Why Girls Are Weird

24 JUNE

So that's how all of this mess got started. I wrote a story about sex kitten Barbies, put it online, and my life changed forever. From the best I can tell, this entry got passed around from co-worker to co-worker, friend to friend. Those strangers and friends of strangers kept coming back to see what I'd write next. What I thought would be a tiny little webpage that just a few people knew about turned into one that thousands of people read every day. I thought the web was supposed to be dead. Wasn't that what everyone had been saying? “The death of the Internet!” That was why I couldn't get a better job than my library admin thing. It was why I was so bored and started all of this. I was trying to find a time killer at work and decided to teach myself a little HTML. I soon realized that the more I was typing, the more it looked like I was working. Anyone passing by my workstation would think I was hard at work improving myself, but in reality I was writing story after story, creating an entire life on the Internet. Slutty Barbies (and the fact that e-mail will never be dead) took me from Anna Koval, a nothing-special-twenty-something, to Anna K: web celebrity.

I don't know what I thought would happen. In hindsight, I don't know how I thought nothing would come of it.

But I'm ending the story of Anna K—right here, right now. I'm closing down this website. I want to explain everything before I take it all away. Some people have been with me from the beginning, and I'd feel bad leaving after a year without so much as a good-bye.

It's been a year of strange choices and often embarrassing decisions on my part. I've made new relationships and lost others. Some people involved with all of this were more innocent than others. Those who weren't know who they are. There are others that will be shocked by what I have to say here. There are some who probably knew what I was doing all along. My only defense is that I never meant to hurt anybody. Looking back now, I know I was searching for something. I exposed myself until there was almost nothing left of me to hide. And now I'm removing the final bits of fabric, standing in front of you completely naked. It'll be our last time together like this, and I don't want to keep anything from you anymore.

It all started the night I watched my best friend, Dale, bathing. He had hurt his hand moving his new couch into his apartment and for the first time in a while he was asking me for help.

“You're very cute,” I said as I stood over his bathtub.

He lowered himself and floated a washcloth over his crotch: “Just hurry up and then get the hell out of here.” He tried to hide his rubber duck behind him, but I had already seen it.

Dale and I met at our first crappy jobs here in Austin right out of college. We waited tables at this restaurant over a Whole Foods store. Three good things about that job: an in-house masseuse, drinking smoothies between rushes, and meeting each other. Every other facet of that place sucked ass.

Dale's my friend who knows the joke I'm about to say because he was about to say it at that exact moment. Like this one time we were both in my car stopped at a red light and a girl wearing a miniskirt and enormous shoes ate shit right in front of us. We both busted up at the sight of those white platforms smacking up and hitting her in the ass as she made this face like she was on
The Benny Hill Show
. She fell to the ground and flipped back upright in almost one swift motion, her hands pulling the bottom of her skirt down as her purse knocked at her knees. But it was the moment when she walked back to stare down the crack in the street that caused her fall—when she had to go back just to show all of us that it was the pavement's fault and not those gigantic shoes—that we completely lost it. It's that laugh that's deep in your stomach where you're sure you'll never breathe again, and nobody else in the entire world but the two of you know why what just happened is the funniest thing that will ever happen in the history of funny moments ever. That's Dale and me.

“I still don't know why Jason can't do this for you.” I wet my hands in the water, careful not to brush against his skin. “This is why we have boyfriends to begin with, Dale.”

“He can't come over until at least tomorrow and I'm tired of feeling so dirty. I can't clean my hair with just one hand and I hate feeling like I'm wearing a wig.”

I grabbed the shampoo bottle and squeezed the liquid into my palm. “A wig?”

“I have very thick hair. Now close your eyes and wash.”

“You're not the boss of me,” I mumbled. I didn't close my eyes. I watched Dale lean his head back into my hands. As I lathered up his head, I couldn't stop staring at his body in the water. It wasn't sexual. In fact, I was fascinated by how nonsexual it was.

“And why am I the one that gets to come over here and bathe you?” I asked.

Dale opened his eyes and moved his head from my hands. A stream of lather ran down his forehead, threatening to run into his left eye. “You aren't
bathing
me. You're just washing my hair. And you're the only one Jason trusts not to try anything funny.” He ran his hand over his forehead and leaned back again, waiting.

I wiped my chin, tasting shampoo on my lower lip. I sat back to dry my mouth. “‘Try anything funny?' When did you join the cartoon mafia? What if I pounced on you right now? I could do that.”

“You wouldn't,” Dale said, inching back toward my hands as I leaned over the tub again. “We both know it'd be gross, and even Jason knows you haven't touched a man since Ian moved out.”

There wasn't much left to say after that. I knew Dale regretted the words. I could feel him trying to think of a way to lighten the air between us and get us joking again. When something that honest is said it usually needs a few minutes of silence to dissipate.

I was rinsing his hair when he finally whispered, “I'm sorry.”

“It's okay, Dale. I know.”

Ian and I had broken up six months ago. I tried to act like it wasn't a sore subject with me, but all of my friends knew that it was.

Dale changed the subject by talking about his screenplay. He'd been working on a film based on his ninth-grade science project. To this day he felt the contest was rigged and he should have taken first place. His movie will expose the inadequacies of state science fair judges and finally vindicate his second-place ribbon. It's going to be brilliant.

Dale was washing his underarms as he explained the love story between the girl who did her project on earthworm regeneration and the boy who determined the best metal for conducting sound.

“She's going to cheat on her project and he won't know if he can still love her.”

Watching Dale in the water, I saw just how much a bathtub could emasculate a man. His body looked smaller than usual, even though it filled the tub. The water made everything look suspended. The washcloth had floated to the foot of the tub, bunched and soggy like a discarded bandage. Dale's body seemed younger and weak. I saw how his dick seemed completely powerless. It bobbed inside the water quietly. Wet like that, it didn't look like a “dick.” It was a “penis” in that safe, Health class way. It was almost feminine in there, in the shadows of the bathtub. The water lapped around Dale's shoulders as he soaked, now silent in his thoughts of the lunchroom battle particulars, his wet head making him appear even more innocuous. He was a wet child in a basin. It was hard to see someone I thought of as a “capital M” Man reduced to a bobbing waterbaby. I was just about to look away when Dale popped his eyes open.

“All right, Pervy. I need some ‘me' time, okay?”

I went to the living room and watched a rerun of
Friends.

Except for the bath, this was the usual Thursday night at Dale's: “Must See” TV followed by beers on his balcony. But that week the shows were reruns and his hand was hurting, so we decided it'd be bathing and beers. I watched him enter the room still in his bathrobe. He brought out a bowl of popcorn and almost stepped on his cat. Almost, as he and his cat have an elaborate song and dance. Dale and Trevor move completely in step, and although it looked like one of them should trip over the other, they never did. They danced perfect figure eights around the living room, both of them talking but never to each other. I hate that Dale named his cat after a member of O-Town. Dale hates that I won't bleach my hair again.

“You know if you tell anyone about this bath, I'll kill you.” His hair was almost completely dry already. It was so much shorter than he kept it when we first met two years ago. Now he hated it when it grew past his eyebrows. When it was longer, I loved how it would flop in his face when he laughed because he'd look just like Paul McCartney. It only happened when he laughed and it only happened when he had his brown hair in that bowl cut, but it was one of my favorite things in the world.

“Hey, for my birthday will you write me a story?” he asked.

I threw myself down on the couch, a cloud of new-couch smell greeting my face. The fabric felt stiff under my arms, and the cushions weren't welcoming yet. “I'm too depressed to write,” I said. This was the elaborate song and dance that Dale and I do. I pout while Dale primps me.

“Where is this big book about falling in love with India?” he asked.

“You never listen when I speak. It's about an Indian woman falling in love with a newscaster.”

“It sounds wonderfully retarded.”

“That's why I'm naming it after you.”

“I like it when we're seven,” Dale beamed.

“Me too. Being a grown-up is way dull.”

“It's dorky.”

“Crappy.”

Dale hid his face in his hands and whispered, “Shitty!”

“I'm so telling!”

Dale giggled and then pretended to be quite serious. “Write me a story,” he demanded with a stamp of his foot. “And I need some body gel. And an R.E.M. CD. Wait. Let me get some paper. I'll make you a list.”

I went home and wrote the Barbie entry.