The Numbers Game (4 page)

“I would
feel more comfortable if you wrote out your conquest list too.” Serena smiled
sincerely. She never knew when she might need some back-up blackmail material.

“We don’t
have enough time for that,” Tabitha replied, rolling her eyes. “This is about
you and your dilemma. We don’t want to be here all night.”

“Yes we
do!” Serena insisted, “It’s only fair.”

“Okay,
okay,” Tabitha grumbled, “After we have finished working on your famous twelve,
I promise I’ll run through mine.”

“Pinky
promise?” Serena asked, just in case Tabitha had crossed her fingers behind her
back.  

            You don’t
want to know how many times she had used that stupid gesture to get out of
doing things.

“Yes,
pinky promise,” sighed Tabitha, uncrossing her fingers.

Serena supposed now
was as good a time as any to tell Tabitha the truth. She reached into her duffel
bag and from the very bottom pulled out a heavy leather-bound black book.
Amazingly enough it had withstood the hands of time and fifteen years on it was
flecked with only a scratch or two and tarnished shine.

“Oh my
gosh, it’s the Hobbit book!”

“You
remember,” Serena grinned. “It’s mine, or should I say Gollum’s.”

“Whom else
would it belong to?” Tabitha rolled her eyes, “Now I really feel like I’ve
taken a step back in time.”

            Instantly
they were both back in the eighth grade. A time when Serena was better known as
Gollum, thanks her to scarily huge green eyes and the book still looked brand
new. She walked the book to Tabitha’s elongated wooden dinner table and
gingerly laid it onto the hand-woven silk tablecloth. The pages were bulging
within, thanks to all the glued in mementos inside that were begging to be
opened up.

“Have you
got the key?” Tabitha asked.

“Of course
I have the key.” Serena lifted a necklace out from under her shirt and held its
trinket up to the light.  The key looked as if it wouldn’t even open a
dollhouse.

“Then
hurry up and open it. I am dying to see what you have inside. Do you still have
the top ten list of kissers I nominated in the tenth grade?”

“Probably,
as you can see I haven’t torn anything out.”

“Then give
it to me.” Tabitha went to grab the book as if it were a rugged Yellow Pages
directory as opposed to the most precious thing in the world to her.

“Don’t you
dare!” Serena cried, in swooping it in just a nick of time. It’d barely live to
tell the tale after a minute in Tabitha’s vulture-like hands. “I want you to
sit down over there,” she said, pointing to the ridiculous log bench situated
beneath some leftover mistletoe, “I’m going to stay right here and guard my
lot.”

“How come?”
Tabitha asked, sulking like a baby. “I thought best friends got to share
everything.”

            Serena
tried hard not to laugh. You had to give the girl credit for trying.  Next
she’d be thinking she was entitled to mischief with Markie and borrowing
Serena’s underwear.

“Tabitha,
Tabitha, Tabitha…now that I’m living here I think we have to draw the line
somewhere. And I’m drawing it with this book; it is a no-go zone for you
without my permission.”

“But….” Tabitha
whined. “That’s not fair!”

            The truth
however was Tabitha had every right to be nosy. Inside the Black Book rest in
peace all of Serena’s loves; everything from men to music to fashion and pop
stars. In other words, it was a juicy piece of tattletale which documented
Serena’s last four years of high school. All one had to do was decipher the
codes.

            Serena
flipped over to page one hundred and eleven, the only number she could safely
remember even in relapse. One, one, one, how hard could it be? Staring back at
her was Dana Ashbrook of Twin Peaks. Those were the good old days, when the
whole world was dying to know who killed Laura Palmer and Dana, playing Bobby
Briggs, Laura’s deceitful boyfriend, was a potential candidate. Scribbled in
the right hand corner was a curly message:
I will still love you even if you
are the murderer
. Hmpf, highly intelligent stuff. An impostor would look at
it and laugh before moving onto the next page, a picture of the studly Corey
Haim before his drug-taking days, never thinking to pull the blue-tacked page
up.

If he or
she did lift it, they would’ve been in for a real treat. For therein, jotted in
miniscule writing, were the names and other details of all her ex-sexual
partners. My Good Time “Friends”, the file was called. She started it because right
from the word go Serena had been a paranoid cookie. “What if I get pregnant?”
had haunted her head. Her greatest fear was that she’d be shafted like some of Jerry
Springer’s guests, who had babies growing in their tummy without knowing even
the daddy’s surname. So you see, it was merely self-protection that motivated
her to start up the list.

            The only
two requirements for the list were accuracy and thoroughness. Serena had simply
needed to know whom exactly she was dealing with and where they could be
reached if a moment of ‘urgency’ arose. This information was usually easy to
come by – one dip into the guy’s back pocket almost always produced a shiny new
driver’s license, and in the later years it was doubly verified by a business
card. So really, tracking down her ex-lovers – even if some were like strangers
- wouldn’t be as hard as either Tabitha or Markie had first thought.

“All the
names I need are here,” Serena explained to Tabitha to take the edge off the exercise,
“so you can put your clipboard and pen away. On second thoughts keep them; we
might need it for later when we trash the names to bits.”

            It was
safe to say not all the boys were going to be ideal candidates for a renewed
relationship. Like partner number one, Sean, who had sneakily stolen her
virginity at fifteen. The cool captain of the lacrosse team had coaxed her into
the act by saying:
do it or else I’ll tell everyone you’re frigid
. Ooh
frigid, wasn’t that a big threat back then? Serena remembered hearing the word
for the first time in the sixth grade, as in the phrase Frigid Test.

To pass
this so-called Frigid Test all a girl needed to do was stand up and spread her
arms and legs out wide like a starfish and allow a boy to take his finger and
run it straight down the centre, from the top of her head down to…well, you
know where. If she could stand there and not burst into a fit of giggles then
she passed the test; any twitch or stifled protest meant you were out. Of
course the thought of any boy going remotely near her private parts had Serena
feeling absolutely horrified so it was safe to say Sean knew what he was
talking about when he labeled Serena frigid.

            “Maybe I
am, maybe I’m not”, she had refuted stubbornly. Still Serena hated being hit
with a label. She couldn’t and wouldn’t stand for it even if it meant sleeping
with someone she only felt half-hearted in order to prove him wrong.

            Besides it
wasn’t like the other girls weren’t starting to do it too. At least Sean
appeared to be gentle and kind and had about as much idea as Serena. Together
she and Sean swallowed the awkwardness pill and everything else that went along
with the territory to take a walk on the wild side behind the school canteen.  
The next day Sean made sure he ignored Serena that extra-special bit, after
telling everybody who cared to listen the reason why. Because Serena sure as
hell wasn’t frigid, she was a slut instead. Not to worry though; she didn’t
need anyone feeling sorry for her.  Thinking about the event didn’t have quite
the same sting as before now that Serena knew her deflowerer was gay.

Serena’s
lover history could be divided into three categories. The Teen Years, which
included two partners, Sean being one of them, the College Era which involved six
more boys and her more Mature Years, aged twenty to twenty three which
implicated only another four. Looking at the breakdown, Serena was surprised
she hadn’t squeezed in a dozen more lays. What was Markie complaining about?
She had lost her virginity at fifteen and once the numbers were spread out that
equaled to approximately one lover over the past fourteen years.  Completely
innocent!

            But let’s
not think about Markie right now. Serena was determined to stay strong, for her
resolve not to flounder. This break was just a temporary situation, something
they both needed to do before committing the rest of their lives to each other.
Or at least something Markie needed to do, a voice reminded her. But she could
respect that; she wasn’t a nagging class-A bitch. Serena was an open-minded
woman of the world.

“Why don’t
you read out the list you’ve got there?” said Tabitha, who was sprawled
facedown against the log, head tilted to the side. She looked like a squirrel
that had had a bad run in with a tree.

“Okay, I
guess there’s no reason to delay.” Serena cleared her throat and set out to
read the innocuous names one by one. In condensed list form, her notes looked
like this:

1.
     
Sean (at age 15)

2.
     
Jesse (at age 16)

3.
     
Tyson (at age 18)

4.
     
Zachary (at age 18)

5.
     
Duane (at age 18)

6.
     
Dominique (at age 19)

7.
     
Fernando (at age 19)

8.
     
Enrique (at age 19)

9.
     
Ramiro (at age 20)

10.
 
Brent (at age 21)

11.
 
Jasper (at age 22)

12.
 
Zane (at age 22)

13.
 
Markie (at age 23)

Obviously
Serena had developed a bit of an appetite for South American boys sometime during
her college stay. Yep, she was a sucker for their gorgeous olive skin and
impossibly long eyelashes which fluttered above liquid black eyes. She was
definitely ahead of her time – Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias hadn’t made
any appearances on the sexiest people list back then.

            During the
reading, Tabitha’s face went through all the expected expressions: shock,
amusement, envy and disgust. Disgust was of course reserved for Fernando who
had managed to sleep with both best friends within days. He was a definite
‘cross-straight-off-the-list, let’s pretend he never existed’ contender. 
Serena knew it was a requirement for true friends to go through that
spit-sisters, kissing-the-same-man thing at least once in their lives (and survive
it) but must it make one feel so utterly repulsive?    

“So what
do you think?” Serena asked, waiting for Tabitha’s ever growing look of
bewilderment to fade. It didn’t.

“I think
you’re in a hellhole.”

“How
come?”

“I
wouldn’t poke half that bunch with a stick. I mean I know they’re all good
looking but where are the brains?”

Excuse me?

“Since
when did you care about brains?” Tabitha’s idea of a good date was someone with
a bulging wallet and a matching bulge in his pants.

“Maybe I
don’t care but you do,” she sighed, exasperatedly, as if knowing Serena better
than Serena knew herself. “Intelligence, wit, isn’t that what turns you on?”

“Not
necessarily,” Serena smiled, “I am human, after all.” During the next three
months, it wasn’t a husband she was looking for but a sexy bed partner. Hence
her lax, revised criteria. For the first time in her life, Serena could forget
about things like personality and focus on all the superficial stuff. She
guessed it was a bit like what men did. Sure she might need to rack her memory
a bit for research purposes; she couldn’t risk jumping into the sack again with
someone totally horrible at doing the deed. She needed a candidate who was good
to go all the way.

            Okay so
maybe Serena should have already known the good ones from the bad. But if truth
were told, she didn’t have the faintest idea anymore. Her memories of those
distant past experiences were hazy, jaded and badly decomposed. It was like
trying to remember your first kiss: you could picture fragments of the visuals
in your head but there were no physical sensations to go along with it, other
than the instinctive one forming in the pit of your tummy. Butterflies flew
about if it was a good memory, sinking dread when it was bad. Surprisingly when
Serena thought about any of her twelve one-night-stands, only good feelings
emerged.

            Maybe it
was because half the time she was drunk and horny. Maybe it was also because
each lay resembled a different phase in her life. Like Sean, for example, he
represented Serena’s childish infatuation with the Brat Pack while the later
chocolate-colored Duane entered her life when she was heavily into human rights
and environmentalism. No man was a mistake because each connected with another dot
to create Serena as she was today.