Erotic/Death Memoir

it's a memoir that is simultaneously erotic and about death. But there's a twist!

            It is ninth period. I am standing by the classroom door, making sure the teacher knows that class is ending in just one minute so he’d better WRAP IT UP, because the most important part of my day is fast-approaching. It’s almost time for THE NOTE.

            Three months ago, two weeks before my fourteenth birthday, the long, lean, seventeen, bubblegum-chewing, tie-dye wearing goddess I had been following around since the beginning of school had wrapped me in her tan arms and pressed me up against my gym locker for the mintiest, softest, hardest, firstest kiss I ever had. And since then, every day, since I still wasn’t allowed to go out after school, I waited for her note to tide me through to the next day, keeping all of my young nerves a-fire with phrases like “I want to pin you down and kiss you on every inch of your body,” and “I touch myself and think of you every night.”

            But when the bell rang and I looked out into the sea of faces, waiting for the sharp-chinned one with the eyebrow piercing to grin at me and slip me a piece of paper while grazing my wrist with a callused finger, I was sorely disappointed. It wasn’t until I had dragged my sorry a*s to my locker in a dead sulk and taken twice too long to get my books together that she finally showed up, grin-less.

            “We need to talk,” she said. “Meet me on the corner of Maple and Linwood at four.”

            I was f*****g terrified. What if she was tired of me? What if she was bored of my naïve bossiness, or tired of my endless admiration?

OH GOD WHAT DID SHE WANT TO TELL ME

            So I walked home and buzzed around my house on pure nervous energy, counting the minutes before I told my mom I was going for a walk and headed out to meet my long-haired, trash-talking, bewildering seraph. I could see her hunched as I approached the corner, and as soon as I got there she dropped the bomb.

I HAVE CANCER.

            I must have stood there with my mouth open for five minutes before coming to and bombarding her with questions. Whatkindwhendidyoufindoutwhat’sthetreatmentwhatcanIdo ARE YOU GOING TO BE OKAY

            She just looked grim and shook her head in response to each question. I started to put it all together. The blood that sometimes leaked out of her ears, staining her earlobe. The fainting at track meets. Ohgodohgodohgod.

            I walked her back to my house and insisted that she let my mom drive her back home. She and I got in the backseat and whispered furiously while my mom drove, keeping a weather eye on the backseat, watching out, as she always did, for “funny business.” We dropped her off, and I lost it.

I mean I LOST IT. I started sobbing and sobbing. My mother looked alarmed. I managed to choke out through my hysterics that I wanted to go to St. Francis, the Catholic Church downtown. My mother must have been nonplussed. We weren’t Catholic! Her confusion heightened when, after we arrived and I collapsed onto my knees in one of the dark pews, I demanded to speak to our Reverend Thomas, the pastor at our Presbyterian church. She was so worried, though, that she called him, and, god bless him, he came and spent three hours telling a deranged fourteen-year-old that her dying girlfriend wouldn’t go to hell for being gay.

            And eventually I calmed down. And a few days after that, I got shipped to my dad’s for the summer, where I paced the backyard frantically with the cordless phone, trying to understand the garbled words of my lover from over the Atlantic sea. Something about Germany. Something about a procedure. DEFINITELY life or death.

            Until my dad got wind of what was happening. He grabbed the phone out of my hand, looked at the area code, and told me to go inside. He stood out in the backyard in his bathing suit trunks and straw hat, shouting into the phone for a half an hour while I waited miserably, kicking the rungs of the kitchen table, and dramatically resisting any tender ministrations from my sympathetic siblings.

            And then my dad came back inside.

            “She’s not dying,” he said. “She lied to you,” he said.

Of course I didn’t believe him. He told me over and over again, refuting each of my arguments, shooting down each piece of information she’d given me, until there was nothing left standing. And then I had to believe him.