Kerry Cohen: Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

Liz comes running to find me right after. Some guys are stealing boxes out of the kitchen. She says she and Chris are getting everyone out; the party needs to end. Soon the only people left are Chris, Liz, and me. Even Iggy has gone home, hearing a rumor of cops on their way. I didn’t see Brian leave.

I look around the apartment. Beer cans and bottles are strewn around the floor and countertops, on top of the stereo and TV. A few have toppled, leaking beer into the carpet. I see two cigarette burns in the couch. I walk down the hallway to my room to find it ransacked, as is Tyler’s. Cigarette butts and cans are on every conceivable surface. The corner of Tyler’s Siouxsie and the Banshees poster is ripped. Apparently someone threw around her collection of fantasy books and figurines, and now they lay scattered about the room. I’m relieved to find none of them damaged. As Liz and I step through the mess, though, we find a used condom near Tyler’s bed. In the living room, one of the speakers has a long rip down the middle. Tiles are littered and broken on the terrace. The pile of new appliances is all but gone. And, when I look in my dad’s drawer, the drugs are gone and there’s no gun. I wish so much that I could remember if there was one in there before. We move through the rooms, filling trash bags and hauling them out to the garbage chute. Nobody says much. We work with calm diligence, sharp counterpoint to the panic inside. Liz vacuums and I wipe the countertops with Lysol, but the apartment still smells like someone poured beer over everything.

Tyler comes home first, after staying at a friend’s for the night.

“Nobody better have touched my stuff,” she tells me. She’s wearing black, as usual. Big, loose clothes that hide her body.

“No one wanted to go into your stupid room,” I say. I don’t dare tell her about the condom.

When she comes out later, she says, “You owe me a poster.”

My dad arrives home soon after, and I’m in a lot of trouble. He’s facing two $3,000 lawsuits, one from the building because someone thought it would be fun to throw tiles off the deck, ripping the pool cover, and another from a person whose parked car was hit by tiles as well. Dad says nothing to me about the possibly missing gun or the drugs, but I’m sure he’s pretty fumed about that as well. He decides to move me to another private school and forbid me from seeing Liz. Liz and I say a tearful good-bye on the phone. We sob about how unfair life is, and how when we can, when all of this is in the past, we’ll find each other again. After I hang up, I lie back on my bed and look out the window, from which I can see the Manhattan skyline. My life is about to change yet again. I close my eyes, seeing how this feels, and I realize I don’t really mind. Change doesn’t scare me. I know about change. I may even like it. I’ll have a fresh start with new classmates and friends. Particularly, I’ll meet new boys. Boys who might see me as something more than just a friend. I definitely don’t want to see Brian or Iggy again. I exposed myself. This is my chance to renew who I am, try again to be the self-controlled, mysterious girl, the one who lives by the rules. It’s my first of many attempts to start from scratch in this way, to try again and again to swallow my desperation, claw my way up from under it.

Gym is the most embarrassing of high school classes. We have to change in the locker room in front of one another, everything revealed—heavy breasts, thick hips, and unshaved legs. This is especially bad for the new girl. I am sharply aware of the moles on my arms, the way my leg fat spreads if I sit to pull on jeans. The other girls, already in cliques, chatter away, every once in a while stealing glances my way. I push the dirty gym clothes into the locker and duck out, avoiding eyes. It is in this vulnerable state, making my way back toward the other buildings, that Amy stops me.

“Did you just start here?” she asks. She looks at me with sharp brown eyes. She is bigger than me, both in stature and in height, and I feel vaguely intimidated. I recognize her from campus. She’s a grade ahead of me.

I nod.

“Why?” she asks.

“Why?” I’m confused.

“Why are you coming here for tenth grade?” She keeps her gaze steady. “Did you just move?”

“I got in trouble,” I tell her. “My dad made me switch schools.”

Amy’s eyes open wide, intrigued. “What did you do?”

I shrug. “I had a party and people stole stuff.” Amy smiles slightly and seeing her amusement, I keep going, embellishing. “And there were boys. I did some things my dad didn’t like.”

Now Amy’s smile fills her face. “I know what that’s like,” she says. I smile too.

From then on, Amy and I spend most of our time together. On weekends we take cabs into Manhattan and search for bars that won’t badger us for our fake IDs. Our aim is simple: We’re looking for boys. Most nights, Dad sleeps at his new girlfriend’s, leaving Amy and me free to do what we want. Amy calls her mother, telling her she’ll be sleeping over. I can tell from Amy’s brief silence that her mother begins to protest, but Amy always cuts her off.

“I’ll be fine, Sheila,” she says, annoyed, and she rolls her eyes at me. I shake my head, feigning understanding, but the truth is I am amazed by the way she talks to her mother. She even calls her by her first name! I would never have the guts.

Nights that Dad is home, he watches me carefully as I emerge with Amy from the hallway, both of us wearing miniskirts and too much makeup. He knows he shouldn’t trust us. But I can tell he also kind of likes it, even after that whole lawsuit thing last year. He likes that I try to be pretty, that I’m even becoming pretty as I get older, and he likes that I want to party. It reminds him of who he used to be when he was a teen, when he was popular and carefree, not a divorced dad raising two girls by himself. He has stories, like the one from when he was seventeen and working at Jan’s Ice Cream Parlor with his friend Les. Whenever thirteen-or fourteen-year-old girls visited, they told the girls to sit tight while they prepared a special treat: two scoops of vanilla ice cream, a carefully carved banana, whipped cream, and chocolate sprinkles for pubic hair.

“Here you go,” my young father said. “Virgin’s Delight, made especially for you.”

The girls erupted into giggles. They held their spoons this way and that, trying to work at the ice cream. My father and Les winked at them. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like it? Is it too big for you?”

They giggled some more.

I can tell by the way he talks that he misses those days. Tyler is another story. Tyler stays in her room with the door closed. I think it bothers Dad that he doesn’t understand her the way he does me. She’s too much like Mom, with her interest in art and all things alternative. She even looks like her, dark-haired and small. I avoid looking at her door as I pass, not wanting to think about the way she isolates herself all the time. It’s her choice, I tell myself. She could be going out and having fun if she wanted to. No one’s making her sit around with her fantasy figurines, waiting for Mom to call.

“Where are you going?” Dad asks when I head for the front door. His cigarette sits in an ashtray on the coffee table, swirling smoke into the air.

“To the city,” I say. “I told you.”

“I want you home by midnight.”

“Dad.” I cross my arms. “Nothing even happens until ten.”

Dad takes a deep breath, considering this. “How about one?”

I scowl.

“Two?”

“Fine.” I glance over at Amy, roll my eyes. And we leave.

“I wish my dad were like that,” Amy says once we’re in the elevator. I think of her dad, who owns a chicken-packing company. He leaves every day at four in the morning, so usually when I’m at Amy’s house he’s asleep. When he’s awake, he’s grouchy and distant. He calls Amy “Lame-y” as a joke, but I can tell Amy doesn’t think it’s funny. In many ways I do feel lucky my dad is my dad. He’s friendly and funny—really funny, not mean funny—and he smokes pot in the apartment. My friends have always liked him, and I can tell he takes pride in being the cool dad.