Kissing Just For Practice (Part I)

Shelly Hudson used to be my best friend. I don’t really know when ­­it ended exactly. It started some time during the summer before kindergarten. The details are kind of hazy, but I remember that we met playing Super Mario Bros. at some neighborhood birthday party. I was Mario, she was Luigi. I don’t recall any specific bonding moment or witty dialogue or shared interest that set a spark, but something must’ve happened that day, because we were pretty inseparable for the next few years.

Our Friday sleepovers – once a treat to be plotted, begged for, and arranged –became such a staple that our parents eventually established alternating driving and location schedules. It was typical teenage sleepover fare - crafting friendship bracelets of every neon fabric and cheap metal that was fashionable, eating too much junk food, developing and admitting first crushes (Special Agent Fox Mulder, both of us). As we got older, our parents - forced into an arranged friendship due to ours - would plan double dates, leaving us to giggle in the basement with rented videos while they drank in some strip mall Italian restaurant.

It became common knowledge amongst peers and their parents in our elementary school that if you invited Shelly, you had to invite me, and vice versa.

We started drifting apart somewhere around the start of junior high. If you had asked me at the start of seventh grade who my best friend was, I would’ve said Shelly, without hesitation. By the middle of the year, I probably would’ve still said Shelly, but I may have paused, the answer having been met far too often with the perplexed scrunch of whatever face I was trying to impress at the time.

‘The girl with the glasses?’

‘The girl with the glasses’ was one of the kinder identification traits people used for Shelly. She had these thick pink frames with pointy ends, the kind that are sought after in hip second hand shops when you’re older, but a sure sign of hopeless loneliness in the fifth grade. Most people thought she’d had a clueless mother with poor fashion sense, but Shelly had picked them out herself. I was there. I tried to talk her out of them.

‘The girl with the red hair’ probably topped the list, but that one felt like it came from polite guilt, as it didn’t really narrow anything down and wasn’t even her most noticeable trait. It was a politician’s answer. Plus, her hair was more of an auburn, sometimes strawberry blonde if she spent enough of the summer outside.

‘The girl with the weird dresses’ wasn’t too bad. ‘The girl with the weird mom’ isn’t exactly what you want to be known for, but at least it was relatable and not really her fault or lack. It could get pretty cruel after that - things about weight and teeth and poverty.

Eventually all of those descriptions were rendered obsolete by an incident in the ninth grade that ensured most everyone – even kids from other schools – knew her name. If someone had to ask who Shelly Hudson was, there was only one answer. ‘The Hot Dog Girl’. She became an urban legend so large that it defined every facet of her social being.

By that point I had long stopped identifying her as my best friend. If you had asked me after Spring Break of seventh grade, I would’ve probably said Nicole Kish or Amy Andrews or Lindsay Mendenhall.

At first, I made it a point to hang out with Shelly every now and again. We’d go to the movies or have a sleepover, like old times, but by then we were just going through the motions. It felt like some awkward act of charity or penance that no one wanted or needed. I wasn’t hanging out with her because I wanted to. I was doing it because I didn’t want her to hate me for not wanting to hang out with her anymore. Each get together was planned with the hope that it might alleviate the guilt I felt, or serve as some sort of proof that I wasn’t a bad person. It didn’t take long to realize that it had the opposite effect. By the start of eighth grade, our relationship had withered down to the occasional nod as we passed each other in the hallway between classes.

I’ve tried every angle I can think of to explain this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a vain, selfish bitch, but I don’t think there is one, so I’ll just spit it out as plain as I can: I’m really pretty. Believe me when I tell you that I don’t believe this in the slightest. On the contrary, I lose sleep over the belief that I’m not. When I look in the mirror, I see the zits and scars and sickly pale twig legs of some weird girl that no one wants. I see the bones sticking out. And if they’re not sticking out, I’m losing my mind over the fat that pads them. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I know most boys want me. My breasts grew right around the time that boners started swelling, and though I’ve always felt the same, I’ve been a different person ever since.

People assume that everyone thinking you’re really pretty is some grand solution or easy path, but it isn’t. I’m not trying to sound ungrateful. I know that I’m really lucky, and most people would kill to have my problems. It’s not like I don’t use it to my advantage whenever I need to. But it’s not as rosy as it sounds.

The world can seem like a pretty lonely place when you can never fully trust that anyone likes you for who you are. I try to ignore it, but deep down I know that regardless of what I say or do, my date will still tell me how pretty and smart and funny I am. That sounds nice, and it can be at times, but in the long run it just makes you feel paranoid and worthless.

Being pretty and popular also means that a lot of people expect you to be the cure for all of the world’s ills. You’re the one who’s going to ditch the jock at the big dance for the sweet geek who professed his love. You’re the avatar that gives boys not only purpose and true love, but confirmation that the world isn’t superficial. You’re the muse, and you’re supposed to do the right thing in the end, or reward someone else for doing it. And if you don’t, you’re the problem. You’re the proof that the world is vapid and cruel. It’s somehow your fault or your lack if you don’t live up to the hope and morality of a John Hughes movie.

Anyway, Shelly and I first started to drift apart once boys noticed me. Our junior high was the pooling of the town’s three elementary schools, a combination that caused a seismic shift in the social hierarchy. Jocks became stoners, the quiet kids spoke up, popular kids suddenly had to vie for a throne they’d effortlessly occupied simply by being. Somewhere in that shuffle, I went from quirky and forgettable to hot and the subject of bathroom graffiti.

I tried to take her along at first. But it was obvious early on that neither one of us were enjoying ourselves. Whenever I brought her around, I could never live in the moment. My every word and action was part of a mission to simultaneously make Shelly feel welcome, while nudging my new friends to accept her as a part of the gang. At the time, I was unaware of the futility of either wide-eyed hope. I was trying to play God in a world where I lacked thunderbolts.

Shelly didn’t seem to enjoy it, either. At first, I thought it was a matter of intimidation - she probably just felt jealous, or inadequate, or frightened that she didn’t belong. But looking back, I think more than anything she was just confused and disgusted at the idea that I was drifting away from her for something so empty.

‘I gave Rob Phillips a blowjob last night.’ It was our last sleepover. I had always envisioned sharing details of my first sex act with her. We’d be sitting Indian style on her bed in pajamas, and there would be an initial discomfort and disgust that was mostly for appearances. She would yell something like ‘Ew! Karen!’ and scold me and smack my shoulder, but the act would quickly give way to the giddy curiosity at her core. She’d grab my wrist and scoot closer to me and ask for details.

She did say ‘Ew! Karen!’. The discomfort and disgust was real, though, and there wasn’t any giddy curiosity. I think she actually might’ve scooted an inch or so away from me.

‘What? We’ve both wanted to do it.’

‘Not with Rob Phillips.’ She drew his name out with dramatized disdain. ‘You hate him. You said, and I quote, that you’d rather have sex with one of The Lone Gunmen, because at least they weren’t apes who blasted Limp Bizkit in their dad’s Honda while-‘

‘I know. But he’s actually pretty sweet. I think maybe we were just judging-‘

‘We were judging him because he’s an Aryan zombie jock.’

‘I know he comes across that way, but he’s really not that bad. He-‘

‘He what? Told you that you were pretty? Smart? Funny? Different from the other girls?’

‘Shelly, trust me, I was as surprised as you are. I didn’t plan it. We just-‘

‘You’ve already turned into one of them.’ It sounded like she wanted to say it with a disdainful anger, but it came out in more of a choppy whimper. It still shook the room. She stopped looking me in the eye, her focus shifting to picking lint from her rainbow socks with the individual toes. ‘Rob Phillips is an asshole. He’s boring, and he’s dumb, and you blew him because he’s good looking and you’re good looking and it would make you more popular. ’

It was silent for a minute before I erupted. They were real tears, not some dramatic act meant to elicit a specific response. But I did kind of assume that she would hug me. When she didn’t, I tried my best to stifle the sobbing jags, grabbing a pillow and blanket before slinking off to the couch. I fell asleep trying to think of a good response. Never came up with one.

It’s not like that was The End or anything. But everything after did kind of feel like an epilogue. We hung out a few times, and every now and again we managed to fall back into the way it was, but even the best times had the pall of a Sunday school night hanging over it – for the most part, it was in the rearview.

We were running on fumes. I had stopped watching X-Files and she had started smoking clove cigarettes. I became a football cheerleader and she got into The Grateful Dead. She went to Renaissance Fairs with trailer park girls and I went to keg parties with basketball players. Towards the end, we probably looked more like two strangers forced to do a school project together than close friends.

Our junior high held a Spring Formal dance for ninth graders about to graduate. Students nominated a Sun Court of ten guys and ten girls, with two being voted Sun King and Queen. The general consensus was that it would come down to me or Heather Gray, the deaf girl who was president of the Drama Club. I know people never mean it when they say things like this, but I had sincerely hoped it was Heather, to the point of voting for her. If I had won, I’d once again be the bitch and everything that’s wrong with the world, proof that it’s all some shallow rigged game.

Anyway, at some point that night - maybe when Heather was crowned, or during my nine straight beer pong wins with Sun King Chad Albers as my partner, or while I lost my virginity to him on Keith Connor’s little brother’s Toy Story bed sheets - Shelly was at home masturbating with a hot dog when it broke off inside of her. I don’t really know all of the details, but I guess she panicked and told her mother, who took her to the emergency room. Somehow, word got out, and that was it for Shelly. She transferred to a private school the next year, but it followed her there, too.

We didn’t talk for a long time after that.