The inside of Scott Harvin’s junky green Chevy always reeks of incense. It makes my head hurt sometimes, so I’ve developed a habit of carrying a bottle of ibuprofen in my backpack, right next to a container of cover-up for my hickeys.
It’s still somewhat dark at 6:15 on the morning of Monday, March 9th. The student parking lot in the back of the school is an ice rink, and the snow is still falling heavily outside. The musty heater in the Chevy and that nauseating smell of incense seem to smother me as Scott’s hands make their way over my body. We never go too far—he is Mormon, after all—just far enough. I find it amusing that he takes off his CTR ring off and put it on the dashboard while we’re going at it, much like a husband removing his wedding ring as he cheats on his wife. It’s one of Scott’s many idiosyncrasies that makes me intensely curious, make me want to inspect his character under a miscroscope.
For six weeks Scott Harvin has been missing early-morning seminary to hook up with me in the backseat of his Chevy on the farthest edge of the student parking lot each Monday. I am pondering the fact that though we have done this six times, it feels as utterly ridiculous and confusing as the first, when Scott hands me my jeans and gives me a toothy grin.
“You done good this time, Skeletor.”
“Don’t call me that…and, thanks, I guess.” I begin to pull my jeans on over my twig-thin thighs. “Sheesh, you performing religious rituals in here or something?”
“Huh?”
“Do you not smell the incense?”
“It’s to cover up the smell of Harris’s weed…he uses this car sometimes.”
Six weeks ago, my jaw would have dropped. But I’ve learned many things about Scott Harvin that no longer surprise me. The guy I once thought was a quintessential Mormon geek, son of a local bishop, taking three AP classes and playing in jazz band was actually surprisingly like the non-LDS boys at our school: simple-minded and morally ambiguous. Unlike the Mormons I knew, who didn’t get their first kisses until 16, Scott was infinitely knowledgeable and surprisingly physically skilled. The fact that his older brother Harris—who had just been accepted early to Brigham Young University—was a stoner somehow fit, strangely.
Yet Scott was a puzzle in himself. Though his family was notoriously wealthy, his faded and loose-fitting Old Navy tees and jalopy of a car would suggest otherwise. Usually reserved yet humorous in demeanor, he released his inhibitions like the flip of a lightswitch each time we met up in his car, in a way so quick and simple that I was envious of him.
I feel awkward talking about personal matters with Scott, so I clumsily drop the subject. “Here’s your sweatshirt.” I pick up his grey Old Navy jacket and, for a split second, feel the strange urge to hold it up to my nose and smell it, to see if it smells less like incense and weed and more like him. Instead, I hand it to him and then ask the question that’s been on my mind for the past six weeks.
“If I’m so skinny, why do you….” I trail off and dig around in my backpack for a compact mirror to inspect my neck with.
“You’re good, babe. Simple as that. Just eat a little, you deserve it after these workouts.”
I can’t help but laugh. I give him a lingering kiss on the lips—he reaches up and cups my face with his now sweaty hands, getting into it, but I pull away and smile. I read once in a cat-care manual that if you take a toy away from a cat before she gets bored with it, leaving her wanting more, she’ll be more likely to want it the next time. I figure it’s the same concept.
All one-hundred-and-one pounds of me make their way cautiously over the ice. Scott will, as agreed, wait five minutes and then do the same. I suppose that the fact that we hook up in the parking lot itself, where at any moment a teacher could come by and tap on the window or a student could observe me leaving his car, makes all of the other precautions we take futile; on the other hand, I think the risk of being discovered makes it more fun for Scott.
And why do I do it?
It’s a question not unfamiliar for me to ponder as I trek to the school each Monday. Why do I suffocate on that incense and freeze my bony butt off in the parking lot and let him have his way with me and endure his taunts about my body? Why does it not bother me more that he can be muttering “you’re so incredibly sexy” as I kiss his neck, yet when we’re through, I’m suddenly too thin to be attractive?
Yesterday in English Scott had audibly proclaimed, “Hey Marcia, you’re so white and thin, I could snort you off of this desk—” whereas a week before, we had been making out in that green Chevy. He had proposed our little arrangement; I let him call the shots.
I came to an answer more real than the justifications I’d come up with in the past—he’s an interesting person I like spending time with; he’d probably help me out with my chem homework when finals roll around; physical pleasure is healthy. But I was kidding myself.
I must be a masochist.
*
*
*
A surprise in one person will make you look for, or even assume the presence of, surprises in others. Trust is something which we all start out with a certain amount of, an amount which is eroded each time we learn of something that surprises us. Scott Harvin’s double life with me in the back of his car each Monday morning made me suspicious—an amused yet slightly nervous sort of suspicious—of the image of everything and everyone. I began to look at my teachers and wonder if they gambled on the weekends; look at my family and wonder if my parents’ marriage wasn’t as happy as it seems; look at my friends and wonder if they’re harboring cocaine usage or bulimia or closet homosexuality or some combination of the above. It was almost exhausting, really. The heated interior of his car, the condensation on the windows, my bra flung over the front seat, the sweat on his forehead—these were all a dose of reality for me. I began to want to ask Scott question after question: Do you think you’ll stay Mormon all your life? Do you think about what we do when you’re in church? Do you enjoy getting good grades or are they just so your parents trust you enough to let you have your own car, so you can do things like this?
But as the weeks went on, the questions shifted from him to me. I began to consider inquiring things such as, What exactly did you see in me? What made you so bold as to ask me directly if I’d be up to this? Why do YOU think I do this? Do you think of me often when we’re not doing this? Are there others like me? What do you think of me as a person? What am I to you, other than friends with benefits? Am I a cool person? Do you lose or gain respect for me when I do this?
Scott’s hand slides over my skin. It’s warm and welcome. The snow falls heavily outside the car and I imagine that it could fall so quickly that it would build up like a fort around the car and not let us out. Then, once we were finished and discovered we were snowed in, Scott would pull some cookies and a thermos of hot chocolate from the glove compartment and we’d snuggle under one of the big fleece blankets in the trunk, talking all throughout the school day, wondering occasionally what we were missing in class, but not enough to try the door and see if we were free. The idea is ridiculous, yes, but it strikes a chord somewhere within me and resonates; it consumes me.
“You okay?” Scott pauses, and it takes me a second to register that he’s talking to me. I’ve begun to realize that the Scott on top of me and the Scott inside my head are two different people, both fighting for my attention. I want to interrogate each of them separately and figure out which is more real.
“Huh?”
“You seem distracted.” He leans back and looks at me, then out the window at the snow.
“I am, sort of. I mean, I’m not. I mean, keep going.”
“Marcia…you can tell me if you want to stop at any point.”
“What? God, no. I guess….I mean, I want to keep going, my mind is just not in the right place, you know?” I stuff the image of our snow day back further into my brain, tuck it into a filing cabinet of imagined scenes for later. I’ll pull it out again sometime later, like at night before I fall asleep; I’ll mull it over, imagine it different ways.
Scott puts his hand on my knee consolingly. “It’s okay. I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I’m sort of sleepy and out of it as well.” He pulls on his T-shirt, a gray crewneck with a small hole on one of the sleeves. I want to tell him I’m good with sewing, that I can fix it; but I think for a second that I’d miss that hole once it was all sewed up.
I don’t say anything, and he looks at me quizzically. He always puts on music when we start getting dressed, so we don’t have to bother with a lot of conversation to fill the silence. I like the music he plays; it’s indie-folk sounding, foreign to me and my iTunes library of auto-tuned pop and generic rock. I don’t want to ask too much about his music, though it wouldn’t be too difficult to just say, “What band is this?” or “I think I’ve heard this song before; what is it?” Instead I remember a couple lines in my head and write them down in my notebook once I get into the school; then I Google the lyrics and listen to the song.
Today, a distant male voice is singing, “Control yourself; take only what you need from it.” It makes me wonder what it is I need.
“Marcia…you know we’re just friends, right?”
“What? God, yeah, I know. I would never, like….well okay, that sounds mean, but I mean I’d never think of you as more than just this.” I laugh a little more loudly than necessary.
“Exactly. You’re great and all, but we don’t want to let feelings get in the way.”
“I know, I was thinking the same thing.”
This was truthful on my part. I had thought before about the possibility of beginning to like Scott, to actually like him, but it never seemed to make sense in my head. He was great, yes, but we had little in common, and he was out of my league anyway—wasn’t that what all the secrecy was for?
“Memories fade, like looking through a fogged mirror. Decisions too, decisions are made and not bought. But I thought this wouldn’t hurt a lot; I guess not.”
A thought strikes me and I realize it is profound in some way before I realize what it is I’m thinking. Those moments of realized significance don’t happen often. I wonder if this moment will still be real, vivid, tangible, years from now. I wonder how much I’ll remember of this, how much this will define my time in high school or my youth in general. I wonder if it’ll shape me as a person for a long time or fade into the background, a fogged mirror like that distant male voice had crooned, or the fogged windows of a car on a snowy day.
It’s still somewhat dark at 6:15 on the morning of Monday, March 9th. The student parking lot in the back of the school is an ice rink, and the snow is still falling heavily outside. The musty heater in the Chevy and that nauseating smell of incense seem to smother me as Scott’s hands make their way over my body. We never go too far—he is Mormon, after all—just far enough. I find it amusing that he takes off his CTR ring off and put it on the dashboard while we’re going at it, much like a husband removing his wedding ring as he cheats on his wife. It’s one of Scott’s many idiosyncrasies that makes me intensely curious, make me want to inspect his character under a miscroscope.
For six weeks Scott Harvin has been missing early-morning seminary to hook up with me in the backseat of his Chevy on the farthest edge of the student parking lot each Monday. I am pondering the fact that though we have done this six times, it feels as utterly ridiculous and confusing as the first, when Scott hands me my jeans and gives me a toothy grin.
“You done good this time, Skeletor.”
“Don’t call me that…and, thanks, I guess.” I begin to pull my jeans on over my twig-thin thighs. “Sheesh, you performing religious rituals in here or something?”
“Huh?”
“Do you not smell the incense?”
“It’s to cover up the smell of Harris’s weed…he uses this car sometimes.”
Six weeks ago, my jaw would have dropped. But I’ve learned many things about Scott Harvin that no longer surprise me. The guy I once thought was a quintessential Mormon geek, son of a local bishop, taking three AP classes and playing in jazz band was actually surprisingly like the non-LDS boys at our school: simple-minded and morally ambiguous. Unlike the Mormons I knew, who didn’t get their first kisses until 16, Scott was infinitely knowledgeable and surprisingly physically skilled. The fact that his older brother Harris—who had just been accepted early to Brigham Young University—was a stoner somehow fit, strangely.
Yet Scott was a puzzle in himself. Though his family was notoriously wealthy, his faded and loose-fitting Old Navy tees and jalopy of a car would suggest otherwise. Usually reserved yet humorous in demeanor, he released his inhibitions like the flip of a lightswitch each time we met up in his car, in a way so quick and simple that I was envious of him.
I feel awkward talking about personal matters with Scott, so I clumsily drop the subject. “Here’s your sweatshirt.” I pick up his grey Old Navy jacket and, for a split second, feel the strange urge to hold it up to my nose and smell it, to see if it smells less like incense and weed and more like him. Instead, I hand it to him and then ask the question that’s been on my mind for the past six weeks.
“If I’m so skinny, why do you….” I trail off and dig around in my backpack for a compact mirror to inspect my neck with.
“You’re good, babe. Simple as that. Just eat a little, you deserve it after these workouts.”
I can’t help but laugh. I give him a lingering kiss on the lips—he reaches up and cups my face with his now sweaty hands, getting into it, but I pull away and smile. I read once in a cat-care manual that if you take a toy away from a cat before she gets bored with it, leaving her wanting more, she’ll be more likely to want it the next time. I figure it’s the same concept.
All one-hundred-and-one pounds of me make their way cautiously over the ice. Scott will, as agreed, wait five minutes and then do the same. I suppose that the fact that we hook up in the parking lot itself, where at any moment a teacher could come by and tap on the window or a student could observe me leaving his car, makes all of the other precautions we take futile; on the other hand, I think the risk of being discovered makes it more fun for Scott.
And why do I do it?
It’s a question not unfamiliar for me to ponder as I trek to the school each Monday. Why do I suffocate on that incense and freeze my bony butt off in the parking lot and let him have his way with me and endure his taunts about my body? Why does it not bother me more that he can be muttering “you’re so incredibly sexy” as I kiss his neck, yet when we’re through, I’m suddenly too thin to be attractive?
Yesterday in English Scott had audibly proclaimed, “Hey Marcia, you’re so white and thin, I could snort you off of this desk—” whereas a week before, we had been making out in that green Chevy. He had proposed our little arrangement; I let him call the shots.
I came to an answer more real than the justifications I’d come up with in the past—he’s an interesting person I like spending time with; he’d probably help me out with my chem homework when finals roll around; physical pleasure is healthy. But I was kidding myself.
I must be a masochist.
*
*
*
A surprise in one person will make you look for, or even assume the presence of, surprises in others. Trust is something which we all start out with a certain amount of, an amount which is eroded each time we learn of something that surprises us. Scott Harvin’s double life with me in the back of his car each Monday morning made me suspicious—an amused yet slightly nervous sort of suspicious—of the image of everything and everyone. I began to look at my teachers and wonder if they gambled on the weekends; look at my family and wonder if my parents’ marriage wasn’t as happy as it seems; look at my friends and wonder if they’re harboring cocaine usage or bulimia or closet homosexuality or some combination of the above. It was almost exhausting, really. The heated interior of his car, the condensation on the windows, my bra flung over the front seat, the sweat on his forehead—these were all a dose of reality for me. I began to want to ask Scott question after question: Do you think you’ll stay Mormon all your life? Do you think about what we do when you’re in church? Do you enjoy getting good grades or are they just so your parents trust you enough to let you have your own car, so you can do things like this?
But as the weeks went on, the questions shifted from him to me. I began to consider inquiring things such as, What exactly did you see in me? What made you so bold as to ask me directly if I’d be up to this? Why do YOU think I do this? Do you think of me often when we’re not doing this? Are there others like me? What do you think of me as a person? What am I to you, other than friends with benefits? Am I a cool person? Do you lose or gain respect for me when I do this?
Scott’s hand slides over my skin. It’s warm and welcome. The snow falls heavily outside the car and I imagine that it could fall so quickly that it would build up like a fort around the car and not let us out. Then, once we were finished and discovered we were snowed in, Scott would pull some cookies and a thermos of hot chocolate from the glove compartment and we’d snuggle under one of the big fleece blankets in the trunk, talking all throughout the school day, wondering occasionally what we were missing in class, but not enough to try the door and see if we were free. The idea is ridiculous, yes, but it strikes a chord somewhere within me and resonates; it consumes me.
“You okay?” Scott pauses, and it takes me a second to register that he’s talking to me. I’ve begun to realize that the Scott on top of me and the Scott inside my head are two different people, both fighting for my attention. I want to interrogate each of them separately and figure out which is more real.
“Huh?”
“You seem distracted.” He leans back and looks at me, then out the window at the snow.
“I am, sort of. I mean, I’m not. I mean, keep going.”
“Marcia…you can tell me if you want to stop at any point.”
“What? God, no. I guess….I mean, I want to keep going, my mind is just not in the right place, you know?” I stuff the image of our snow day back further into my brain, tuck it into a filing cabinet of imagined scenes for later. I’ll pull it out again sometime later, like at night before I fall asleep; I’ll mull it over, imagine it different ways.
Scott puts his hand on my knee consolingly. “It’s okay. I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I’m sort of sleepy and out of it as well.” He pulls on his T-shirt, a gray crewneck with a small hole on one of the sleeves. I want to tell him I’m good with sewing, that I can fix it; but I think for a second that I’d miss that hole once it was all sewed up.
I don’t say anything, and he looks at me quizzically. He always puts on music when we start getting dressed, so we don’t have to bother with a lot of conversation to fill the silence. I like the music he plays; it’s indie-folk sounding, foreign to me and my iTunes library of auto-tuned pop and generic rock. I don’t want to ask too much about his music, though it wouldn’t be too difficult to just say, “What band is this?” or “I think I’ve heard this song before; what is it?” Instead I remember a couple lines in my head and write them down in my notebook once I get into the school; then I Google the lyrics and listen to the song.
Today, a distant male voice is singing, “Control yourself; take only what you need from it.” It makes me wonder what it is I need.
“Marcia…you know we’re just friends, right?”
“What? God, yeah, I know. I would never, like….well okay, that sounds mean, but I mean I’d never think of you as more than just this.” I laugh a little more loudly than necessary.
“Exactly. You’re great and all, but we don’t want to let feelings get in the way.”
“I know, I was thinking the same thing.”
This was truthful on my part. I had thought before about the possibility of beginning to like Scott, to actually like him, but it never seemed to make sense in my head. He was great, yes, but we had little in common, and he was out of my league anyway—wasn’t that what all the secrecy was for?
“Memories fade, like looking through a fogged mirror. Decisions too, decisions are made and not bought. But I thought this wouldn’t hurt a lot; I guess not.”
A thought strikes me and I realize it is profound in some way before I realize what it is I’m thinking. Those moments of realized significance don’t happen often. I wonder if this moment will still be real, vivid, tangible, years from now. I wonder how much I’ll remember of this, how much this will define my time in high school or my youth in general. I wonder if it’ll shape me as a person for a long time or fade into the background, a fogged mirror like that distant male voice had crooned, or the fogged windows of a car on a snowy day.
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