Thick Skin

Audience: Modern Love

“Twinkies are made of whale blubber” were some of the words Matt shared with me during our first encounter. That and, “I went to The Avery Coonley School. We’re the seahorses because we only travel onward and upward—never backward.” Anxious to learn more about my first high school crush, I Googled The Avery Coonley School after class, and sure enough the site’s masthead read, “Guiding Gifted Children Onward and Upward.” Seahorse silhouettes and seahorse watermark paraded the page. It was a well-known suburban grammar school for kid geniuses, but Matt didn’t want people to know he attended, or that he got a 36 on his ACT three years later. I liked Matt’s quirks, his playful personality and his obliviousness to the dos and don’ts of making a good first impression. So I took his word for it that the cream filling of the Twinkie was made with the blubber of a whale, for the next four high school years.

Each academic year had its defining moment; freshman year I joined the rowing team for two reasons: I hoped to find my niche in sports, since my older sister had found hers on the volleyball team at that age, and Matt was on the team. We traveled to out-of-state regattas nearly every weekend and carpooled to 5:10am practices Monday through Friday, but even outside our rowing bubble we were best friends. The last regatta of the spring season fell on Mother’s Day, so Matt absconded with a white rose from his mom’s bouquet and gave it and an invitation to be his girlfriend to me. The natural blush of my cheeks made my face doubly pink, as I had already coated it with a layer of makeup to look my best for the race. I said yes, we dated for two weeks, and I broke it off for the neighborhood bad boy, Kevin, who I had been crushing on since our First Holy Communion in the second grade. Matt’s Facebook status that night read, “Well this blows. Tryin’ again next year!”

So he tried like a toddler on a two-wheeler. But after a year of wanting to have my cake and eat it too, of rejected dance invitations and unreciprocated romantic gestures on my part, Matt decided he’d had enough. But I liked him, and he was, in the words of my girlfriends, perfect. So I asked him to be my boyfriend. But first, to show the seriousness of my request, I purchased every last Twinkie from the local grocery store to equip his locker, so that later, his face would shine as bright as the golden sponge cakes cascading to his feet. He accepted, and as the story goes, we fell in and out of young love in what seemed like a blink of an eye.

Those are transformative years, say my parents, the years we begin to discover our individual selves. And it happened that my hip was glued to his during that transformational time. I walked and he followed. I was one half to a whole. So two years into my glorious teens, I became all about a boy. And I was all about that boy for the many months following a painful breakup at the start our sophomore year of college, the adversary of all high school sweethearts like Matt and me who go to separate schools and can’t make it work.

Until July of the following summer, a year into my half trying to be its own whole, when Matt told me he was dating our 20-something-year-old high school rowing coach. Jenn was seven years older than him, bubbly and free spirited, training for a dangerous rowing excursion across the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 2012, and she was awesome. I would date her too, but still, the news hit me like a meteor flogging the cement, and I stormed out in tears like a fourteen year-old high school me. But she would feel justified, and I felt foolish.

That happened one month before I boarded a plane to study in Quito, Ecuador for six months. With the excitement of that change in setting, of breathing in another language, traveling and living independently of my family, fast came an instinctive and effortless desire that everything I do, I ultimately do for myself. So in twos, I was a one, and in a group, I didn’t worry about losing the sense of myself. I thought about Matt often, longed for him at first, then after a few more months in Ecuador, I didn’t feel anything for him. I couldn’t disregard, however, that he was the reason I sought and worked at that change in the first place.

My dad wanted only to be a bystander in the six years this boy overwhelmed my life, while my mom organized book club meetings with Matt’s mom and trips to their summer cabin in the north woods of Wisconsin. He foresaw the ramifications of a high school couple consuming themselves in each other before they leave for college, but he only ever told me, “You have to be selfish, mija.”

He didn’t mean a vindictive selfishness that eats away the good in people, but one that leads to resilience instead of weakness when a plan backfires, or when a boy breaks my heart. A selfishness that's left me satisfied inside.