The People You Have to Blow Up
It’s summer and I have spent the last three months very drunk and hungry. Every morning I wake up with a light hangover (like a lightly tossed salad), stretch my legs and run on the elliptical. I like running. All the rumors I had heard about it being good for your mental health are true. When I run, I get to turn my brain off and escape my constant state of low-grade anxiety.
I walk home from the gym and my legs and arms turn dark from the sun. People have been commenting on how tan I look and I’ve been saying, “Thank you. I just had a pre-cancerous mole chopped off at the dermatologist last week. Maybe that’s helped?”
It feels disgusting to admit this but I love being tan and thin. Yes, I’m a monster but listen, I was raised in Southern California and read Us Weekly cover to cover so I never stood a chance at loving my flaws—which is a shame because there’s so many of them. A scar on my right calve; a scar above my right knee; a skin graft on my left upper thigh, a long bumpy scar on my left forearm.
“Scars are sexy,” said one boy who wanted to fuck me.
“Scars are scary,” said everybody else.
I’m not going to explain to you how I got those scars. Just know that they’re 70% of the reason why I’ve decided to spend my summer so drunk and hungry.
There’s one day in the summer when I feel riper than usual. The sun coats my brain like a vanilla ice cream cone that’s been dipped in chocolate. It is decided that I am going to go to a party at a museum in downtown Los Angeles to celebrate some artist’s exhibition. When I go to the party, I gulp down warm wine and look at the embarrassing art. It’s one of those swishy modern artists who copies and pastes a tweet on a blank canvas and then sells it for ten grand. I guess I shouldn’t be embarrassed for him, though. I should be proud. To do so little and get so much…well, it’s impressive and American!
I get drunk quickly. Everybody here is put together like a New Yorker and for a second I am homesick for good taste. LA has a lot of magic and wonder but the fashion is an American Horror Story.
Through a sea of “Fuck you” haircuts, I see the boy who took my virginity. Actually, “took” isn’t an appropriate word—I gave that shit away on clearance. “HALF OFF!” I screamed from all freeway exits. Finally someone thought to listen. Finally someone saw me at 17 and was like, “Okay. I’ll throw that guy a bone/boner.”
I lost it on my stomach. But before that, I was sitting naked on top of a ratty mattress, waiting for him to finish looking at a scrapbook my sister had left behind of Leonardo DiCaprio.
“Excuse me,” I groaned impatiently. “Are you seriously getting distracted by Leo when there is someone in front of you who’s ACTUALLY READY TO FUCK?”
After putting down the book begrudgingly, he came over to the mattress and fucked the virginity out of me. It was…fine. It was how first times usually go. A smack here, an “ow!” there. When it was done, I immediately felt closer to him. Of course I did. At seventeen, I could feel close to a fucking bank teller.
We dated for a few months after that and then decided it’d be best if we were just friends. Well, he decided. I just smiled and hated myself enough to say yes.
Unfortunately, the friendship went far past its expiration date and when I finally got the self-respect to end it, it was catastrophic. I blew him up with an Uzi and destroyed all the witnesses. Sometimes you have to kill something so thoroughly that there’s no hope of ever reclaiming it. So that’s exactly what I did.
Looking at him today feels like an assault on my brain, like some bully broke into my emotions and fucked around with the fine china. He glances up at me and my first thought is “Well, at least you look tan and thin…” It’s a grotesque thing to think, I know, and it’s also idiotic. How I look now doesn’t make any difference. I could resemble the mom in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or Nicole Richie and he’d still just see me as this person who had to go away. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying that he knows how much I cared.
He walks over to me slowly and says hello. I say hello back. It’s on an LOL level of weirdness. After a pregnant pause, he gets a phone call and runs away. Like, forever. He leaves the party. At one point, his friend even asks, “Uh, where’d he go?”
I don’t know. He probably had a valid reason to leave. But a part of me hopes that he saw me and ran away screaming. He had to blow me up just like I did with him. Because if that were true, it means I’m more than nothing to him.
I never want to be nothing to anybody but to the first penis I ever had in my asshole, I’d always like to be a somebody.
Ryan is a writer for MTV’s Awkward and also wrote a book called I’m Special, which will be out in June. He likes watching YouTube videos of Mary-Kate Olsen trying to speak.
Image by Alice Regina LaVille
