That's Us

High School

At first, I was pretty freaked out about hanging out with Lucas alone, but I had no idea how to avoid it. With no bus, no car, no one brave enough to risk the wrath of “Skeletor the Skinhead” by offering me a ride, and both my parents at work (okay, one of my parents at work and one of my parents sleeping off a hangover), he had successfully made himself my only option. And I went along with it because, well, I didn’t know what else to do. I had never interacted with someone so angry, aggressive, or powerful before. My parents were peace-loving hippie potheads, for Christ’s sake.

Nobody ever raised their voices or hands in anger at my house. Hell, most of the time, my parents couldn’t even raise their eyelids all the way. So I tried to play it cool. That’s what you do around big, scary, unpredictable creatures that could kill you, right? You stay calm. You don’tmake any sudden movements. So I went with Lucas to Karen's house every day to keep him happy, and basically, I did everything I could think of to keep him strictly in the friend zone. And you know what? It worked.

There, at Karen’s house, without anyone else around, in the idle hours, we spent drinking and smoking and watching daytime TV after school, I

became friends with Don. When we were alone, Lucas morphed into a completely different person.

He was sweet and candid and chivalrous. He would carry my backpack and open my beers and light all my cigarettes, like a gentleman. He would catch me off guard and tickle me until I cried. And once, after I complained about what a b***h it was to break in a new pair of boots, Lucas pulled my feet into his lap, deftly removed the forty-pound steel-and-leather monstrosities I was

wearing and rubbed my feet with his big, callused hands while we talked. It was during these unusually intimate moments that I could sometimes get Lucas to open up. I learned about the stepdad he hated, the parade of abusive boyfriends who came before him, the anger he harbored toward his mother, and the secret longing he had to see his real father. To a psychologist in the making, the intensity of those conversations was intoxicating. Not only was I fascinated by the never-ending layers of armor this freckle-faced boy wore to protect himself, but I also got high on the fact that I was the only person on planet Earth who got to see what was underneath. The whole time I thought I was breaking down Lucas's walls, but in reality, he was the one chipping away at mine. Making me feel special. Giving me the illusion of safety.

Then, he pounced. On one unusually warm December afternoon, I found myself at Karen’shouse, engaged in a particularly aggressive tickle fight with Lucas. Well, it’d started as a tickle fight, but every time I wriggled away, that f*****g ghost ninja would chase and recapture me. I made it from the couch to the floor, from the floor to the other side of the coffee table, from the other side

of the coffee table to the recliner, and from the recliner to the patch of floor in front of Karen’s 2000's era wood-paneled television set. With each successive

recapture, my efforts to escape would become a little more forceful, a little more panicked. I went from tickling my way free to twisting my arm free to shoving him away and scrambling across the floor on all fours, but it only

seemed to excite him more. By the time Lucas finally had me pinned on my back in front of the TV, it was clear that what had started as a flirty, fun exhilarating little chase had quickly devolved into a full-contact game of cat and mouse. And now, the game was over. Other than my heaving chest and pounding heart, I was completely immobilized, ensnared by both Lucas's glacial stare and his impossibly strong arms, which were straining and pulsing against the taut sleeves of his T-shirt. It was at that moment that I realized just how stupid and reckless I’d been. Lucas and I weren’t friends. We were just predators and prey. He’d been hunting me for over a year, and my dumb ass just fell right into his trap. Without releasing me from his grip or gaze, Lucas slowly lowered

himself onto me, making his intention clear, and I surrendered. Adrenaline exploded through my body as I braced myself for something aggressive and

potentially bloody to happen. Leaving my body to fend for itself, my consciousness floated up to the nicotine-stained popcorn ceiling above to

watch the entire scene unfold through splayed fingers.

But rather than devouring me, Lucas placed a single, lingering kiss on my lips. The shock of his tenderness reeled my consciousness back in, like the snap of a stretched rubber band, and suddenly, I was alight with sensation —the potent scent of dryer sheets and musky cologne filling my lungs, warm lips on my lips, a hard chest on my chest, forceful arms pinning my scrawnier

ones to my sides, and the taste of watermelon gum emerging, somehow, through the tangled flavors of PBR and cigarettes. When he finally withdrew from that gentle peck, in yet another unexpected gesture, Lucas rested his forehead on mine and released a long pained breath. I felt his grip on my tiny biceps release as well. Callused hands

slid down my arms, all the way to my balled little fists, which he slid up and over my head with no resistance. His movements were so controlled and his breathing so deliberate that it was as if he were calling on every ounce of self-control he had to keep from tearing me to pieces.

Oh, yes, we were predator and prey. I was sure he could feel my pulse vibrating in the air, radiating off of me like sound waves from a bass drum, as I lay there, suspended in thrilling trepidation. Once he regained his composure, Lucas kissed me again. I didn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Instead, all my resources had been redirected to my brain, which was struggling to form a coherent thought, once Lucas’s tongue began swirling around my own in hypnotizing unhurried circles.

Once he released his grip on my wrists and gave my bottom lip one final appreciative suck, all the thoughts I couldn’t quite seem to form during our encounter came rushing into my mind at once. I didn’t know where to begin. I had only been kissed by two other boys, Calvin and Brent, in my fifteen years on the planet, and never, ever had it been like that. That was hot. That was—

Oh, f**k…what was that? Still sprawled on the ground underneath an emotionally unstable bodybuilding skinhead, two notions finally wriggled themselves free from the tangles of my mind. One: Lucas McKenzie was in love with me, and two: I was never going to escape.

Part of me loved how sparklingly special Lucas made me feel and how passionate he was about me and even, to some extent, how domineering and intimidating and exciting he was. But the other much bigger part of me was scared shitless and wanted this whole thing to just be our little secret. Even though Lucas had never hurt me, I’d seen him hurt plenty of other people, and sometimes for no reason at all. What the f**k would he do if I rejected him? I wasn’t about to end up in some Silence of the Lambs–style well under Karen’s house. No, rejecting him was out. I also couldn’t be seen romantically with him in public. Sure, I knew that Lucas wasn’t the fascist, racist monster he led people to believe, but nobody else did. What would my friends think? My BFF, Raizel, was half-korean and half-Japanese, for Christ’s sake! What a cluster f**k. This could not get out. This would not get out. My little secret lasted all of about three days. As it turned out, Lucas wanted to shout that s**t from a mountaintop. He’d walk me everywhere, kiss me good-bye before every class, sit with his arm around me at lunch, and shoot icicle daggers from his eyes at any guy who so much as turned his head in my direction. s**t, s**t, s**t. Somehow, I had become Skeletor, the pet rattlesnake’s, girlfriend.

He’d write me love letters with disturbingly graphic illustrations during almost every class and bring me random gifts, a baggie full of Goldfish, a dandelion he’d picked on the way to school, a severed head each morning. For a guy whose entire reputation had been built on the image of being unapproachable and potentially lethal, Knight was amazingly unfazed by the

attention he was drawing. He couldn’t have given less of a f**k who saw him carrying on like a damn fool, picking flowers and doodling flaming hearts all over his notebooks. I had just settled into a back-row desk in my last period class to discreetly unwrap and read yet another intricately folded piece of paper from Lucas when three words immediately jumped out from his hasty, psychotic I-have-your-daughter-now-give-me-my-money-style handwriting. He had scrawled something to the effect of:

DEAR JANE,

I CAN’T f*****g WAIT UNTIL THIS AFTERNOON. I HAVE

SOMETHING PLANNED THAT I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT

SINCE THE FIRST TIME I SAW YOU. PLEASE DON’T WORRY.

I KNOW YOU PROBABLY THINK I’M JUST GOING TO USE

YOU FOR s*x, BUT I’M NOT.

I LOVE YOU.

LUCAS

All my virginal sixteen-year-old brains could comprehend were the words worry, s*x, and love. Oh My God. I had to clutch the sides of the desk to keep it from falling out of it.

Lucas wanted to have s*x. With me. In a few hours. And, if the tiny stick-person illustrations scrawled on the back of Lucas’s note were any indication, it was going to involve props. I’d worn a skirt to school that day. I never wear skirts, but I had just gotten some brand new mid-calf, steel-toed Grinders and I needed my future husband, Don Spring, to see them in all their laced-up leathery glory. They weighed a ton and cost more, but I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I could prove to Don that I wasn’t just another Dr. Martin's￾wearing poser, he would finally realize that we were, in fact, soul mates, and

then he’d whisk me away from the clutches of Lucas McKenzie. Don was six foot three and filled out in all the right places, so on paper, at least, it seemed like it would be a fair fight. Unfortunately, my plan backfired.

In reality, Don was far less interested in bucking up to Lucas than he was in bucking under him if you know what I mean. So, rather than securing the bad boy of my dreams and my freedom from “Skeletor the Skinhead,” the only thing I managed to accomplish with those

two-hundred-dollar boots and that short plaid skirt fastened on the side with safety pins was pouring gasoline on Kenzie's already raging libido and crumbling self-control. In the few weeks up to that point, our little make-out sessions at Karens’s house had graduated into Lucas going down on me any chance he got. No s**t. I had been the star of the c*********s after-school special, and it had been pretty f*****g phenomenal. It turned out that Lucas loved eating p***y almost as much as he loved, um…well, he didn’t love anything, except for me, if you could believe the angry all-caps scribble that was ticking like a time bomb in my pocket.

And not once during that time had Lucas made me think that he expected anything in return, which was good because that was exactly what he’d been getting. Although I hadn’t even seen it yet, I was scared shitless of the one-eyed monster living inside Lucas's jeans. Every time we made out, that thing would swell so much that it would manage to escape the waistband of his impossibly tight, extend up into his fitted T-shirt, and crawl halfway up his washboard abs before all was said and done. I had zero experience with a p***s, but I was great with visual-spatial reasoning, and there was no way that d**k was going to fit in my v****a.