From Chapter 2 of Finding My Way Home
Thoughts shifted from past to present. Remembering the bags of chips and cookies I enjoyed in my youth made me hungry for a snack, so I made a pit stop and grabbed a treat from the bag my mom had packed for me. I wonder how many of these little displays of love I had taken for granted throughout my life. She loved us in the best way she knew how, which usually meant giving gifts. Scared for my safety but fully aware that she could do nothing to stand in my way, she did all that she could do and put together a collection of snacks for the road.
Twenty-eight years old, I was single and lost. Increasingly, invitations to dinners and nights out were no longer extended to me because it was “just couples,” which begged the question, “What was wrong with just me?” When my ex-boyfriend James resurfaced, he gave me hope. He was my ticket to normal.
James came into my life when I was 25. We had dated for two years, and I was ready to move in together. He wanted to sign another lease with his friends. We broke up. A year later, I went to his grandfather’s wake. A few days later he called.
“Thanks for going to Papi’s wake,” he said. “You looked great, by the way,” he paused. “Maybe we could get together for a drink?”
I agreed to meet him, and two months later, we were still seeing each other once or twice a week though only on weeknights. I wanted more. He was content. We broke up again. I knew what I needed from him, and I wouldn’t settle for less, but I was not always so focused on my needs in relationships.
I had a history of losing all self-control when any man paid me the slightest attention. One of four children, none of us could ever be the center of attention. While my mother doted on me, I had to compete for my father’s love, and no matter how much of his love came my way, it was never enough.
As hard as I had tried to forget about the naïve decisions I had made, my female high school students reintroduced me to my younger self every time I stepped into the hallways or the girls’ bathroom.
“Oh my God, I hate her. She’s such a bitch.”
“Did you see her talking to him?”
“Who does she think she is?”
“Are you gonna say something?”
The drama of teenage girlhood. The dialogue never changes even though time ticks away.
Back in 1989, I spent many a night as a teenage girl weeping because of my love for Jonas Hatfield. Jonas was the type of kid who knew he was handsome, nearly six feet tall, broad shouldered, blond, a senior, and a football player. His smile warmed me almost as much as when he wrapped me in his football jacket the night we met. At a Friday night party in my junior year, he noticed me.
I never felt that I mattered to anyone, except my mother. For most of my life, I felt invisible, even with my girlfriends. Like many teenage girls, I struggled to fit in. The winter of my junior year, I found a hot pink jacket that I had to have. I loved the jacket because it was loud. People noticed the hot pink, even though they may not have noticed me. Perhaps it was the bright fuchsia puff that caught Jonas’s attention.
At the party, I was upset about another boy who had broken up with me when suddenly I felt the warmth of a man’s body behind me. He whispered, “Why are you wasting your time with that pimply-faced geek?” My belly tingled; I was shocked that I mattered to him. He felt like a giant watching over me with genuine concern for my sadness. I was confused. Why was he even talking to me?
After a few minutes he abruptly left, claiming that he’d be right back. He never returned, which didn’t surprise me, but he did send his friend to fetch the jacket--his football jacket--that he had wrapped around me only moments earlier.
“Kacy, I need Jonas’s jacket.”
“What?”
“His jacket. He wanted me to get it for him.”
“Why didn’t he come get it?”
I searched the crowd and saw him standing with his arm around another girl.
“Does he have a girlfriend?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I just need the jacket.”
“What a jackass.”
I wanted to forget about him, but he rushed to our car as I was leaving. He ran to the passenger window and begged for my number.
“She’s nothing. I’m breaking up with her tonight. Just give me your number so that I can call you,” he pleaded. No boy had ever begged me for my phone number. Girlfriend or no girlfriend, I gave him what he asked, barely able to suppress my happiness. I would have given him anything. I was a nobody.
He called, and we went on a few dates before he explained why he had broken up with the other girl. A warning.
“She wouldn’t have sex,” he said.
I decided that I’d rather have sex with him than have him break up with me. I had never had sex, yet I romanticized that he would make the perfect first. He loved to kiss me and put his arm around me. We talked every day, and he had ‘asked me out’, which meant I was his girlfriend. If I had sex with him, he might decide that he loved me.
He didn’t. After we started having sex, he made little effort to take me out on dates. The phone calls slowed to every other day or twice a week. I hunted him down at school, passing by his locker or classroom every period, but my body shrunk each time I passed him with his crowd of friends, all senior boys huddled together in the hall.
When Friday afternoons came, he smiled and called me over. The school hosted dances many Friday nights, and often they were followed by a house party, and parties meant sex.
As an adult who chaperoned dances, I hated them. The older boys flocked in like mobs eager to attack their victims, and I wanted to round up all the girls to protect them. In the darkness of the cafeteria with the music blaring, a group of boys circled around a girl and closed in on her. They’d bump her back and forth among them until one grabbed her by the waist and turned her around, squeezing her to him. He’d stand behind her rubbing his groin against her ass until a teacher walked over and stopped it.
When it happened that I was the teacher who interrupted this dancing, I wanted to pull the girl aside, hug her, and say, “Please don’t. You don’t need to do this to yourself. Before the night is over he’ll forget about you, even though right now you feel pretty special. Go have fun with your girlfriends, then go home where you are safe.”
When Jonas and I went to the Thanksgiving dance together, I felt like the homecoming queen. We danced every slow song together. He held my hand and told me I looked beautiful. All night, I was part of the popular crowd. I was somebody. As we walked out, we passed her—the ex-girlfriend—but he was holding my hand. What I didn’t know then was that he had leaned over and whispered to her, “Wait for me. I want to be with you.”
He played the two of us against each other for most of my junior year, and I let him. On the nights when he wanted sex, he’d call me. He courted her and abused me. It would be easy to say that I was willing to share him because sharing was a prerequisite with three siblings. But my insecurity was not a side effect of growing up with a brother and sisters.
When he was looking for a date, he’d call her. When he called me, it was quick. He never wanted to talk, only to confirm a plan.
“What are you doing tonight?”
He still likes me, I thought.
“I don’t know,” I said making myself available.
“Hup’s having a party, so I’ll call you later.”
Sometimes he did call, but there were many nights that he didn’t. I waited in my room, snapping at my mother if she came in to ask if I wanted to play a game.
“No. Leave me alone.”
“What is wrong with you?” she’d ask.
“Nothing. I want to be alone.”
I lied.
To recall all the nights when I believed he would call, only to later find that he was with her—the other girl—humiliates me still.
“I heard he sent her flowers for Valentine’s Day,” another friend said.
The most memorable cruelties were at the basketball games during the winter of my junior year.
I made the basketball cheerleading. The squad performed a half time show on Tuesday and Friday nights. Every time the cheerleaders rushed the floor, a mysterious, cshhhhh, cshhhhh, cshhhhh sound hissed, like a leaking tire, from the upper right-hand corner of the bleachers where Jonas and his friends sat. The noise resounded almost as loudly as our cheers, and I was relieved when the music, “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” quieted that corner of senior boys.
After one Friday game, I asked my guy friend Chris what that ricochet of hisses meant.
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“I know it has something to do with me because Jonas always starts it. Chris, tell me what it means.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just a joke. It’s stupid.”
“Just tell me then.”
“It means you’re his blow-up doll,” he sighed.
I should have slapped Chris and then struck Jonas. Instead, I swallowed heavily and let out a terrified noise somewhere between laughter and tears. I could have gone home alone or gone along with our plan to go to a party that night. Already disgusted with myself, I ignored my feelings. I decided to play the role of the good little blow-up doll. A few drinks helped me pretend that there was something likeable about this awful boy.
At the party, Jonas asked me to go outside. We walked down the driveway to where his truck was parked so that we could be alone. We climbed into the front seat and he kissed me. He wanted me. Being with him made me feel grown up. He seemed like such a man. He’d breathe in my ear and send chills through my body. He must love me, I told myself. When his hands moved to the button on my pants, I didn’t stop him. Then he reached under my shirt and around my back to unclasp my bra. As I lifted my arms for him to take off my shirt, my head turned. From the corner of my eye, I saw someone. I shot my arms down and jumped to the passenger’s seat. There, watching us and laughing, were three of his friends.
Though I heard the mocking hisses several more times that season, I pretended not to. I also pretended to believe Jonas when he said he had no idea that his friends were watching us. I was willing to be his toy. And for that, I despised myself. Jonas’s little blow-up doll. At least he considered me his something.
I absolved myself of any dignity and self-respect and continued to see Jonas, but only when he had time for me. Dating Jonas had—in my mind at least—catapulted me into the limelight of my high school. For the first time in my life I felt pretty and popular.
He afforded me a social status that I thought I alone never could have achieved.
What I didn’t realize was the reputation I was making for myself. I thought I was sleeping with Jonas, but the senior boys saw me as a girl willing to have sex. When Jonas’s friends started asking me out, I mistook the invitations as compliments. Looking back, I realize what they really wanted was a turn with Jonas’s blow-up doll. So I suffered through a long winter, but when the seniors graduated in June, I was glad to see them go.
Even after we both graduated from high school, it took me years to finally say no to Jonas. As an adult, I see that I was a weak, insecure, and boy-crazed girl, even though I couldn’t see what I was doing while she was on the production line. Now, I see reflections of her in my students, and I want to warn them, stop them from making the same mistakes.
Whether true or not, many rumors do pass through the hallways. Often I sat in my classroom listening to the Monday morning stories.
“She was with him and him this weekend.”
“I heard she…”
“And she knows that he’s going out with…”
“She is such a slut.”
Sometimes the stories erupt into screams, and the girls attack each other as if they were enemies.They never blame the boys.They never mention the names of the boys. It’s always the girls despising each other. Despising themselves.
It would be easy to blame Madonna (in my time) or Britney Spears (for girls now), to blame the media, even, for exploiting youth and sexuality, for turning teenage girls into sex symbols. Or is it that we exploit ourselves? Feeling sexy, being the object of a man’s attention, was devilishly fun. I both loved and hated it at the same time. Being with Jonas fulfilled some fantasy that I was somehow like Madonna: risqué, uninhibited, iconic. Yet in the secret of my solitude, all I really wanted was my virginity back.
It didn’t occur to me then that I had much to offer as a person, and it wasn’t until my senior year that I discovered the pride of being admired for my intellect. In the same way that Jonas had noticed me, my English teacher also picked me out of a crowd. She wrote complimentary notes on my first essay, which she likely wrote to all of her students. For the first time, I felt my words had worth, so for most of my senior year, I divided my time between obsessing over Jonas, who wasn’t even in high school anymore, and working to impress Ms. Antolini. She noticed a spark inside of me that had never mattered to anyone else, and her attention nurtured my intellectual soul.