It was spring 2004. George W. Bush was running his reelection campaign against John Kerry. Newspapers frequently reported gruesome updates from the Iraq War. But most importantly: I, 14-year-old CHH, was hopelessly single.
Famously, I struggled to make platonic friends more than I struggled to date, and this friendlessness made me feel even stronger about the need for a boyfriend. I had one close female friend, a former Unitarian and newly converted Druid named Rachel. I had a boyfriend earlier in my freshman year—Tony, a sixteen-year-old thespian, who plucked me from the first week of school and absorbed me into his friend group full of cool older kids who “did pot” and knew who David Mamet was. Tony broke up with me two months later. The reason he gave was that he was “too stressed to have a girlfriend” because his cousin was on death row for killing a cop—although I’m sure it was a coverup for just not being that into me, it somehow was also a true story.
I didn’t take the breakup well. Not only did I bore the crap out of everyone I knew with stories about how stupid Tony looked in his Hawaiian shirt at the slam poetry club show, but when Tony got a new girlfriend who looked suspiciously like an older version of me, I became obsessed with the idea that she was actually a twenty-something narc planted by the feds to get kids expelled for drug possession. Given that drug-related expulsions skyrocketed that year, I had some kind of basis for this theory, but I’m not sure what purpose it served for me to hide out in an empty short bus and take photos of her from afar with my Kodak FunSaver camera.
Tony himself was expelled for marijuana use around this time (Trust the plan! The Storm is coming!) and without Tony to obsess over, I felt empty and lonely. Because he had scooped me up at the beginning of orientation, I never had a good chance to bond with kids my own age—and it’s safe to say that even if I had, I would have alienated them anyway. To add insult to injury, Rachel got a boyfriend, and wouldn’t stop talking about how they did “dry oral” on the lacrosse field (she clarified he licked her over the underpants, while she was also wearing a maxi-pad.)
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