“You’re a wimp,” Stacy would tell her brother. “How come when you were fifteen, Mom and Dad never even cared what you did on a school night?”
“ ’Cause I’m not going to get raped,” Brad would respond.
“You can say that again.”
Once Brad had started working at Carl’s Jr. Stacy noticed an immediate change in her brother. He started with bad weekend hours, a busboy making $2.90-an-hour wages. But even Stacy could see he loved the whole idea of going to work, clocking in, getting paid, and rolling home still wearing his Carl’s name tag with a few bucks in his pocket.
Not long after that Stacy spotted Brad with a bus station paperback called Power with Class. She noticed he had made graphs of his hours and wages and taped them to his closet door. Someone taught Brad how to work the fryer at Carl’s, and there was no looking back. It was the classic example, as she wrote Linda in a note last year, “of a guy finding his niche.”
They hadn’t squabbled much about The Phone lately. Stacy had taken to asking Brad first, before she even picked up the receiver.
“Do you need to make a call, Brad?”
“No,” said Brad. “I use the phone at work.”
There was a muffled knock at Stacy’s bedroom door late that night.
“Who is it?”
“Brad.”
“Come on in.” He looked tired from a night at Carl’s. “What’s going on?”
“I got rid of those flowers for you.”
“Oh, thanks a lot,” said Stacy. “That was pretty embarrassing.”
“What did you do? Die?”
Stacy looked at the rug. “It’s just some guy from Swenson’s. You don’t know him.”
“Does he go to our school?”
“No. You don’t know him.”
“I don’t care if you tell me or not,” sighed Brad. “I’ve got something else on my mind.”
“Is everything okay at work?”
“Oh yeah,” said Brad. “Oh yeah. Work is fine.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Lisa,” said Brad. “That’s what’s wrong.”
“Are you going to break up with Lisa again?”
Brad got up and started to pace. Lisa had been his girlfriend for the past year and a half. They’d met in typing class. She was pretty. She was friendly. Too friendly, Brad was always saying. He had no idea how popular she was until scores of Lisa’s girlfriends starting coming up to him every day, passing notes, telling him, “Lisa likes you.” They went out once; they started going together. They’d been together ever since. Brad had gotten her the intercom job at Carl’s, and now her hours were almost as good as his. She was even an excellent student. All in all, as Brad once told Stacy, Lisa was the kind of girl who “makes friends with your parents.”
“I’ve been with her almost two years,” said Brad. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. It’s a new school year. My last high school year. I think I want my freedom.”
“Why? Because she won’t sleep with you?”
Brad glared at his younger sister. After all, it was he who had the sticker on his car that said Sex Instructor.
“Where did you hear that?”
“I’m just guessing.”
Brad shrugged. “It’s true.”
“What do you mean?”
Stacy felt Brad study her face. Everything about him said this is serious. He continued in a tone of voice that was meant to cut across the years of brother-sister squabbles.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “We’ve gotten close, but she always says that she ‘can’t go any farther.’ She has this thing about sex. She doesn’t think it will feel good or something. We make out for a while, and then she always goes, ‘I don’t want to have to use sex as a tool.’ She says that all the time. You know, and I say, ‘Tool for what? We’ve been going together almost two years!’ Then she says she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, because that ruins everything, and she’s out of the mood, anyway. It kills me! I go to school and everyone goes, ‘HEY HEY HEY, how’s Lisa? She’s such a fox!’ ” Brad shook his head. “And I’m thinking, ‘Tool for WHAT?’ ”
“Maybe you just need to give her some time. She’s so nice, Brad. That girl really loves you.”
“Everyone loves Lisa. Everyone loves Lisa. But everyone doesn’t have to be her boyfriend.”
Brad and Stacy talked for several hours that night. It was one of their first meetings on equal turf. They knew that it wasn’t usually wise to entrust a family member with information that could later be used against them, but on this night Stacy and Brad broke the rules. Stacy had waited for the perfect time, and then she popped the big question.
“Hey Brad,” she said, “are you still a virgin?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I was just curious.”
Brad grinned. “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
“You’re not a virgin!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But your face did!”
They laughed.
“Are you still a virgin?” Brad asked his sister.
“Maybe yes, maybe no.”
“Don’t give me that shit! I know you’re still a virgin!”
Stacy kept smiling, and changed the subject back to Lisa. “What are you going to do, Brad?”
“I’ve made up my mind,” said Brad. “I’ve got to break up with her. I’ve got to do it once and for all. There’s a world of girls out there. When you’re young you have to play the field.” Sometimes Brad stayed up and watched late-night “Love American Style” reruns. Stacy had noticed the dialogue cropping up in his speech. “I’m a single, successful guy, and I’ve got to be fair to myself.”
“Just do it in person,” said Stacy. “That’s the right thing to do. Lisa is so nice.” She caught herself. “This is weird. I’m supposed to have an older brother telling me stuff. Here I am giving you all the good advice.”
“Give me a break,” said Brad. “It’s not like I’m asking you the meaning of life.”
There was a parental rap at Stacy’s door.
“Whatever the meaning of life is, it can wait.” It was Mr. Hamilton, turning out the houselights. “Do you kids realize it’s past eleven on a school night?”
“Okay, Dad.”
Brad smiled at his sister and padded down the hall to his room. Stacy thought about their talk as she turned off the lights and listened to her clock radio in the dark. In the maturity sweepstakes of life, she felt as if she had begun to overtake her brother.
The Attitude
It was one of the cruel inevitabilities of high school, right up there with grades and corn dogs. After thirteen, girls tended to mature at a rate of two- to three-times faster than boys. This led to a common predicament around Ridgemont High. Two kids were in the same grade. The girl was discovering sex and men. The boy, having just given up his paper route, was awakening to the wonders of gothic-style romance. High school could be murder on a guy like Mark “The Rat” Ratner, sixteen.
He was not blessed with the personal success or the looks of a Brad Hamilton. To junior Mark Ratner, high school girls were mystical, unattainable apparitions. So close and yet so far away.
“I am in love,” said Mark Ratner. He clutched his heart, spun in a circle, and landed on his buddy Mike Damone’s bed. It was after school, three weeks into the school year. “In looooove.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah,” said Ratner. “This girl is my exact type. It’s her. It’s definitely her.”