“Ah, shit,” she cursed, dragging a hand down her face, looking guilty. “Sorry, first thing I said. I mean, first thing I could think of. I mean…”
“I get it, I get it,” I soothed her.
“I didn’t mean to get all… I mean, I didn’t…” She put her head in her hands and put both elbows on the table. “…yeah,” she finished.
“I have never taken a martial art class in my life. Nor piano, nor book club or chess club. Oh, and my parents aren’t expecting me to become a doctor.” I added the last part with a chuckle.
She joined in, albeit guiltily. “Yeah, sorry,” she repeated. “So wait, what do you, like… do after school?”
“Go home, do chores, then whatever. Sometimes I draw, I play video games… whatever every other high school student does after school, minus the hanging out part, apparently.”
“I bet minus the homework thing too, unless that’s another stereotype,” she replied humorously, pushing the envelope.
I was still looking at the table, but I let a smile slip. “Some stereotypes have truth to them,” I admitted.
“For someone who couldn’t, like, talk an hour ago, you’re adopting well,” Taylor observed warmly.
“Practice helps,” I admitted. “If I’m going to spend an hour with anyone I’m going to say at least some words by the end of it. This is tutoring for you, not speech therapy for me.”
Taylor thought to herself. “…Wouldn’t speech therapy mean you are going to be better at talking by the end of it?”
“…Huh. Okay, you got me.” I hadn’t noticed it yet, but I was looking at her now, albeit not in the eye. “Either way, you’re easier to talk to than I thought.”
“‘Than you thought?’ What’s that mean?” Taylor challenged me.
My gaze fell back to the table again. “No, c’mon,” Taylor coaxed. “What, am I, like, scary or something?”
I didn’t say anything for a while and could feel my mouth drying up again. After a bit, Taylor cleared my throat. “I won’t be offended. I just want to hear the truth.”
I gave a long sigh. “It’s just… it’s like we live in different worlds. I feel like the way you think and see the world is almost… alien to me. I’ve also been taught for years now that’s we’re in different leagues, and different worlds, and that if I so much as talk to – not just you, anyone popular – it would only be embarrassing or dangerous.”
Taylor laughed. “What, you think I’m gonna get a jock to beat you up or something?” she asked incredulously.
As much effort as it took, I met her eyes with mine and gave her a serious expression in answer. “Wait, like, really? That wasn’t a joke?” she asked in disbelief.
“I told you. Different worlds. And some of my beliefs are found on my own experiences.”
“Jesus fuck. Okay, look, I’m not going to get some jock to beat you up. I’m not this stuck-up little princess, and if you talked to me in class or something I wasn’t just going to see you as, like, some peasant or something. I don’t get why I have to-”
“It’s not you specifically,” I interrupted. “It’s just, that’s the world of where I belong and what I feel like others see me as.”
“So, like, because I’m popular, you’re in a different… section of people?”
“If you like.” I shrugged.
“Alright, well, if we’re being honest, I always thought the nerds saw themselves as superior to me, and were, like, laughing at how they could easily get 90s and I actually had to try. And, hey, a lot of that comes from my own experience too.”
I didn’t consider that, but I wasn’t actually surprised. A good number of the nerds I had hung out with definitely did have that smug reactionary ‘what do the jocks even know’ kind of attitude to them. It was definitely made in retaliation to a lot of bullying, but it still was a prejudice we carried too.
“Sounds like we both need to show each other that we’re not our stereotypes,” I thought out loud.
“Yeah, sounds like we do,” Taylor replied. My perception of social cues still needed, work, because I only clued into something at this point.
“Did I offend you?”
“Kinda,” she answered honestly. “It’s okay, but like… I don’t want to do this every week if you’re just assuming I’m waiting for the, like, perfect moment to hit you or something. It’s not fair.”
“I don’t think you’re going to hit me. I’m just so used to jocks – well, all popular people – being bullies and not liking people like… people like me even associating with them. And I’m sure you know you’re popular.”
“Um… I know people know me, but…”
“Don’t be modest,” I chuckled. “Tell you what, I give you my word that anything you say about your popularity, I’m not going to use it against you and I’m not going to use it to argue you’re inferior or whatever the other nerds did. I just want to hear it from your mouth.”
“Weird way of saying that,” she muttered. “Okay, yes, I’m popular. But that doesn’t mean anything. Anyone can become popular, especially in, like, high school.”
“I think it’s too late for me,” I pointed out.
“You probably also thought it was too late for you to talk to girls, and you’ve been looking into my eyes while we’ve talked for the past, like, minute.”
I tore my eyes away again and she chuckled. “Hey, I don’t mind it. As long as you don’t stare or whatever, you can look at my eyes when you talk all you want, okay?”
Teen brain, activate. When she said that, there was this invisible intimacy to her words and I could feel myself reacting again, which of course, included my erection. I ended up not responding beyond a nervous chuckle.
“So, should we get out of here?” Taylor asked after a bit.
“Um, uh, gimme a bit,” I stammered, grabbing the textbook and pretending to look over it, attempting to wish my erection away. “There’s just one thing I gotta check, and then we can go.”
“Okay,” she replied. I looked over the book for a few more seconds before she spoke up again. “Did you think I was going to be embarrassed to be seen with you?”
I looked up and didn’t answer. She took my silence as one. “Because I’m not,” she continued. “And even if you don’t believe that for my sake, you should believe it for yours.”
***
I never watched porn before senior year. I knew what naked people looked like, so seeing it for the first time wasn’t this huge shock to my system, but I thought there was this disgrace to watching it. Something inside of me had told me, “Do you want to be the type of person that watches porn?”
But something about what Taylor said to me yesterday really resonated in me. That thing about the nerds thinking they’re superior to jocks and popular kids. I always thought of it as a one-way system, but in my mind, where I’d never have to say out loud that I was wrong, I knew that in some way, she was telling the truth. There were a lot of things about me that I either did or didn’t do out of ceremony, out of this belief that if I did or didn’t do those things, that’s what kept me feeling like, at least in some way, I was better than a jock.
My door was locked, my lights off, headphones in, and several tabs open. At first I thought I could ease my way into it with some kind of online erotica instead of pictures and movies, but that went nowhere – the first story I found took over seven thousand words to even get to a vaguely sexual place, and that wasn’t promising. After a bit, I had found a website hosting videos for free, and clicked on one of them.