Everything You Want Me to Be by Mindy Mejia

Author:Mindy Mejia [Mejia, Mindy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

HATTIE / January 2008

I LOST my virginity when I was fifteen, although lost is a funny word for it. I didn’t misplace it like a homework assignment or a cell phone. It wasn’t like I could find it again and tuck it back in there. I gave it away in Mike Crestview’s basement on an old sofa with a cabbage-leaf print while we watched Lord of the Rings. I suppose it was a pretty typical first time, except I wasn’t all starry-eyed about Mike. I was curious more than anything. You can’t watch that many seasons of Sex and the City without getting a little curious. And Mike was a nice enough guy, a senior all excited to leave for college. I probably liked that excitement as much as anything else about him.

We were watching the part where Gandalf fights the fire monster and falls into hell or wherever when I asked Mike if he wanted to have sex.

He seemed pretty surprised. He was actually better friends with Greg than with me, but Greg was gone for the weekend, so I’d come over alone.

“Do you have a condom?” I asked him. “If not, we can forget it.”

It was kind of hilarious how fast he found a condom and made sure his parents were still at the grocery store.

The sex itself was bumpy and weird and I didn’t help very much. Mike said he’d done it before, so I just lay back and let it happen, observing more than participating, I guess. The thing I remembered most, besides the scratchy fabric rubbing my butt, was the vein that popped out in Mike’s forehead, like a curvy blood river. After that I figured I understood what sex was all about, and didn’t have any urge to try it again.

Last fall, as my junior year started and Mike was off enjoying life in Minneapolis, my grandpa passed away right in the middle of harvest and my parents had to go to Iowa to take care of the details.

He’d been in a nursing home for years, ever since my grandma died and he had a stroke. Before the stroke he was just like my dad—a tough, matter-of-fact guy. Dad had a sense of humor, though, while Grandpa always seemed tense, like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but if it ever did he wouldn’t say a word about it. After the stroke, it was like he’d been turned inside out. He cried all the time. He cried when we came to visit him, when the nurse put him to bed at night, even about stuff that should have made him happy like when the Twins were winning. It was as if eighty years of buried emotion started leaking out his eyeballs.

The nursing home was a sad-looking concrete building outside Des Moines where all the old ladies sat on the cracked patio and tried to wave us over to their wheelchairs. We ignored them and kept our eyes on the backs of Mom’s shoes as she walked inside.

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