Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Read Free Page A

Rock-n-Cock in Playgirl. No, it wasn’t even the capital P for Penis that made me so uneasy about sex and my first love.
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    Forever…
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    Katherine and Michael believed in the first-and-only vows of everlasting love. When the newspaper survey asked a question about how the relationship would end, Katherine was deeply offended by the query. B. would have been, too.
    He told me many times that I was his female equal, and he was wrong. B. was far more popular than I was, and I took some comfort in my elevated status by association. He was good-natured and charismatic. He was as adept at being the sensitive guy who listened to girls’ troubles as he was at engaging in grossed-out guy humor. I was moody, quick to judge, and used sarcasm to shield typical teenage insecurities. His body was amazing, with the carved-
in-stone musculature of a natural athlete, and he had no shortage of girls who would have been more than happy to do anything for him in and out of bed. As for me, if any other guys in high school thought I was hot, I certainly never knew about it. These disparities might have been why we weren’t considered for Class Couple in our high school yearbook. I wouldn’t have even voted for us.
    But I guess we were well matched in the sense that we were considered the male and female Most Likely to Succeed. We were both ambitious straight-
A students, three-sport varsity athletes who rounded out our college applications with a long list of extracurriculars. Maybe this was enough for B. He was so convinced that I was The One that he repeatedly reminded me in furtive late-night phone confessions and in tightly folded notes he left for me in the pocket of his varsity jacket—the one that he said I didn’t wear often enough. But usually he’d gasp promises in my ear during frenzied sessions of making out (and more): We’re meant to be together forever. Less often—but often enough—he told me if I ever broke up with him, he would kill himself. The vein in his forehead bulged, and my bicep turned white in his grip.
    Before asking Michael to drop his pants so that she could examine Ralph-the-Penis, Katherine confessed, “I want to see everything…I want to know you inside out.” The truth is, I didn’t want to know B. inside out. In a way, the less I knew, the better. This emotional detachment was indistinguishable from my physical detachment when we were intimate, an odd not-really-there feeling that I needed in order to cope with this intense relationship for which I was not at all prepared yet couldn’t bring myself to get out of. Unlike Katherine, I thought about how our relationship would end all the time. And it never went well.
    So what makes Forever still relevant for me isn’t the genius nymphomaniac, the famously personified penis, or any other dirty detail. It’s what the novel says about love—especially first love—and how it dies.
    Katherine bravely ended her first relationship because she wanted to experience physical and emotional passion with someone else. She was no doubt emboldened by the knowledge that someone else was already waiting for her in the form of Theo, the hunky tennis instructor she met during her summer away from Michael. “I thought of pretending,” Katherine said after she reunited with her boyfriend and realized she wanted out. “I’m no good at pretending. And anyway, pretending isn’t fair.” I knew that, too. And yet the good girl in me pretended.
    After six months with B., I pretended that I wasn’t curious to kiss the cocky actor I met at a summer arts camp. After a year, I pretended that I wasn’t intoxicated by the class lothario, a poet/addict who went out of his way to flirt with me in front of B. After two years, I pretended that I wasn’t completely taken by a shy, smart sophomore who once dated B’s younger sister. For nearly three years, I pretended that I saw