Angeline

One important night for me as a teenager began when I met up with a group of my friends from school at an Applebee's. We had all turned eighteen, and were out after curfew. There was Bobby, Mike, Curtis, Paul, and Paul's older sister Angeline. Paul was a half asian, half Filipino friend, and Angeline was sort of dating Bobby. Bobby considered himself the leader of the group; he was the most aggressive, and really wanted to be cool. I think everyone recognized that he was trying a little too hard, and that he tended to lie enough that you couldn't believe anything he said. He was the type to say, "Oh year, I got accepted to Harvard Medical School, but I told them 'no,' because I wanted to focus on my research." Like, OK, but maybe the truth to that story was that he had met an admissions person from Harvard who told him he should apply. My brother Eric was like that, too.

Bobby's mother had lost an arm to cancer as a young woman; he told me that he had once found her prosthetic arm in the attic, and used it to beat a kid bloody. He was at the top of the class in everything, and became a swimmer and got pretty strong. When I had been a freshman, I got beat up in gym class; a bigger guy, Tom, was trying to drag me into a trash can. I grabbed his pinky finger and twisted it back, and he got mad and hit me a couple times. Bobby had seen me, and probably recognized how upset I looked, and asked if I was OK. I still appreciate that.

Angeline sat next to me, and she felt my leg while we were talking. I did my Ralph Wiggum voice, "me fail English? That's un-possible!" She laughed and told me how cute I was. Had I ever had a girl touch me before? Not like that. I mentioned in an earlier post how one of my brother's friends girlfriends would climb on top of me while insulting me when I would go down to drink with them, but that was really unromantic; if it was sexy, it was in a really different way.

Angeline was so gorgeous to me. She smiled and laughed, she wore her hair to the chin, and she went to Vassar. She was twenty one, which seemed so adult compared to my eighteen years. I was so wrapped up in her, and I lost track of all time. Was she on Bobby's shoulder when we were talking then? My watch betrayed me. It had stopped, but the second hand continued to tick on the same second, making it look like it was still working, even though it wasn't. I got home, and my dad was furious. I was grounded for the first and only time in my life, despite being eighteen. Completely unfair.

Over the course of that summer and fall, I ran into Angeline with Bobby a few times, and got together with them. They came over to my Dad's house, and she licked chocolate sauce off my chest. Later, I came downstairs where she and Bobby were watching TV, and her fly was unzipped.

My Dad's car was a Volvo S-80, which was a nice car at the time. When my Dad had remarried Carmen, we moved to a large house in a wealthier suburb of Pittsburgh. Carmen had been widowed in her forties, and was wealthy from her first husband's estate. She also managed a downtown realty office, and had investment income from rental properties and a parking lot.

I mention this because I recognize that Bobby was hanging out with me and brought Angeline around due to my perceived status as a rich kid. My Dad's psychology practice, while successful, wasn't enough to provide for those appearances, until after he got married. Bobby's family had a nice, older, smaller home in a suburb closer to the city. His house was more like a college professor's.

In the Fall, I talked to Angeline on the phone a couple times. She sent me a package and a couple of letters from Vassar. There were some bumper stickers, and a few trinkets. I think we exchanged a few emails, as well.

A group of us went out to see a movie at the art house cinema in town. Bobby told me that if I would let him drive my Dad's car, he would let me have sex with Angeline. I said, "sure," and he did.

What did I think was happening? Here's the thing. Everyone had just seen American Pie the previous summer. We were 95% virgins. We all wanted to have sex, and were pretty sure that our virgin status made us part of some 5% loser crowd. I should mention also that I went to an all guys Catholic college prep school in Pittsburgh, so any girls I knew my age were through friends or extracurriculars. Like in the movie, we were totally OK with some casual encounter, which could serve as foundation for a later relationship.

So I made a few assumptions, which were formulated by my ... 1., I thought that Angeline really liked me. 2., I thought that if she was making all these flirty and sexy gestures to me, that she was interested in having sex with me, and that we could do that while she was still dating Bobby, and Bobby and I could still be friends. 3., I thought that Bobby and I were pretty similar. 4., I thought that maybe if she and Bobby were done, she and I could be together. They didn't seem that warm and affectionate with one another, despite all the sex stuff.

Around Thanksgiving, Angeline was home on Thanksgiving break. My mom's house was across the railroad tracks from a movie theater. Bobby, Angeline, and I went to see Dogma. She sat between us, and Bobby was kissing her, and she put her legs on my lap, and I felt her leg. Afterward, we went back to my mom's house; my mom was working, and my brothers were with my dad.

We went down to the basement, and played some game that was meant to be like strip poker, but it didn't go like that. We were fooling around with each other. She asked me and Bobby to kiss, but we shook our heads, "no." I definitely wasn't interested in Bobby. I left them alone for a little while, and went to the bathroom and masturbated, so I wouldn't come so fast. Then I put a condom on.

I went back. She was naked, and so much smaller than she seemed before. Bobby went out of the room. He had come on a decorative pillow, which he turned over. Later, I understood that they had just had sex, but at the time, I definitely wasn't thinking. We were all completely sober, too.

I talked to her, and we kissed a little. She had a horizontal scar across her left breast, around the demarcation between pec major and pec minor. I asked her about it, and she said she had hurt herself when she was upset, but she was OK now. This was my first time, and I didn't know how to insert; she guided me in. We had sex, for awhile. She told me I should finish, and I did, picturing some porn scenario, because I wasn't really that turned on; she wasn't that into it.

Was Bobby watching from the doorway? Probably. I didn't look back, and the lights were off. Was he wanking? Probably.

We got dressed separately, and I walked them upstairs. I french kissed her when we said goodnight. I went back and went to sleep. I went to church the next morning, and afterward I tried to type up everything that had happened, so I could wank to it later. I never did wank to it.

At school on Monday, I told some of the guys I had lost my virginity, and that it was with an older girl, from Eric's college; I told enough of a lie to preserve everyone's privacy, I thought. I didn't mention Bobby. Guys congratulated me.

Curtis was there in the parking lot after class, and he asked if he could talk to me. I said, "sure," and we got in my car. He said, "Simon, I was on the phone with Angeline this weekend, and she's been crying all weekend. She said that you practically raped her." Curtis filled me in on what happened after Bobby, Angeline and I had said goodnight on Saturday. Bobby had broken up with her, on the pretense of her having sex with me. He had told her that he had traded sex with her to drive my Dad's car.

I said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. Listen, I had never had sex before this weekend. I didn't know where to put it in. She had to help me put it in. I didn't know anything about him breaking up with her. I didn't take the car thing seriously, I thought that she was doing everything because she wanted to. I didn't mean to upset her, I really care about her. I thought she was doing it because she liked me."

Curtis seemed surprised by this explanation; I think he had built me up in his mind as someone more confident and sexually experienced than what I was. I think I also rattled something for him, and he recognized that Angeline wasn't telling the truth. This event broke up our friend group, and Curtis spent more time with Mike, avoiding me and Bobby.

I tried to call her, but couldn't get an answer. I wrote her an email where I said something like, "I love spending time with you," and I might have said I loved her, or at least implied it. She told me later in an email. that she had just called Curtis because she was upset, and that she was OK.

I stayed friends with Bobby, and never really held him accountable for what he did, which was essentially using my affection for Angeline and naïveté as part of some elaborate sexual drama; if he had told me he had planned to break up with her, or if I knew that she wasn't mentally healthy, there's no way I would have consented. The idea of hurting someone that you were intimate with was and is anathema to me.

I learn more about Angeline from Bobby. She would go to parties and drink, and just have sex with whoever the guys were there. I think her father or grandfather abused her, and she had spent time in a hospital after she cut herself. She left Vassar, and ultimately graduated from Pittsburgh State.

I saw Angeline twice after that. Once at graduation, and once years later, at Paul's wedding in New Jersey, after Concetta and I were married and Concetta was pregnant with Olivia. Paul and I had run into each other at a shoe store in Pittsburgh while we were back home for Christmas, and found out we both lived in New York City. Paul and his girlfriend, Mona, lived in lower Manhattan, and we double dated a handful of times before Concetta and I moved to Buffalo. Did he know about me and Angeline? I don't know. I didn't think so.

I had told Concetta about Angeline very early in our relationship; we were both in the Christian "new virgin" mindset, and talked about our earlier relationships as we got to know each other. Concetta hadn't had sex before, but had gone as far as oral sex with a boyfriend in high school. She felt really guilty about that, though it really didn't bother me.

She kept her distance at the wedding. I tried to approach her once, and she walked the other direction. She was very thin. She had married a nice white guy, and I chatted with him for a few minutes in the bathroom, thanking him for helping to end a terrible toast one of Paul's drunk friends was offering. Angeline had become a university psychologist, and worked with young women with eating disorders.