Lisa and Kaylyn sort of threw Stacey at him, like ground chuck at a lion, and when the matchmaking worked out, the two of them immediately took to treating her like they’d all been best friends for years. Almost overnight, she stopped hanging out with her best childhood friend, Tina Ross, while Lisa captured the bulk of her attention—probably more so than the guy she was actually dating. Lisa had this odd habit where she tied small strings around her left wrist. Remarkably, she could do it using only the fingers of her right hand, and as the strings gathered in a braided clump, Stacey found herself fixated. Then her eyes would flow up the length of her arm. They found her athlete’s build—muscled shoulders and strong arms, very little curve to her hips, and a taut, round butt, difficult to not obsess over. They found the geometric tip of her nose, brown eyes like saucers of coffee, and thick, plum-colored lips. The tilt of her eyes gave her a perpetually mischievous quality. It was a face that knew how to razz people, fuck with them, knock them off-balance before they even realized they’d been standing. She could hold a person’s gaze well beyond what most people found comfortable, like she believed the longer she held your eye, the more she’d have access to your mind and memories. Beyond that, she was a fire starter. Smart and sassy with a graphic, volcanic mouth, and the first person Stacey ever met who was just unapologetically herself.
At a sleepover with Kaylyn, Lisa gave them a description of her forthcoming autobiography.
“Obviously, much of it hasn’t been written yet. It’ll have great lovers and adventures and all that, but the entire first chapter is just going to be about how I discovered masturbating. How I basically didn’t sleep from ages twelve to fifteen because I was staying up till three a.m. every night rubbing myself out.”
“Twelve?” Stacey clucked. “I barely knew what my vagina did when I was twelve.”
“I’m glad it happened that way.” Lisa lay on her side with her head propped in her hand, deadpan expression, like a bored queen trying to decide whom to execute for the laughs. “A couple years ago, my mom told Alex how he’ll grow hair on his palms if he touches himself. If she’d told me that I would have been checking my hands every day. My room was a pedophile’s idea of a good website.”
“What will you do when your kids read about your rub-out parties?” Kaylyn asked.
Lisa rolled her eyes. “Wouldn’t expect a conformist New Canaanite for life to understand. I’m not having kids. I’m traveling the world and having Italian lovers and stuff. If I do have a kid, I’ll raise her as a single mom, give her a weird name, and fuck her up real good by dragging her around the globe.”
Stacey asked what the child’s name would be, and Lisa looked at her like she was an idiot. “My kid? Darkheart McStabababy. Duh. Darkheart McStabababy Han. DH for short.” Stacey clutched a pillow, laughing in that way that scrapes the inside of your breastbone.
That night Lisa also schooled her on condoms. When Stacey mentioned Ben wasn’t using anything, and she wasn’t making him, Lisa slapped her forehead and then pulled her cheeks down exposing the gross intake of her eye sockets. “Staaaaaaacey. No, no, no, no.”
“He takes it out,” she explained. It was the first time she’d felt truly naive around them.
“No, no, no. Common misconception. You can still get pregnant even if he just gets a splash in you. Even if it’s just the pre-cum.”
“The what?”
“Body’s natural lube.” Lisa sat up, clenching a fist. “See, this is Ben’s beautiful, gigantic dick making you want to have unprotected sex. During this part, before he comes, there’s some lubricant that comes seeping out, which is nature’s way of greasing the pole.” Kaylyn was cracking up, but blinding horror had descended upon Stacey, convinced she was already pregnant. They’d just had sex at the Brew the night before, her sixth time total, a count she would keep with obsessive specificity. “So because evolution is so clever, it’s like, ‘Hey, why not make this lube have some little hot Ben Harrington babies in it too? Then give those babies gigantic staffs, and let’s keep the ball rolling.’ Get what I’m saying?”
She did not. She still thought evolution was a conspiracy theory, but the next week Lisa gave her a ride home after volleyball practice and tossed a box of Trojans at her. “From now on, wrap it up, Miracle.” And that’s what Lisa called her from then on, “Miracle.” Because Ben never got her pregnant.
Good girl that she was, Stacey truly could not recall why she let Ben deflower her. Somehow she justified and compartmentalized it, and then put on an abstinence play for her parents, youth group, and church while sneaking off to sleep with her boyfriend on the reg. Not that you really need an explanation. That’s just being a teenager. Were He to exist, God would still have no power over the hormones, the longing, the urges that carpet-bomb you at that age. What could be said about her first time except that it hurt like hell, and she was mortified that she got blood on Ben’s sheets and further embarrassed that she hadn’t thought of that? They made the decision quickly, his parents and sisters still out for ice cream after his basketball game, thinking Ben and Stacey had gone to the dance. Stacey likened losing her virginity to getting her hand slammed in a car door: abrupt, shocking, painful beyond your ability to anticipate while causing no real lasting trauma (most of the time). Like they tell you, though, with practice it gets better, and before you know it, it’s pretty much all you want to do. Then your young life becomes a fretful logistical equation of spatial and temporal factors to determine when you might next find the opportunity. It helped that Ben was more or less the perfect boyfriend for a sexually inexperienced nascent lesbian unaware or in denial of her own dyke-ish desires: easygoing and considerate in a way that many teenage boys cannot summon. Like so many men, he had an uneasy relationship with his father and therefore an uneasy relationship with himself. He was a fantastic musician, spectacular on the guitar, which he could complement with a soulful voice that now reminded her of Amos Lee or Josh Ritter. His father, Doug Harrington, was this old-school chauvinist who measured his own child’s worth in feats of athletic performance and his ease or unease at wielding power saws or hunting rifles. Doug saw Stacey as the distraction that kept Ben from achieving on the court, but it was the other way around. For two years Stacey didn’t do much besides hang out with his son.
It was hard for her to say what they spent so much time talking about, but she liked to remember it inaccurately, to recall the two of them pondering philosophy and literature while he plucked at guitar strings. Maybe he wasn’t the love of her youth, but Ben Harrington had what her mom called a “great big heart.” Even though she knew her relationship with him was part of her own inability to understand herself, and every sexual encounter had a claustrophobic quality—watching a frightening, beautiful alien planet from within a small glass box—she didn’t regret a moment. They broke up when he went to college, but at that point her mind was already elsewhere. She saw him only once after he graduated but kept a close watch on his music career. He even put her in a song. Pretty, sad girl / on her way to somewheres better / pretty, sad girl / she’ll take you the next planet over if you let her. A reference to what he said the first time they had sex stoned, which admittedly, really blows your hair back if you’re not used to it. “I think I just woke up on a different planet,” Ben said, and Stacey laughed and played with his beautiful sweaty blond hair.