Girl Meets Boy Read Free Page B

pulled into a wide spot hidden in the trees. I pulled in behind her, shut off the engine, walked over, and knocked on her window.
    She rolled it down.
    “I do love you, Wanda. I can prove it.”
    Best sex I ever had.
    Course, I only had that one other time to compare to.
    It’s too late to make a long story short, but for a while, nothing could keep us apart. I picked her up for school and took her home.I stopped going to intramural sports and dropped out of the music quartet I was practicing with to compete in the state music festival. I was able to give up those things that were once staples in my life as easily as a case of chicken pox so I could spend time with Wanda. Her foster mom thought I was the best thing in the world for her; she hadn’t skipped a class since we started going together. Her caseworker and teachers were ecstatic because of her grades.
    But as any relatively sane person knows, you can only breathe rare air so long before you need it to be mixed with the toxins that everyone else breathes. Caviar is great, but so is a burger. I’m not talking about other relationships here, not other girls. I’m talking about the things any stable human needs in his life to provide balance. Friends. Activities. A night alone watching TV. Time to let your member heal. You want to remember that I was a guy who, before I turned into a sex fiend, relieved myself a couple of times in the morning, a couple of times at night and once a day on a restroom break from Pre-Calc. I thought I held records. But Wanda Wickham wore me out. Sometimes we’d get done and I’d think I needed stitches in my back. And just try saying I was too tired or that I had to get homework done or that body fluids were finite. “Okay,” she’d say. “I thought you loved me. I knew it would end. It always ends. Go ahead.” Forty-five minutes later, I’d be driving home hoping I’d crash into a paramedic truck.
    Suddenly I was on twenty-four-hour call. Wanda’s panicked voice would breathe into my cell phone with increasing frequency. Fifteen-minute intervals, ten, five, three. Where was I? Had I been in a crash? Would I please call? Would I please call?
    Then anger seeped in: What was I doing? Had I turned off my phone? Why had I turned off my phone? I was a lying son of a bitch. So it was going to end the way the others had.
    The plain and simple truth, that I was sitting in my room, grabbing some minutes for myself, wondering who I was when I wasn’t running to put out one of Wanda Wickham’s fires, was not the answer she could tolerate, and I became a liar of Shakespearean status. My car broke down in an electronically dead place. My phone was lost, and I just found it. I never turned my phone off when I thought she might call. I didn’t know why it went straight to voicemail; probably some glitch in AT&T. I thought of no other girls or women, ever. How could I?
    Truth was, I was as smitten as the day I met her.
    Before it was over, I had broken half the Commandments. No one died, but I stole my parents’ pickup in the middle of the night to take her out to the river and hear the horrors of her foster father, who she always escaped, but who became more and more menacing. I had actually never met him because he worked long hours, and was never to even mention him to her foster mother, because Wanda could not afford to lose this placement. The last three times I snuck out after midnight it was to keep her from committing suicide. Nothing I did, no random act of kindness, no random act of desperation, made a dent.
    So I went to see Rita the therapist.
    “Hi,” I said. “I’m John Smith. Thanks for seeing me.”
    Rita Crews had the same look on her face I always got the first time I said my name was John Smith.
    “No, really,” I said. “John Smith. I think you’ve probably heard my name.”
    She smiled. She was probably in her late fifties, smooth skin and shocking salt-and-pepper hair. “I’ve heard the name John Smith a