing that I could possibly ever have a single problem with a single word he had just uttered. As my heart began to pound, I realized what the expression “my heart began to pound” actually meant – like my heart was growing and growing ever so large that it was pushing against the walls of my chest, desperate to get out, about to penetrate my body and plop onto the floor at any unpredictable moment, leaving me dead and full of pot. My right arm went numb and I felt the Slurpee begin to slip out of my hands. “Just chill out, okay? It’s okay. I mean, you never know how long these things are going to last, but you and me, we’re forever.” I tightened my grip on the Slurpee and felt my right arm begin to retract. Half aware of what I was doing and half out of reflex, I chucked the Slurpee over my shoulder and directly at Matt’s white Ocean Lakes High School t-shirt. My aim was unusually perfect. The half-frozen blue beverage exploded all over him, leaving him a wet, sticky, fruity mess. My mouth dropped as we both stood there silently for what seemed like five minutes but was probably no more than five seconds. “Give me my fucking cigarettes,” I said as I grabbed them off the counter.
I don’t remember leaving or how I ended up on Flanagan’s Lane, a place I often went to drive around when I was upset. Sometimes I would take Matt with me, and we’d cruise around with the windows rolled down and the music turned way up, communicating only with our eyes and occasionally with our hands. But this time I was alone, unable to discard my feelings of betrayal and disbelief and confusion, trying to focus on making my heart stop pounding, which only made it pound even more. I turned left around a bend, then right around another, until I reached a straightaway, probably a half-mile long. I put my foot on the gas and pushed… and pushed… the speedometer hit 40… and then 60… and then 80… well, it didn’t go any higher than 80, but the car sure as hell did. Suddenly my heart was in this with me, no longer pounding but returning to a gentle and stable beat, as if to say it approved of what I was doing. I decided to keep going. So I kept going. Soon there would be no turning back or changing my mind – just a fence, a ditch, a barn, and an endless field of strawberries. Here I was, in total control of my life and death, yet no longer able to control my pseudo-relationship with my pseudo-boyfriend who was too damn ashamed to admit to anyone that he might have feelings for a guy and too damn afraid of his father to even consider the possibility and too damn proud and perfect to think that he might be just a little different than someone else. And here I was, a bright and popular high school senior with a supportive family and a UNC Chapel Hill acceptance letter in the mailbox at home about to kill myself for… love? I knew I had to stop. I slammed on the brakes as fast as my slowed reaction time would allow, my body flying as far forward as the seatbelt would allow, my left leg shaking as I pushed it on top of my right leg to try to stop faster. The car shook as it decelerated across the open field, bumping up and down on the uneven terrain. I didn’t want to die – not today, at least. Not on Valentines’ Day.
I turned around and drove back to Matt’s house, parked in the same spot, opened the garage door, and walked up the stairs into his bedroom. “Hey, Matthew Clay,” I said and smiled at him. “Sorry about your shirt.”
He smiled and shrugged. “Should we spend the night at your house or mine?”
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