Seattle Girl (4 page)

I laid my blanket close to the front door of my building. Who knew what kind of creeps were out this time of night?

There were several couples making out under the stars and some guy was playing guitar. He was surrounded by a bunch of women, all looking at him with that rapturous gaze girls always give rock-stars.

He had longish hair, falling just below his ears, and a sharp nose. He played beautifully. If I closed my eyes, I would have been lulled to sleep, were it not for the way his female court giggled over his every word.

I was enjoying watching the girls try to get his attention. So much so, that I began to forget my worries altogether. I love people watching and while I’m doing it, I always think I’m invisible. But I guess I wasn’t, because I suddenly realized his eyes were burning a hole through me.

His attention kind of thrilled me and gave me the creeps all at the same time. But after fifteen minutes of his focus and unwavering interest, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I grabbed my blanket and went back inside. Crawling back under the covers I tried to get his eyes out of my head, but I couldn’t.

By the time midnight rolled around the next night, I was sick of sitting around pretending to study—and I had been haunted by visions of the fire-eyed guitar playing stranger all the previous night—so I decided to run through some energy by hoofing it over to the radio station to see what was going on. It was just about time for Bill’s show and I was hoping he would let me listen in. I was heading out of the front door of my building when I noticed the mystery man leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette.

I was sort of stunned by his presence and instead of just walking past him my traitorous mouth opened and said, “Oh! You startled me.”

He didn’t say anything, just took another drag of his cigarette. The thing is, although his mouth was shut he was doing a really nice job of talking to me with that eye-burning thing again.

I should have walked away, but I’ve never been good at doing what I’m supposed to do. Instead I said, “Do you live here?”

He threw his cigarette to the ground and stamped it out with his faded black boots.

“No.”

His obvious reticence helped kick some good sense back into my head. Forget it. Why was I trying to have a conversation with someone that I didn’t even want to be talking to?
 

Somewhat sarcastically I said, “Neat. Gotta go.”

And then I walked away, hoping he wouldn’t follow me, which was a total lie, because more than anything I wanted him to rush after me, begging to know my name, desperate for any smidgeon of information that he could get about me.

But he didn’t follow me.

Or beg, for that matter.

Damn him.

* * *

I was unaccountably bummed by the time I got to the studio. Bill was in the control room and when I tapped on the window his face lit up, motioning for me to come in. He was saying, “Do you realize, folks, that 90% of all college students who have sex don’t use condoms!”

He looked at me and I rolled my eyes as if to say:
Of course I always do, don’t look at me!

But what I was really thinking was how his topic didn’t impact my life at all. After all, I was the virgin wonder.

Most of the people I knew had been having sex since they were sixteen. Not me. Neither, amazingly enough had Diane or Seth, my other best friend.

In fact, the three of us had been lounging around the previous Saturday night, guzzling Corona Lights, mouthing off about how lame we were.

Me: “We suck. Why can’t any of us get laid?”

Diane: “We’re too hot, that’s why.”

Seth: “My dick is too big. Gay men are afraid of big dicks.”

Diane (really drunk, by the way): “I crave big dicks.”

Me: “Me too.”

Seth: “Bring on the big dicks!”

Me (did I mention that I was drunk too?): “I bet I’d get some if my tits were bigger.”

Diane: “I love your tits. They’re hot.”

Me: “Thanks. Yours are hot too.”

Diane: “Maybe we should all do each other in a three way.”

Seth: “I can’t do you guys. My dick’s too big.”

Diane: “Are you sure you’re really gay? Or are you just afraid to do us?”

Me: “Yeah, ‘cause we’re hot!”

Seth (standing up on the coffee table and yelling): “I AM GAY!”

Me: “Cool.”

Diane: “Yeah, right on. Get us new beers while you’re up.”

Apart from intimate conversations like these with my best friends, I didn’t feel like I had let the world at large know I was still a virgin, so whenever the topic of sex came up with anyone else I did something out of character: I kept my mouth shut.

Bill continued to make his solitary rant to the unknown KUW listening populace. “I, for one, would like to know what is so damn hard about unrolling a condom?
 
It sure as hell is easier than having to deal with AIDS, isn’t it?” He let out a sigh. “OK, somebody, anybody, tell me why you don’t like condoms. Make me understand. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a letter to Trojan with all sorts of suggestions for how they can improve their products.”

I noted the blank phone lines. Didn’t seem like Bill was having that great of a night thus far.

That made two of us.

* * *

As the days went by I noticed Mr. Fire-Eyes, as I had started to officially think of him, more and more. At some point I found out that he lived in the building directly across the lawn from mine and that pretty much, without exception, every chick within a five-apartment radius was in love with him.

Whenever I came back from a late night class he was standing outside the front door of his building, smoking. He never did anything that should have made me think I was special to him—no particular smile or declaration, in fact I still didn’t even know his name and I’m sure he didn’t know mine—but nonetheless I always got the sense that he was waiting to see me.

We might have continued on like this forever—with him always staring and me pretending to never look, even though I was hypersensitive to his presence and was totally looking whenever he wasn’t looking—until one night during dinner with Diane.

We were sitting at our little round dining table eating artichokes when she said, “Hey Georgia, what’s up with that guy who’s always watching you?”

I stopped mid artichoke leaf-slurp. “Which guy?”

She rolled her eyes. “Hello. Don’t act like you don’t know. The one who thinks he’s James Dean.” She paused to dip and delicately scrape a leaf with her perfectly white, even teeth. Swallowing, she looked back up at me. “He’s always smoking. Long hair. Wanna-be rocker with his guitar. I think he lives in Alpha Sig.”

“Oh him,” I said, trying to act all blasé about it. “Honestly, I have no idea what his deal is.”

Diane shrugged and got back to her artichoke. But now that the whole thing was out in the open I was
dying
to talk about it.

“So,” I said slowly as I pulled another firm leaf off and dipped it, “What makes you think he’s watching me, anyway?”

“Cause I’ve seen him do it a bunch of times. That’s why.”

I stopped dipping. This sounded promising. I mean, I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed him noticing me.

“Like when?”

“Like yesterday when we were at Café Café reading and all of a sudden I got this feeling that I was being watched and then I looked up and saw him in line getting coffee.”

It wasn’t until she said that he was watching her that I admitted the pathetic truth to myself: I had actually harbored some kind of romantic hope about this guy. Only, I wasn’t the only one he liked to stare at. Probably now that he had seen Diane in all of her tall, blonde glory he would forget about me completely.

It wasn’t that I was surprised by Mr. Fire-Eyes preferring Diane to me—most men would probably choose a voluptuous blond over an average height, average weight, average-in-every-way-brunette any day, no fault of theirs—but I was still a little bit crushed.

“See,” I said. “He was staring at you too. He must just be like that, or something. You know, creepy. Starey.”

“Get a grip, Georgia. He wasn’t looking at me. He was devouring you.”

I raised an eyebrow in disbelief, although secretly I liked that idea of being devoured across a crowded room.

Then she smiled and added, “It was pretty cool, actually. I keep hoping someone will look at me like that one day.”

I was shocked by her statement. “As if half of the male population on campus being in love with you isn’t enough already,” I said, somewhat sarcastically, somewhat enviously.

Diane shook her head. “Sure, people look,” she said, flipping her shiny hair over her shoulder. “But they look at me like they just want to bone me,” she said matter of factly. “I’m just another pretty face that they want to stick their little penises into.”

I have to admit, I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to this new insight on Diane’s part. Was she right? Did men only look at her because they wanted to have sex with her? And, could a man ever look at an attractive woman without immediately wanting sex?

I scooted back from the table and grabbed some chocolate cake out of the fridge. The way this conversation was going we needed some chocolate and quick.

I sat back down, but before I could delve further into a deep philosophical discussion regarding men and sex with Diane, she said, “Whatever. We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about your stalker rocker guy. So, really, what are you going to do about him?”

“What do you mean? What am I going to do about what exactly?” I said with a mouth full of cake. Some crumbles fell out of my mouth onto the table. I wiped them into my hand.

“You should really learn to take smaller bites, Georgia,” she said tsking with disapproval at my god-awful table manners. “Anyway, I was thinking that you should go talk to him.”

“You mean just walk up to him and say, ‘Hi. My friend says you stare at me a lot. What’s your deal? Do you want to screw, or something?’”

She rolled her eyes again. “Wow. That was touching. No, of course not. You have to be a little sneaky about it. Ya know, catch him off guard.”

I nodded sagely. “Oh, I get your drift now. I should run up behind him and yell, ‘Boo’! Okay, now that I’ve got your attention do you want to screw?”

“Sometimes,” Diane said with more than a little impatience creeping into her voice, “you are very annoying.”

“Me? Annoying?” I said, giving her my most innocent look.

But Diane was blessed with an impressively one-track mind. “I think we should go to the exotic erotic party at his co-op on Saturday night.”

“The party where people walk around wrapped in saran wrap and nothing else?”

“Uh huh,” she said.

“The party where that guy got arrested last year when the tin foil fell off?”

Diane shuddered with distaste. “Yuck. Hopefully they got a restraining order against him.”

“I’m not sure that party is exactly my speed,” I said, trying not to betray the utter fear in my heart at actually attending what I had heard was as close as you could get to an orgy without actually going to an orgy. Needless to say, my comfort level around random nearly-naked strangers was on the low side.

“Who knows. Maybe we can find out which room is his and you can surprise him in his bed!”

It was time to put a stop to the train she was on. “Don’t even think about! I’m not going to the exotic erotic and I am definitely not going to get into some guy’s bed that I don’t even know.”

She got up from the table, put her dishes in the sink, and over her shoulder she said, “Unless you want to, that is.”

She walked away and I was left staring at the half eaten piece of cake in front of me, wishing I hadn’t shoved so much of it into my mouth.

I felt sick already.

* * *

The next day at noon, Diane, Seth and I met at our usual Sunday spot, Café Café. There was a chain coffee shop across the street, but we disdained it and all of its corporate-ness. Plus, they made their mochas too thick. It was like drinking chocolate sludge. Whereas CC did it just right: A hint of chocolate, a touch of coffee bean, and a bucket of whipped cream.

(Although on Sunday nights when CC closed early, we had nowhere else to go but the big chain, so just in case you ever saw us there I’ll freely admit that we would lay down our social concerns once a week in our quest for caffeine).

“Darlings,” said Seth, “I have a toast to make.”

Diane and I looked at each other over the rim of our sunglasses, already amused by whatever it was Seth was about to dish out.

With a slight, newly affected lisp, he said, “I’ve given our dilemma some thinking, and…”

I cut him off. “What dilemma?”

“Shush!” he said, imperiously. Then lowering his voice to just above a whisper, he said, “The dilemma that involves our virginity.”

Diane and I grimaced, but nodded for him to continue.

“I think we should all make a pact right here and now that by this summer, we will have rid ourselves of the nasty little beast.”

He raised his mug high into the center of the metal café table. “Do you fine young things concur?”

 
I rolled my eyes and Diane said, “Honey, the lisp has got to go. It is so lame,” but we raised our oversized coffee cups to clink with his.

“You know guys,” I said, “and by the way I agree 100% about losing the lisp, I’m not sure about this whole pact idea. Can’t we just let things take their natural course?”

They looked scandalized. Diane spoke first. “God no! If we do that, you’ll probably hit menopause before you let anyone touch your precious little boobies.”

Reaching into her purse, she pulled out a sheet of pink notepaper and a pen, which must have set her back at least $100. Clearly ready to ignore any reservations I had, she said, “I think Seth is right. Good job,” she said, like a ruler knighting her favorite petty laborer.

“Thank you,” he said smiling at the Queen.

Taking over, she said, “First thing we need to do is make a list.”

I groaned. Diane loved to make lists. She liked making lists almost as much as she liked reading romance novels. “No, please. Not a list. How is that going to help us?”