Isabelle and I came here together from High School. While I smoked joints in the parking lot before school, she eagerly studied her algebra book, trying to hammer down isosceles triangles, as if she had nails made out of X’s and Y’s.
She was gorgeous and came from the wealthy family with a house on a hill. All the ways in which a high school girl can be perfect, all the numerous things you can imagine, she was. Skirts not so short so a guy can only picture dirty things, but skirts just short enough for him to imagine laying on a blanket in a wheat field somewhere, sunlight on her cheekbones, butterflies grazing her knee caps. Hair she twisted with her right index finger when she thought hard, and then upon realizing the answer she sought, was released into a spiraling curl down her freckle dotted shoulder. Wire frame glasses, a bit too large for her face, a bit too librarian for her looks, so that when she removed them, people tended to gasp silently in satisfaction, as if they were opening a present which had been placed before them at the beginning of December, and could only now open on Christmas Eve.
She let me lay with her in the wheat fields. I ran my fingers over her naked freckled shoulder. Someone had given her to me as a gift. But it was all under false pretenses. As all beautiful teenage girls must do, (all teenage girls who’ve never had a care or a worry in their entire lives) she invented a problem and had decided it was absolutely necessary for her survival to rebel from the tight grip her mommy and daddy clamped down on her with. Upon seeing me, smoking joints in the parking lot junior year, Isabelle knew I was the man of her dreams. The man of her dreams for a year or two, at least.
She could have done worse. She could have picked any other guy at the school. And he would have fallen so quick and so hard that he would have simply become her father incarnate. Any other guy would be clamping down within a week or two. Grasping for any extra Isabelle tidbit he could get. At least I knew she would never belong to me. At least I loved being alone too much to ever love her too much. And that fact, the fact that both Isabelle and I loved one another under certain unspoken parameters and borders, is the fact that made our love more true and more real than most other stories of teenage love I’ve seen in the movies or read in books.
While the rest of the kids only paid attention in physics class on paper airplane day and the rest of the time simply doodled phallic sketches on their desks, Isabelle and I were apt pupils when Mr. Moose described the laws of gravity. I underlined it in my notebook. She highlighted it in neon pink. All things that go up must come down.
