Thinking of You Tonight
That night up in my room, when I opened my journal, I wrote about Brenda and Forrest.
I did something new in what I wrote there that night. The crossing of another line. This proved surprisingly exciting.
As I wrote, I let myself pretend I was Brenda Barnett. I’d been the one with the cleavage bursting out of my dress that night. I’d been the one in the kitchen with Forrest, clearing away the dishes.
As I was rinsing the dishes, he came up from behind me, I wrote. He pressed his body against mine. I could feel him, pressing hard against me.
What would that feel like? I didn’t know exactly.
All I had to go on were boys in my class, times I’d noticed something appeared to be going on with their penis—and how, when it did, they’d grab a notebook or their sweatshirt and hold it over the crotch of their jeans.
As difficult and embarrassing as it was being a girl, at least the things that happened to girls—the sexual things—took place under cover.
Nobody could see. Where for a boy there was no concealing it.
Take Hayward, for example. As annoying as he was, I could almost feel sorry for him, with his voice in the middle of changing, never knowing when he opened his mouth what sound might come out.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The picture came to me of him on a recent afternoon at the club when a girl named Jennifer dove off the high board and her top slipped.
I had looked at Hayward then to see if he’d noticed, and he had, evidently.
It was as if a small animal woke up in his swim trunks.
Was he embarrassed, or proud?
I turned back to the journal page I was writing on. Back to the scene in the kitchen. With myself in the role of Brenda Barnett.
I was trying to wash a glass, I wrote. There were lipstick marks on the rim. He took my hand, which was holding the sponge, and moved it away from the sink. It was as if there were no muscles in my arm. I let him move my hand like it was a part of his body, not mine. Like he owned it.
He turned off the water and set the glass on the counter. Then he guided my hand to his . . .
My pen stopped moving. Writing the word, even in my journal, felt scary.
He pressed his mouth against mine. I felt his tongue going deep. And further down, something else, pressing against my body.
His finger made its way down my neck and my chest. Then further down.
“Don’t ever change,” he told me. “I love you just the way you are.”
“I’ll be thinking of you tonight in my bed,” I told him.
That part was true.
Did I actually believe Forrest and I would become lovers that summer?
I was young, but I wasn’t crazy. If the man who was my father’s oldest and best friend ever actually did any of the things I dreamed up in the scenes I played out in my brain and wrote down in my journal, I wouldn’t know what to do. If he kissed me, I doubt I could kiss him back.
Part of the appeal of Forrest Emerson, to my almost-fifteen-year-old self, rested with the knowledge that mine was an unattainable fantasy.
Forrest could take up residence in my brain—and he had—without any risk of embarrassment or failure.
Forrest Emerson, as I brought him to life in the pages of my beautiful leatherbound journal that summer, was like a character I dreamed up in the hope that he’d rescue me from my profound loneliness.
Constructing romantic scenes between the two of us—Forrest and me—felt dangerous and safe at the same time.
So long as the stories just happened on the page—like the stories I read in my Stephen King novels—nobody could ever get hurt.