The Girl at the End of the Street

Morgan: I was the bookish sort, and I hadn’t had too much success with girls, especially the snobbish girls at our school.

You remember the type. These were the kind of girls who carried Dooney & Bourke handbags roughly equivalent in value to my battered used car, a metallic blue Ford Probe (not the most masculine car, but cute and trying hard, and I realize now that it perfectly captured the essence of its owner’s personality in a way that was purely unintentional). These were the kind of girls who allowed themselves to be plied with Shiner Bock at the legendary bonfires we had only known about through refracted shards of overheard conversations. These were the kind of girls who made out with guys in their glimmering, long BMWs or their mighty, rugged, hard charging, Ford pick-up trucks. Needless to say, I was not the sort that captured the fancy of those girls.

I was a rumpled, literary kid, and obnoxiously earnest. I had taken it upon myself to read Moby Dick in sixth grade, and had known enough to be suitably horrified at what I interpreted as its racist undertones; also, I had been clever enough to use that as a pretext to stop reading the book, which honestly bored me to pieces. My poetry had been published in an anthology that proved to be the literary equivalent of the Who’s Who series. In later years, I realized these books likely published every single submission so as to sell the enormous, hardcover tome to every fool amateur scribe thrtoerein for fifty dollars a pop. The anthology, entitled (to my great dismay) Whispers in the Wind sat on my bookshelf gathering dust while the Dooney & Bourke brigade got deflowered by the three-sport-playing, lettermen-jacket-wearing, soon-to-be-alcoholic young roustabouts of St. Augustine Academy.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when I discovered you liked me, Morgan. And I was both excited and terrified when I found out you lived at the end of my street. I had seen you around school and I kind of knew you were trouble because you had made a pass at my best friend and fellow school newspaper co-editor, Will, despite the fact that you were an eighth-grader and he was a senior. And, I knew you had noticed me playing the piano around school, and my piano playing was the one thing that set me apart from your standard issue nerd-boy. When you put it together that we lived down the street from each other, you quickly invited me over for iced tea.

The invitation shook me to the core. You were an eighth-grader of the dangerous variety—pretty, overly developed for your age: the kind of smart, good-looking misfit weirdo that gave the school clique-makers fits.

When the day of our appointment finally came, I found myself there in your formal living room, holding a glass of iced tea in my trembling hand, flanked by my trusty pal Joaquin—the nicest and most well-liked boy in school, if not necessarily the most popular. Did you know that when a kidney ailment kept him from playing football, his buoyant school spirit led him to sign himself up as the waterboy, a move that practically elevated him to the level of team mascot? Anyway, I was a little bit nervous when we went over to your house. But the whole time we were there, making idle chitchat, you tried to put me at ease, playing the role of the consummate hostess, entertaining your gentleman caller (ie, me) with Joaquin serving as a kind of chaperone, and your mother working in her home office down the hall. Their presence assured me that our little date would stay entirely innocent.

I didn’t know then that your innocence had already been shattered.

You told me all about that later.

If I could find the men that hurt you and confront them, I would. I don’t know what kind of punishment they deserve, but the things that were done to you... deserve some kind of reckoning.

I don’t think I loved you, Morgan, I really don’t. I was a little too emotionally stunted, too trapped inside myself to feel those emotions. So, no, it probably wasn’t love, and anyway there was something more wistful about it than love can yield. We lived down the street from each other and yet we were never able to find our way into each other’s arms.

Looking back on it, it’s probably the kind of near-miss romance that happens in small towns everywhere. College-bound, graduating senior and socially awkward but great-looking loose cannon of a younger girl flirt with hooking up, but don’t, in the end. Nothing really happened between us, except for a few furtive kisses stolen during a second visit (no Joaquin this time, but your mother still right down the hall). You told me you wanted to have sex; I was a virgin, you weren’t. And that’s when I realized, mutely, underneath the dense layers of my own fear and inexperience: something really terrible had happened to you. Maybe I was naïve, Morgan, but I was shocked that as an eighth grader, you had already had sex. And, incidentally, it never occurred to me to disbelieve you. So I asked you what had happened and you told me about how a guy my age had pressured you into have sex the year before. Years later I realized he was only one of many men to abuse you, going both forward and backwards in time.

I wanted to comfort you but I didn’t know how.

I had enjoyed your wet, sloppy, enthusiastic kisses, I loved holding your young and bursting body, but there was no way I could take it further, even though I wanted you with every fiber of my eighteen year old being. I’d like to think I was being a gentleman, but I was probably just scared shitless.

So we left it there.

I promised to call you the following summer.