Pathetic: Part Three
How do I explain what happened next? It doesn’t even feel real.
I thought about breaking up with him. I swear I did. I told Tara and Macy I was going to and they were so proud.
But then I didn’t. Because I’d never felt for anybody the way I felt about him. And I thought about how he came up to me in art class and told me I was pretty and asked me to go for a drive and how it was just like a movie, and how he walked over the train tracks with me and held my hand and told me not to be scared. “It’s safe. I do this all the time. Besides, you think I’d let you fall?” And I thought of how he’d wanted to take me to the movies on Valentines day, but then it snowed a lot and so we stayed at his dad’s apartment and watched TV and I helped him set up a MySpace account. I thought of how he’d let me pick the music when I lost my virginity to him and I put on Christina Aguilara “CandyMan.” I don’t know why I picked that song, but it’s the one I lost my virginity to, in a crawlspace, and he didn’t notice when the spiderweb fell and hit me in the face. I wanted to ask him to stop, so I could make sure there wasn’t a spider on me, but he was so into it. I just thought and thought of how good it all could be. If only I could be better. It was my fault. I was annoying. I talked too much. I was stupid. I was boring.
After I started thinking of breaking up with him, that’s when I did like he asked, and I started dressing more like his gothic friend Jackie. I had a big long battle with my grandmother and then she caved and drove me to Hot Topic. The closest mall was over an hour away. She sighed a lot and waited on a bench outside, while I stocked up on black pants and band t-shirts. I casually listened to all of the bands that I bought merch of. I casually listened to HIM, My Chemical Romance, and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. They were the bands I liked a couple songs here and there, but didn’t listen to consistently. My favorites at this time of my life were Nelly Furtado, Lindsay Lohan, the Black-Eyed Peas, Avril Lavigne, Ciara, Missy Elliot, and No Doubt. I decided I would start listening to these bands I only sort-of liked a LOT more. I would become the alternative chick he wanted. Jackie was objectively prettier. It couldn’t be argued. I mean, scrutinize her face and mine with some face-measuring artistic perfect ratio bullshit and you’d have to agree Jackie was prettier. But she was also way too skinny. She had no tits or ass. Okay, I have no tits either. But I’m pretty certain I’ve got a good ass. It’s the only compliment (and sometimes backhanded ones) I’ve consistently gotten from men. I decided I could do alternative better than her. I could be hotter than her. I could make Joe forget about her.
Very soon after I started coming to school in tight black pants and grungy black band t-shirts (is it not ridiculous how much in high school depends on image and what you wear? My God, I feel stupid typing this out) he decided I should come over to Jackie’s house with him.
I don’t remember why I chose this strategy, but I went into this actually trying to be nice. I really did. Not fake nice. Not nice with an agenda. My only real agenda was to make Joe happy.
She and Joe talked. She didn’t talk to me.
Her bedroom walls were covered in magazine clippings and collages. It reminded me a lot of my bedroom in New Jersey, with my green walls and tye-dye comforter (leftover from my hippie phase on 5th grade of course). It reminded me of the collage I’d covered my entire wall with in 8th grade, while I played No Doubt’s ‘Return of Saturn’ on loop and cried a lot, but wasn’t really sure why I was crying. I felt sad and had nothing tangible to pin my sadness on. So I found pictures that made me happy and distracted myself with a collage and two girls from middle school drew on it and I never felt the same about it after.
Look, it’s weird, but I liked collages as a kid. I made tons of smaller ones in 5th and 6th grade. That wall was like my fucking omnibus after years of smaller collages (portions of it even came from those smaller collages). So I liked her walls. Even if she didn’t fully commit and cover the entire wall. They were still neat.
While she and Joe talked, I walked around and looked at her pictures. One of the emo bands I was starting to get really into, HIM, she had TONS of clippings of. After I decided I needed cooler taste in music, their Razorblade Romance album really caught me. Wicked Game is the best song by far on that album. Poison Girl is a close second, followed closely by Sweet 666.
Okay, required supplementary material to accompany this post
But see, in my 18 year old head, this song was a soundtrack to a Harry Potter fanfiction that I wrote in my head. I used to make up a lot of HP fanfiction in my head. We won’t explore that cringe further at this juncture (and no, I didn’t know the song was a cover).
Anyhow, I was starting to get really into HIM and I wanted to connect with this girl Jackie and she had HIM pictures all over her walls.
I happily burst into their conversation. “HIM!” I squealed pointing at her walls. “I love their Razorblade Romance album!”
She gave Joe a look and smirked at me.
Silence fell and I became uncomfortable. I looked around at her walls. I spotted another band I liked. “Oh! Evanescence. Whisper is my absolute favorite song of theirs. Don’t you love the weird chanting at the end?”
She just kind of smirked and said. “I don’t really like HIM anymore.”
“Oh….what about Evanescence?”
“I outgrew them,” she laughed. “These are old pictures. Only little kids take time to decorate their rooms. I haven’t put any new pictures up in like years.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say to her.
She got up from her bed, a round bed-I’d never seen a bed shaped like a circle before, and she opened up her nightstand. She took a CD out of it. She walked over and placed it in my hand. It was the latest HIM album, one I didn’t have. It was still in the plastic from the store. “You can have that,” she said in a mean little voice. The kind of voice where a girl is hiding behind the facade of niceness. “My mom bought me that but doesn’t know I don’t listen to baby music anymore.”
I stared down at the HIM CD and felt about 5 years old. I knew that if Joe wasn’t part of this, I could have stood up to her. I could have held my own. But with him…
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
And I put the CD into my purse.
Because I was pathetic.
