Have Sex, Will Travel

(December 16, 2000)

I've been thinking about Mona lately. I haven't seen her in fifteen years. Is it possible to just look someone up after that much time and say, "Hey, remember me? I just want to tell you that you were ahead of your time, and you were right."

Mona was a high school Junior when I met her in 1985. I was a surly Freshman, pissed off pretty much all the time and not looking to make any friends. For one thing, I was thrust against my will into a new school, in a new town. I was Andie in a sea of Blaines and Bennys. And there weren't any Duckies. And Pretty in Pink hadn't come out yet so my thrift shop clothes and costume jewelry weren't hip yet. And I didn't look like Molly Ringwald.

One day in the cafeteria I was miserably pushing iceberg lettuce around a styrofoam bowl with a spork. A girl walked in. I'd seen her in the halls but didn't know her name. She was beautiful. Creamy clear skin, wavy blonde hair, large dark eyes, and a wide, full mouth. Straight white teeth. Smiling, she greeted the Sophomore girls at my table. Her cheeks were positively rosy. She was holding an ice pack to her forehead.

"What happened to your head?" someone asked The Girl.
"I hurt myself," says The Girl.
"How?"
"In the Ladies' Room, in the stall"
"In the�how�.?"
"You know that *metal box?"
"Omigosh! Only you could do something like that, Mona."

(*Footnote for men: There's a metal box to toss used tampons and pads into. Yes, it's lovely.)

And that's how I met her. I ended up being great friends with Mona--- not a space occupied by many. Being the new kid, I didn't understand why all the girls seemed to avoid her and all the guys seemed to sneer at her behind her back. To me, she was cool. Every head turned when she walked into a room. She smoked pot with her dad. We cooked dinner and invited over the French teacher and his wife. She had her license and drove a beat-up blue pick-up truck. She didn't eat meat. She called the teachers by their first names. We went to foreign films with subtitles. We went to concerts at St. John the Divine in New York. She didn't care about grades. She could strike up a conversation with anyone and keep it going. She was great at dishing, she was great at girl-talk. Though she wasn't that book-smart, she was funny, beautiful, very sweet, very friendly and outgoing. VERY outgoing. It turned out that Mona had a reputation. People started looking at me sideways, suspicious, asking me why I was hanging out with her. They said she was a slut, a whore, she was easy.

I'm sad to say it had an effect on me. I was an outcast myself, but I wasn't an outcast in THAT way, and wasn't interested in changing my lifestyle to match Mona's. One summer night I went to babysit some kid with her. She had plans that she didn't tell me about�a couple of guys came over. I'd sort of seen them around but didn't know them because they'd graduated a few years before. In retrospect, that made them college-aged, and I couldn't have been more than fifteen. They totally expected to score. I went to find the bathroom, and when I came back Mona had disappeared with one of them. I called my mom for a ride home.

Though Mona and I still hung out together, things weren't the same. In school I was embarrassed to be seen with her. The worst part was, there were days when she'd get really depressed and cry about how people treated her. On one of those occasions I asked her why she didn't just stop sleeping around? "Because it's fun," she said, sniffling. I told her there were lots of other ways to have fun. She said, "But I like to have fun that way. I'm careful�why can't I sleep with who I want to?"

What Mona wanted was not to STOP being herself, but to be ACCEPTED for it and not judged by it. I didn't get it. Now I get it. It only took fifteen years to sink in, but that girl was right. The rumor-mongers called her "easy," yet she was the one that decided who she wanted to sleep with. Yes, she's spot a guy at a party, and yes, he'd be toasting her a muffin in the morning. Her conquests were many and varied-- sports guys, rock guys, science and math guys-- but she always made the conquest. She liked sex, she liked meeting new guys. She knew how to make them hers, and she was damn good at it.

If any of us really thought about what was going on, we'd have realized, "How difficult is it for this beautiful, charming girl to get a guy into bed?" Not very difficult at all. SHE'S not the easy one. THE GUYS are the easy ones.

Well, Mona made it look easy, anyway. What a woman.