Why Can I Never Seem to Find Anyone I Google?
The thing was, he kissed Beth first. And he didn’t just kiss her, in the dark basement, but he kissed her and then after he left I started rabbiting on, in an excited thirteen year old way, about how I thought he liked me. I thought he might really like me. He’d given me some very handsome smiles. I liked him and he might like me and what if, one day, we started dating and THANK GOD I finally advanced, socially, beyond elementary school.
I confessed these things in an adolescent tumble of words while Beth and I lay on the pullout sofabed in that same basement, watching and not watching MTV. I remember we were eating boxes of some oat crunch cereal. I remember that my brain felt buzzy and my eyes felt bright. I thought about him and the way he smiled and I thought he was funny and handsome and a little bit dangerous.
Mike had dark hair that he kept long. He wore black t-shirts with the names of strange bands that I pretended to have opinions about by nodding sagely, and his jeans always had rips in the knees. He smoked. Not in the way typical teenagers smoked, all bellows and looking around to catch who we were impressing, but he really smoked. Bought packs of cigarettes and smoked them quietly and unobtrusively, the way I would later at 23 years old. He wore aviator sunglasses all the time. Those seconds when he’d take them off to rub his friendly brown eyes or to laugh were like being let into a private room. I don’t know why he wore them and he never made excuses or apologies, he just did.
He would walk in a lanky way down the street and if he ever felt stress or worry that he didn’t meet the normal teenage standards for conformity, it never showed. The people we all knew were appropriately young and in many ways Mike was already past it. I liked how he was past it. I hadn’t even got there yet and it would have been nice to date someone who was past it and try and skip it altogether. I was never sure I could make it work in the first place.
The thing about Mike, the thing that all you had to do was talk to him to understand, was that he was nice. He wasn’t nice in the way where he gave you some of his attention when he got around to it. He wasn’t nice in the way that meant that he didn’t make fun of you, or in the way that meant that he carried something heavy for you, although he’d do that. He was nice in a way that was utterly and completely genuine. When we talked and laughed he heard what I said. If he disagreed then he disagreed, instead of looking at me pityingly or witheringly. He seemed so much older than I was but I never got the impression that he looked down on how obviously naive I was. He never looked down on me.
I would call Mike and ask him if he wanted to walk to the bus stop with me. We lived in the same apartment complex, although in different buildings. He usually said that he did and I would watch him slope down the parking lot to the back of my building and walk up the stairs. I’d meet him out front and he’d carry my book bag and smoke while we walked to the stop about three blocks away. He always lent me an air of sophistication that I didn’t deserve and hadn’t earned. He was nice that way.
He’d wait with me in rain or shine and we’d talk about people or tell jokes. Mike had his own parental issues and I think that he believed that I shouldn’t have to make the emotionally draining trip to my father’s house alone. I think he knew about draining parents. I know that I hated his father.
I remember one day we stood huddled tight together under my golf umbrella during one of those shocking Maryland storms that sweep in. We laughed and our legs got soaking wet while we waited the half an hour for the bus to arrive as the sheets of water slammed into the top of the rainbow umbrella and we had to yell to hear one another.
I remember when the bus came and he insisted that I keep my umbrella for the other end of the journey and stepped out into the waterfall of water and was immediately drenched. He took off his sunglasses and danced a small, shuffley dance. I remember laughing. I remember liking him. I remember liking him a lot.
He kissed Beth, my best friend, in the dark basement while I headed upstairs to grab my coat. He kissed her and then I talked about him that night on and on and on with not really enough breath behind my words. It’s like that when you like someone that much but don’t want to say it all, in case you let on how totally vulnerable you are. It’s not until you’re older that you start shouting it out because you learn that everybody can tell anyway.
She stood it as long as she could, and then told me. My heart crashed to the floor and suddenly I could breathe again, although I didn’t want to. I was angry with her for not cutting me off right away. For letting me ramble on like an idiot with a chance, when she knew that I wasn’t the one he was interested in. When she was the one he’d tried his kiss on. I yelled at her, but it didn’t have any force behind it because I was yelling at me; yelling at me for being that pathetic; yelling at me for getting my hopes up and being so stupid and young and misinterpreting. I never seemed to know about these things. You can read books and watch movies and the real thing is never like a book or a movie and the first times you deal with it you fuck up a thousand ways to Sunday. At 13 I was already tired of all the fucking up I’d done.
I never told Mike I knew. Beth may have told him, but I don’t think she was as interested in his kind brown eyes as I was and as far as I knew it never went past one stolen kiss that I wasn’t supposed to know about.
Later that summer, months later, we spent the day together as we occasionally did. I remember the hot, tight feeling around my face that day and looking at him and smirking and looking and smirking and refusing to say anything; my first day ever successfully flirting. Being cute and coy and distant and letting him do the figuring out what I was up to. He was charmed, and he was laughing, and he leaned in to kiss me, and he did. I remember one kiss and I remember that my eyes hurt very badly and that I said something cruel. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember how his face fell. I remember him cussing quietly and getting up and lighting a cigarette and leaving without looking back. I remember watching him walk away and knowing that in that moment he felt exactly the way I did when Beth told me he’d kissed her.
I’m not sure why I chose revenge over happiness. I’m not sure why I ruined something that might have been as nice as Mike was. I can tell you that being the backup girl is something that stayed with me for years upon years - through college and into my 22nd year, when I finally figured out that I was allowed to be the first choice. I never knew that, you know. I never knew that I could be anyone’s first choice. Until I got out there and found out that sometimes the girl gets to choose, and sometimes the boy has to wait to be chosen.
We became friends again, but it took almost a year. I think I tried to apologize but I doubt it was enough. He never belonged to me and I never belonged to him and I was always certain that he’d gone on to girls that were older; girls that had that hint of womanhood around the corner instead of an Easy Bake Oven still in the back of their eyes.
Mike is one of those people I think about sometimes. Not because he was a lover, because he never was, but because he was a friend. He always was a friend. He stood with me at the bus stop when those trips were hard to take and he made me laugh.
Beth and I stayed best friends and she’s now onto her second, and much better, marriage. She’s still happy and pretty and good the way she always was. I still love her the way I did then.
Mike and I never called or talked after my mom and I moved a half an hour away to another town. I’m sure he’d have gotten his driver’s license shortly after we moved, but by then the damage was done. We’d just be friends, and passing friends instead of long-term friends.
I feel sure he went on to college. I feel sure that he fell in love with some sweet little blue-haired girl with a little turned-up nose with really great taste in clothes and with just as much kindness as he had. I am certain somehow that he has a little boy or little girl, and maybe is even a daddy blogger about his family. I’d love to know, just because he was so kind and I hope that good things happened to him. Mike’s only ever transgression against me was kissing my best friend first. That turned out to be all that I could take, but for years of friendship, that’s such a minor transgression. If it was one at all. Which, of course, except in my mind it wasn’t.
But I can never find pictures or stories about the people I used to know. Google, which seems to yield up acres of information for the other people, is generally gravestone silent when it comes to my past. Sometimes I think that I knew too many people with names that are all too common and sometimes I think it’s perfectly symbolic of just how vital and effective my teen years were. They were years I’m willing to lose entirely and see through a milk-white haze, except for some of the people who live in them, bright and clear as the ember of a cigarette and a perfectly frozen laugh.
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Jeff: I need breasts with brains. I don’t mean individual brains, obviously… I mean, not a brain each. You know, I like intelligent women, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere… I think breast brains would be over-egging the woman pudding. - 
