Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,1

like I have an itch I can’t scratch.

Boys would call it being horny. Girls would call it the same thing, I think, but not out loud.

It’s not something I’d put on a job application or anything, but I don’t want to lie: I’m good at getting myself off. When I got my first period—this was back when my parents were still together—my mom told my dad we were going out, just us girls, and she took me for pizza. And at the pizza parlor, she didn’t just show me how to use a maxi pad—she also let me have some of her red wine and drew a picture on her napkin of the vagina and told me that I was a woman now and she really wanted me to understand the clitoris, so she circled that part and she even wrote it there in pen. C-L-I-T-O-R-I-S. She told me, “Susan, the men in your life sure aren’t going to care about it, so you’d better,” and I hadn’t realized it but I guess it was an early sign that she and Dad were done. Then she just left it on the table at Vito and Ray’s, a vagina napkin. Which, as first periods go, was slightly less embarrassing than bleeding through my pants.

When we got home, she gave me a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves, and “clitoris” was right there in the index. So was “masturbation.” Not step-by-step instructions, but enough to clarify that those feelings in my fulcrum—feelings I’d felt before, riding a bike or sliding down the banister of my grandma’s house in Wisconsin—could lead to something good. So I read between the lines.

And came up with elaborate footnotes.

It’s not that my thoughts are that dirty. I daydream about being undressed like one of the heroines in a Rosemary Rogers book, or about Han Solo pushing my hair out of my eyes, or Roy Scheider from Jaws squeezing me a fresh lemonade and watching me drink it. The fantasies can be brought on by small aspects of boys I know—like Alex Noti’s neck—but whose other aspects take them out of contention as fantasy material. Candace always tells me I need to give more boys in school a chance, get to know them, but honestly, I feel like I know enough about the boys we know: Most of them stink. And even the okay ones are no Han Solo.

If I wasn’t so proficient at masturbating, maybe behind-the-scenes groping with some bumbling stagehand would sound more appealing to me. And if I were a boy, I probably wouldn’t be so secretive about it. Masturbation and boys went, well, hand in hand. At school, boys had nicknamed stalls in their restrooms the Spankin’ Station (first floor), the Beat-Off Box (second floor), and the Jerkin’ for Jerkins (a stall in the third-floor bathroom next to the teachers’ lounge that got its name because visits there were often inspired by the curvy geometry teacher, Ms. Jerkins). I’d actually tried to masturbate between second and third period once, but I couldn’t do it standing up, and lying on the bathroom tile was out of the question. It seemed unfair, in a way, that guys not only could yank their things in almost any position but also had almost-official places to do it right at school. But I guess it’s not that different from how boys can just pee against a wall in an alley if they have to, while girls are expected to hold it until the proper time and place.

Anyway. That day, I’d come to lunch fresh off my Alex Noti/Paul Newman daydream when—BAM—this guy, this man, this vision in tight nylon shorts appears. I’m not even going to describe him in detail just yet, because I won’t do him justice. If I say he was a white guy who had day-old stubble along a cut jaw and hairy, muscular calves, I could just as easily be talking about our plumber, Mr. Mariano. But there he was, in the cafeteria, collapsing the tower of my disparate thoughts—school play, geometry homework, the weekend’s parties, the zit I felt growing right under my lip—into one compact and focused mass:

Who is this man?

I downed the rest of my Yoo-hoo in one slug, not knowingly this time. I definitely knew nothing.

“Wow,” said Tina. Next to her, Candace said, “Wow,” too, but no sound came out of her mouth.

“Who is that?” I watched him stride past tables of girls now agog. Our eyes had to be bugging out