So I’m laying there, with just a thong on, in his bed on a Tuesday night, and we’re making out. Then he stops, and lays down on his back, pulling me into his side. “Alex?” he says to me. “We need to talk. Something doesn’t feel right.”
“What do you mean?” I say, aware that whatever it’s going to be, it’s not going to be good.
“I don’t think I’m over Jessica.”
In this moment, I know that we’re over. my month-long quasi-relationship with this boy is over, and the only thing I can think of is, did he have to tell me this when I’m not wearing any clothes?
So I pull on my high school lacrosse shorts that were given to me (and by given to me I mean taken by me) from a boy I used to hook up back in the days when we were still thinking about social studies and prom dates, not about theses and one-night stands. And I say something huffy and immature, and he says he hopes we can still be friends, or maybe we can still, like, hook up or whatever, or–and I bolt.
Walking back to my corner of campus by myself, I can’t help but think about how I’ve gotten to this point. It’s a pretty simple thing to say, a story we’ve all heard before, but somehow my life is thrown completely off track by the realization that this boy that I like is thinking about a girl that’s not me. And all the priveleges–all the education, the opportunities, the clothes, the money, the pools, the drinking, the lifestyle–none of them seem to matter in this moment.
It’s a weird culture, that we have created for ourselves here at our wealthy, exclusive little school. By day, we are all hardworking, smart, and passionate students committed to community service and promoting equality and creating “safe spaces” whatever that means. But come Wednesday night and we regress back to our true forms as self-obsessed, self-conscious, self-loathing, drunken, horny, overpriveleged west coast liberal arts kids who can’t be bothered to even learn how to spell “overpriveleged” even though their parents are dropping hundreds of thousands on their educations.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love it here. Love the people, love the sunshine, love the work. But that doesn’t mean I’m not struggling to find my place in the scheme of things, to find friends, boyfriends, random hookups, that make me feel connected and like my life is worthwhile. And as trivial as this quasi-breakup might sound amidst such a charmed life, I don’t know how to deal with it right now any other way but through writing about it.
So we’ll start from the beginning, and see if I can figure out how I got to this point. And if it sounds like your kind of ride, welcome aboard.
