That meant that any guy who wanted to be around me had to make room for Jade. In my freshman year, I started dating Kris, a brown-haired tenth grader who was two years older than me. They’d held him back a year when his family moved over from Poland as a small child, but he was really smart, and his parents were biochemists at LSU studying carcinogens. He had a car and would drive me to the barn and all my horse events. Kris bought my first dressage saddle, so I could compete, and he would take pictures for me at all my shows. He was not going to get on a horse, but he bought a mountain bike so he could ride along with me and Jade. He taught me how to drive, and I’m actually a great driver because of him.
And he taught me how to say what I liked in bed. “Do you like when I touch you like this?” he would ask me, genuinely wanting me to enjoy our time together. Whereas Jacob was so conservative, Kris would just walk around naked in his room, comfortable with his body. We didn’t do anything freaky, but we had a lot of sex, and more importantly, we could talk about it without shame.
When I was sixteen, Kris wrote a letter to my mom telling her to put me on birth control. I had been too afraid to ask her. She was furious, but I heard her talking to her friends about it, saying she thought it was cool that he was honest and concerned about me. Two days later she thanked him and she put me on birth control. I have Kris to thank for my being able to enjoy sex without constantly worrying about getting pregnant and stuck in Baton Rouge.
Yes, Kris was the best boyfriend, until he cheated on me. But I don’t blame him. We were high school kids and the girl, Camille, was really fucking hot. She had an Angelina Jolie look.
I was with my best friend, Elizabeth, when I saw them. We were in her car, driving to Coffee Call, a coffee shop on College Drive in Baton Rouge. It had been Kris’s and my place. And there he was, walking in holding hands with Camille.
I sat there, my mouth open, when the radio DJ came on to present a song they’d just gotten in. Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” As Alanis sang, Elizabeth got more and more wide-eyed as I just stared at the café.
“That’s a really good song,” I said when it was over.
“Yeah,” she said, still looking at me like I was a time bomb.
“So, I’m just gonna go in there and kill him,” I said.
“Cool,” she said.
I did confront Kris. I didn’t kill him, nor did I scream-sing my new favorite song at him. He admitted it, always honest, and that was that. But whenever I hear that song, my eyes narrow and I am right back at the Coffee Call.
I did a bank shot to sink the nine ball and glanced up at my dad. For the first time, he looked proud of me. I’d waited fifteen years for that.
We were in a bar near his house on Thorn Tree Court in Miamiville, just outside Cincinnati. Susan had been making him spend more one-on-one time with me since middle school. He tried. We would run to Subway for an hour, but he just couldn’t relate to me. Now I was fifteen years old and mature enough for my age that we could finally relate.
They knew him by name when we walked in but seemed surprised that he had a daughter. It was a little bar with several pool tables, and my dad’s a very good player. He started to teach me how to play, at first probably just to pass the time. But once he saw I was pretty good, he seemed more interested. He gave me money for the jukebox, and I went over but I didn’t know how to make the selection. I’d never seen one before.
“Oh, it’s easy,” he said, coming over to show me. I looked up at him and smiled. This was what I wanted as a kid. Him showing me how to do things. “What song do you want?” he asked.
“Uh,” I said, drawing it out as I flipped through the records until I saw Def Leppard. “How about ‘Let’s Get Rocked’?”
He nodded and smiled. “Good choice,” he said. We went back to pool, and he surprised me by knowing the lyrics. We were singing and laughing, and I think he was surprised that he was actually having fun.
The next day he took me out on his boat to go waterskiing. He brought a friend with him, because you need a spotter and a driver. I picked it up pretty quickly, mainly because I was determined to impress him. I got up on the third try and as I held on, I could just see him thinking, Oh, maybe she is mine.
Other times we went out on the water, just me and him. He’d drink his Coors Light, and we got to a point where the awkwardness was almost gone. It was the same the following summer, when I was sixteen. When we were in his element—at a pool table or on the boat—he could just be quiet with me. I was just happy to be there.
It was around this time that Susan became the first I told about hating the name Stephanie. There are lots of stories about why I call myself Stormy, but the truth is that while Stephanie is a lovely name, it never suited me. First off, my mother gave it to me, and I didn’t want anything from her. And I read a lot of books about Native Americans because of my dad’s Cherokee heritage. In those stories, names reflected both character and destiny. I couldn’t rule the world with a name like Stephanie. But Stormy… that made more sense.
But then my dad and Susan split up, and with her went the person making him hang out with me. I only saw him one more time. At the end of junior year, I was sitting in class when a voice came over the loudspeaker: “Please send Stephanie down to the office. Her dad is here to pick her up.”
My best friend, Elizabeth, was in that class, and as I picked up my books she stage-whispered, “Who?”
I figured it had to be my stepdad, but he had never come to check me out of school. Mr. Kelley would never call himself my father, so the office lady must have seen a big guy and assumed. I walked quickly, worried something was wrong with my mom or my horse.
And there he was. My father, standing completely out of context in my school. I didn’t know he even knew where I went to school.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I just wanted to see you.”
“Does Mom know you’re here?”
“Yeah, I just let her know,” he said, the slightest grimace crossing his face. I could guess how the call went. I was surprised the school even let him take me, because he wasn’t on any kind of form they had. We walked outside, and I saw he had his truck hooked up to his boat, full of stuff. It was just like all the moves we did when I was a kid.
“Me and Susan split up,” he said.
“I kinda heard,” I said.
“Yeah, we sold the house,” he said. “I’m on my way to California.”
“Oh.”
“I just thought I’d take you shopping,” he said, getting out his keys.
“For what?” I asked.
“How do you feel about getting a car today?”
Pretty good, actually. We hit a used-car lot and he told me I could have eight grand to spend on any car I wanted. That feels like twenty thousand these days. He told me to pick out whatever I wanted. He paid cash for a Toyota Celica that seemed pretty brand-new to me. It was dark teal, but the coolest thing about it was it had the flip-up headlights. He paid for a year of insurance on it and took me to dinner. At the restaurant, I mostly talked about how I couldn’t believe I had a new car. When it was over, he got in his car and left.
I never saw him again.
I still can’t figure out why he just handed me a car free and clear. It was nowhere near my birthday or graduation. Maybe it was just a final gift, so he could leave me again with a clear conscience. Eight grand to just be done with me.