Mrs. Melon had a nervous habit of rubbing her forearms while she talked. The more nervous she was, the redder her forearms. Today she was rubbing harder than usual.
“You are grownups,” she said, “and you live in a grownup world. Most of you already know we’ll be going into forms of sexuality, birth control, domestic problems, and divorce in this class. I’m going to need these state-required forms filled out and signed by your parents.”
She began dropping more piles of the purple sheets on the alphabetical tables. Most of the students had already received their parental consent forms, including the sex-ed forms, with the thick green Ridgemont High School Rulebook sent out in August. And the school gave out more of the same forms with the first-day registration papers. Now Mrs. Melon was rubbing her arms and passing out even more of them. Somewhere along the line a student could get the idea Ridgemont was nervous about sex education.
Mrs. Melon’s class was out of control most of the time. Students came, students went. Everyone seemed to feel adequately developed as a child, so they used the class as a free-zone study hall. Most students simply brought in all their work from other classes and saved their evenings by doing it during Mrs. Melon’s lectures.
This would be the third consecutive year that Stacy Hamilton would be taking a sex-ed class. She felt she had seen most of the films, looked at all the cutaway diagrams; she knew what went on. But even Stacy couldn’t deny that it was valuable to run through sex-ed one more time. There were always some kids getting it for the first time, and they were always entertaining to watch.
There had been a guy in the seventh grade whose mother told him women had teeth in their vagina. The boy must have believed it. He stood up in sex-ed class one day—Stacy was there—and asked, “Do very many men get their penises cut off?”
The kid quickly got himself the nickname Jaws, and, didn’t come back to Paul Revere Junior High the next year. Someone called his home and was referred to a number in Alabama.
Stacy herself had learned about sex from her mother, in a supermarket, in the feminine-hygiene section. “There is a certain thing that adults do after they are married,” Mrs. H. told her. “The purpose is to have children.” She went on to explain the sexual process in such cold clinical terms that Stacy’s first question was, “Does a doctor perform the operation?”
“No,” said Mrs. H., “your father and I did it ourselves.” In the years that followed, Mrs. Hamilton never mentioned the subject again. Not even a word. Stacy’s mother seemed to consider sex an unmentionable obligation performed in unspeakable situations. Sometimes she’d say something like, “You watch out for boys with beer breath; you know what they want.” And that was it. So Stacy was grateful for sex-ed, even if it was old territory.
As Mrs. Melon droned on this afternoon, three weeks into the school year, Stacy decided the time was right to open the note from Linda Barrett that she had been saving since period break.
Stacy carefully unfolded the notebook page:
DEAR STACY,
HI STACE. HOW IS EVERYTHING GOING? WHAT’S NEW? ISN’T MY WRITING JUST WONDERFUL? ALL I HAVE IS THIS EYE-LINER PENCIL THAT I NEVER USE. (She switches here to a pen) SO HI! I HAVE REALLY GOT TO TALK WITH YOU. ABOUT SOME SERIOUS STUFF. STACY, I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THE VET ACTUALLY CALLED YOUR HOUSE AND TALKED TO YOUR MOM!!! HOW DID YOU FEEL WHEN EVELYN GAVE YOU THE MESSAGE? PRETTY WEIRD, HUH? FIRST HE SENDS FLOWERS, THEN HE STARTS CALLING YOU UP. THIS GUY SOUNDS DANGEROUS. WE HAVE GOT TO TALK. WRITE ME AND TELL ME HOW MUCH YOU LIKE THIS GUY.
I WISH YOU WEREN’T WORKING EVERY SATURDAY! I WAS THINKING THAT IT WOULD BE NICE IF WE GOT TOGETHER THIS SATURDAY, BUT I GUESS WE CAN’T. UMMMMMM . . . I GOTTA GO NOW. I’LL SEE YOU IN ABOUT 52 MINUTES. I HAVE TO REWRITE AN ESSAY NOW! BYE STACE! WRITE ME!
Stacy withdrew a clean sheet of paper from her Pee-Chee folder. She wrote:
OH LINDA OH LINDA OH LINDA,
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. MOM IS OKAY. I NEVER KNEW I COULD THINK OF SOMETHING SO FAST. SHE GOES, “WHO IS THIS RON JOHNSON THAT CALLED YOU? HE SOUNDS LIKE A MAN!” I’M NEARLY SHITTING, RIGHT, BUT I GO, “HE’S JUST THIS GUY FROM SCHOOL WHO WANTS A JOB AT SWENSON’S.” SO THEN I ASK HER WHAT SHE TOLD HIM, AND EVELYN GOES, “I TOLD HIM THAT YOU HADN’T GOTTEN HOME FROM RIDGEMONT YET.” WHAT DO YOU THINK THE VET THINKS????? I TOLD HIM ONCE I WAS GOING TO JUNIOR COLLEGE. AND THAT I WAS 19. HE’S PROBABLY SO MAD AT ME! I LIKE HIM. I FEEL KIND OF SECURE WITH HIM. I THINK WE SHOULD GO OUT SOME MORE! BUT I SHOULD TELL HIM THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW OLD I AM. WHAT DO YOU THINK?
About ten minutes before the end of Child Development, while Mrs. Melon was working her way around the room with enchilada recipes, Stacy noticed the class disrupted by the appearance of a buxom young office worker in a tight red dress.
She had come to give Mrs. Melon a mimeographed office memo, but the simple act became a much larger production in the hands of this girl. She swung through the doorway and scanned the room with two mighty whips of her head. She took a long while to separate the top sheet from her stack of other mimeographs pausing once to shake out her hair. Then she swung back out again. Somebody applauded.
The bell rang, and Stacy found Linda Barrett on her way to the next class.
“Here,” said Stacy, handing her the note. “Write me back next period.”
The next period, Stacy received this reply from Linda:
STACE,
DON’T YOU DARE TELL HIM THE TRUTH. YOU’LL NEVER HEAR FROM THE GUY AGAIN. JUST TELL HIM THAT YOU HAVE A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO USE THE PHONE, AND UNTIL YOU GET YOUR OWN LINE PUT IN, YOU’LL CALL HIM! OKAY? SEE YOU AT LUNCH.
Stacy thought about it all through her next period, and debated the subject further with Linda Barrett over lunch. She had to tell The Vet her true age, she said. She didn’t want to have to keep thinking up and hiding more lies.
“You don’t have to lie,” said Linda. “Just don’t talk about your age at all.”
“But I already told him I was nineteen! I told him I was already out of high school! I totally lied!”
“Now it bothers you to lie,” said Linda. “But it didn’t bother you to sneak out your window at night.”
“That’s different.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
And so it went. By the end of the school day, Stacy’s mind was made up. She was going to tell The Vet how old she was, and she was going to do it in a grownup way. He would understand; and if he didn’t, forget him! Right? After school Stacy took the H bus to Town Center Mall and picked out a card at the Hallmark Store.
She selected a middle-of-the-road cartoon card, nothing too wild. The face was a drawing of an intent astronomer, his telescope trained on the heavens. It said: “Don’t dwell on all the mistakes of the past. Look to the future.”
The card opened up to another drawing of the same astronomer, who had just realized the lens cap was still on his telescope: “And all the mistakes you can make, then.”
Stacy decided to wait a day before she wrote The Vet anything on the inside of the card. Mrs. Melon was still preparing the class for sex-ed, rubbing her forearms, while Stacy worked out the phrasing in Child Development the next day.
Dear Ron:
Thanks a lot for the flowers. I got the message that you called. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back yet. I admit I have been pretty quiet, but I have to admit a few things, like I am only 15! But that’s the only lie I told you! I hope we can still be friends! Good luck at the clinic, and I hope we can talk very soon.