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My high-school boyfriend and I wound up at the same university, our dorms separated by two brick walls and a few bored hall monitors. We shared a cafeteria, and though mine was a women’s-only floor, it was easy to sneak him back and forth, granting us access to each others’ beds and underwear in a way that was unimaginable back when we took what we could get in the back of his Chevy Nova. There was only one problem with this luxury scenario: A week before college, we broke up.
Well, he broke up with me. I was going to take more convincing. That summer, we had long conversations in the front seat of his car, him staring out the window while my face contorted, flushed purple, and bubbles of snot popped in my nose. It’s a mean cosmic coincidence that at the moment you are feeling most vulnerable, sad, scared, and angry, you also look the most stupid. "No one’s ever going to understand you like I duh-duh-duh-do," I said, wiping my sleeve on my nose. Strangely, this argument did not work. My boyfriend had decided that other people would understand him like I did. Even better, they might be on the pill. So while I sulked in my girls-only wing, stroking our prom pictures, he experimented with psychedelics and enjoyed handjobs from hot Venezuelan exchange students. I hated college, and it hadn’t even started yet. My roommate was a flag-corps member who slept with a stuffed bunny rabbit. She had a boyfriend in a nearby town, but they were saving themselves for marriage. We didn’t have a lot in common, my roommate and I. Still, I didn’t have any other dinner
companions, so each night at 7 p.m., we joined the crush of college kids in the cafeteria wearing torn jeans and flannel shirts in summer. I remember thinking the room was full of possibility. (And free fountain drinks!) I remember thinking cute boys in concert T-shirts sat at nearly every booth. I remember thinking the guy holding hands with the exotic-looking Venezuelan exchange student looked an awful lot like my ex-boyfriend. "Hey, this is Marisa." My ex-boyfriend had grown a goatee. It looked stupid. "It’s nice to meet you," I told her. By that, I meant I wanted to rip off her fucking face. I sat down with my roommate and my chicken-fried steak. There was a hot bulge in my throat. One tear slipped off my chin. And then twenty more. "I promise I won’t be like this all time," I said, dabbing my face with a square napkin. But that was a total lie. I have never cried more than I did my first year of college. Well, maybe in the first year of life. But even then, I had new toys and a breast to suck. In fact, what I remember most about my freshman year is not the classes, or the dorm, or the professors, but how difficult it was to find a place to cry in peace. There was just no privacy. Dorm living is kind of like being on a reality-television show in that way. You know everything about everyone. When people use drugs, you smell it. When people have sex, you hear it. I used to get so desperate for a little scrap of my own that I’d lock myself in the phone booths, just curl up and feel sad for myself, and think about how much I hated it. Looking back, I guess the study rooms were always empty, too. Somehow, it never occurred to me to go in there.
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| PERSONAL ESSAYS |
  
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The drama with my ex-boyfriend lasted all year. It had new verses, exciting bridges, but mostly, it was the same bad song, stuck on repeat. Marisa got bored with my ex, and decided she preferred giving handjobs to his good friend Steve. My ex decided he needed to grow his goatee into a creepy point and complement that with a rainbow beret. And I decided to forgive this and start sneaking him into my dorm room whenever my roommate was off on a band trip or visiting the boyfriend she never screwed. It was my first experience with casual sex. Strangely, it was with the first love of my life, but that hardly made our encounters more meaningful. We started hanging out together, "as friends," and I could tell each night whether we’d sleep together based on the amount of Jagermeister consumed, based on the other girls in the vicinity and how many pimples and/or tattoos they had. It was more than a little bit humbling, being demoted from his girlfriend to the chick he might bag if he got drunk enough. Sometimes, he’d just pound on my door at 4 a.m., eyes bloodshot and half-lidded. He used great come-on lines, like, "I’m wasted. Are you alone?" All this was a bad idea, and I knew it at the time. But I was genuinely confused. I still loved him. The other
girls enraged me with jealousy. And what little physical contact I’d had with other guys had been awkward and strange. It seemed entirely possible that my entire sexual future would be an endless series of fumbling encounters, while he could undo my bra with his teeth. So yes, we were drunk, and young, and had mad chemistry. But mostly, I kept thinking that if I slept with him, he’d realize what he really needed to do was to be my boyfriend again. Why I wanted this, I’m not entirely sure. Back when I was curled up in the phone booth, or making beelines from the pizza buffet to a tight ball underneath my blankets, it made sense to cling to him like this. But months had passed. I had made new friends. I had a life that had nothing to do with him. And yet, wanting him back was like a tic I had acquired, the way I tapped my cigarette when it didn’t have any ash. "What does this mean?" I would ask, as he tossed my panties onto the mini-fridge. For a smart kid, sometimes I was soooo stupid.
I think what I liked more than anything was the pretend comfort. On the nights after we slept together, I always woke early, enjoying a kind of relief, as if I had just wrested myself from a sweaty nightmare. As I waited for him to wake up, I would imagine us walking downstairs to the cafeteria, hand in hand. We would load up on stale bagels and watery eggs. We would share the same side of the booth. Instead, he would wake up grumpy and confused. "I gotta split," he would say, yanking on his jeans. "Do you mind if I whiz in your sink?" I ate the stale bagels and the watery eggs by myself. I sat alone in a lopsided booth. I would cry for being so stupid, and then I would cry for crying, and then I would cry for getting mad at myself for crying. Crying is insidious like that, the way the very act of it feeds it more. How did this begin? It was like an M.C. Escher print of personal agony. After I was feeling better, I would promise myself that I wouldn’t sleep with him again. But then we’d get drunk on Friday, and he’d slip his hands under my shirt, saying, "Come on, I won’t be an asshole." Whatever, I figured. I’m already here. For a while, it seemed like this would never end. I began to wonder what indignity I would have to suffer, what humiliation would make me hit bottom. Then one day I dropped by his dorm room to see if he wanted to have lunch. Empty condom wrappers were strewn around his bunk bed. Like a very stupid mother holding a needle she found in her son’s drawer, I had to ask: "Are these yours?" Duh. He had been sleeping with a girl from Wellesley, someone he had met through his roommate. She’d come in town for Spring Break, they’d fallen in love, fucked approximately five hundred times, and tossed the condom wrappers over their shoulders while enjoying a nice long ride on mushrooms. I went to the cafeteria by myself. I didn’t cry. In fact, I think I ran into some friends, and we had a pretty great time. n°
©2007 Sarah Hepola and hooksexup.com
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