Chapter 6. Lennix
LENNIX
“So you made it?”
The concern threading my father’s voice kicks in my instinct to reassure him. He needs lots of reassuring. Ever since Mama disappeared, he worries constantly.
I get it. He’s a professor of Native American Studies.
He knows the statistics. Four in five American Indian women have experienced violence, and more than one in two have experienced sexual violence.
Even knowing the facts, he never expected them to hit so close to home.
He and my mother never married and didn’t always see eye to eye on how I should be raised, but I know he never stopped caring for her and was devastated when she disappeared.
“We made it, yeah.” I lean against the wall outside our hostel room. “I’m fine. The hostel’s great. Amsterdam’s beautiful.”
“Please be careful, Lenn. Three pretty young girls in a foreign country—you could be snatched off a corner in broad daylight. You know not to drink anything you’re not sure of. God, not to mention sex trafficking.”
I’ve heard his concern veer into panic before, so I stop him before it goes there. “Dad, did you watch Taken again?”
His guilty silence provides my answer.
“No one is going to snatch me off a corner or traffic me or sell my virginity to the highest bidder.”
“Could we not discuss your virginity? I’m not prepared for this.”
“I’m twenty-one, and believe me, my father is the last person I want to discuss my sex life with, too.” Nonexistent though it is…
“Could you also avoid using the word ‘sex’ in the same sentence as…well, you?” he asks. “Men are pigs. I’ve told you this, right?”
“Um, on more than one occasion. I believe you once called your species the scourge of the earth and told me they were basically petri dishes with bad intentions.”
“I stand by that assessment.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll be happy to know I’m not even in the lab, so to speak. Maybe I’m asexual? Or broken? I just don’t ever meet guys who seem worth my time, ya know?”
“When I asked you not to use the word ‘sex’ in the same sentence as you, that included ‘asexual.’ But, baby, you’re not broken. You’re…discriminating. In the good, picky way, not in the systemic racist way.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“All jokes aside,” he says, his voice dropping, sobering, “someone will feel more special than the rest.”
I want to ask if Mama felt more special to him than the rest. I want to ask if he ever cries for her, like I still do.
Does grief hit him in the most unexpected times and hang over the day until he wants to crawl back in bed and sleep so he won’t remember she’s gone and never coming back? Does she come to him in his dreams?
Or is that just me?
They weren’t together for years before she died, and it makes me wonder if I’m the only person on Earth still hurting this way for her.
If her memory only lives in my heart like a knife lodged between my ribs.
Grief is its own kind of intimacy, a bond of sorts between you and the one you lost. No one else feels it the way you do about that person you loved most. And maybe it helps to know someone reaches that same level of despair. That’s what family is for, right?
I wish I could go back to the night of my Sunrise Dance and beg her not to go to that protest. Ask her, just this once, to let someone else fight the world’s problems because I needed her more than everyone else did.
“Lenn, you still there?”
I shake off the helplessness of done deals and irreversible things and straighten from the wall. “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Time difference has me out of it. I just wanted to let you know I got here safely.”
“Thank you for that.”
“I’m sure you have a stack of papers waiting to be graded, so I’ll let you go. You need a social life, old man.”
“You’re right,” he says, his voice lightening. “So you’ll be happy to hear I might be getting one. I have a date tonight.”
I frown and blink and lick my lips and tug on my ear. Apparently the thought of my father on a date makes me fidgety. “A-a date? Wow. Good. Good for you.”
“Yeah?” he asks with unexpected tentativeness.
I think of my father as I usually see him. Distracted in that way academicians often are, lost in a pile of papers he’s grading or books he’s reading or something he’s researching. His gray eyes always half-hazed with whatever task I interrupted. He deserves more than that.
“Yeah, I’m happy for you, Dad. Do I know her?”
He goes on to tell me her name is Bethany. She’s an English professor who started a few months ago. They’ve had coffee but are grabbing dinner tonight. Hearing him excited about something other than his work lifts my heart a little. I find myself smiling as we disconnect.
“I miss you, too.” Vivienne, my best friend number one, is clutching her phone and wiping a tear away when I enter the hostel room we’re sharing. “I keep telling myself it’s only a week, but my heart won’t listen.”
I catch the eyes of my best friend number two, Kimba, who gives me her famous can you believe this shit look.
Vivienne glances at us a little self-consciously, turns her back, and lowers her voice.
“Sorry, I should have told you. I took the pillowcase,” she says in a sad whisper. “Because it smelled like you.”
“Jesus, keep me near the cross,” Kimba mutters, rolling her eyes and raising her voice. “Bitch, get off that phone. Stephen, she’ll be fine. We’ll make sure she doesn’t screw anyone before the wedding.”
I snort, but over her shoulder, Vivienne’s eyes are wide and horrified and filled with poison.
“Sorry,” Kimba hisses with unrepentant humor.
“I have to go, Stephen,” Vivienne says. “The girls need help settling in.”
As soon as she hangs up, she grabs a pillow from a nearby couch and puts it over Kimba’s face where she lies on the bottom bunk.
“You’re smothering me,” Kimba’s muffled voice, mixed with laughter, comes from under the pillow.
“That’s the point.” Vivienne chuckles and lifts the pillow. “Were you trying to get me un-engaged?”
“It would take a stick of dynamite to blast you and Stephen apart,” I tell her, climbing the short ladder to my upper bunk on the opposite side. “I’m not sure he’ll make it this one week without you.”
“It’s gonna be tough,” Vivienne says, completely serious, which sets my and Kimba’s eyes to rolling again. “What? It’s our first time apart since the engagement.”
“I get it,” Kimba says and then shakes her head and mouths, I don’t get it.
“I mean, it’s a week.” I try to keep the exasperation from my voice. “Surely you can last a week without him.”
“Just wait’ll you meet the one,” Vivienne says. “And you’ll see how it feels. Maybe even here in Amsterdam. Wouldn’t that be romantic?”
“Until I figure out what I want to do with my life,” I say dryly, “the great problem of ‘the one’ will have to wait, and I’m in no hurry.”
“While I’m looking for the one of many,” Kimba says. “Nothing that lasts beyond an orgasm. Maybe I’ll find a big, blond Dutchman to woo me with his foreign tongue.”
“Some tongue.” Vivienne laughs. “And some abs, chest, arms, dick.”
“Oh, for sure some dick.” Kimba high-fives Vivienne and peers up at me from the bottom bunk in our tiny but cozy hostel room. “Come on, Lenn. You planning to get you some while we’re here?”
“Oh, yeah.” I turn over onto my stomach. “Because I’m most likely to rando hook up. I doubt very seriously I’ll be surrendering the V-card to some stranger in Amsterdam. I’ve held on to it this long; that would be a waste.”
“Already a waste, if you ask me,” Viv says. She climbs the ladder to her top bunk but stops midway, propping her butt against a rung. “I know you’ve been tempted.”
“Of course I have.” I shrug. “But it passes, and I always see something I don’t like, don’t trust, or can’t tolerate. I’ll know when it’s the right time, the right guy. I literally just had this conversation with my father.”
“You and your dad,” Vivienne says, shaking her head and grinning. “How is the professor?”
“Better now he’s heard my voice and knows I haven’t been sex trafficked yet.”
“Ugh,” Kimba groans from the lower bunk. “Did he watch Taken again?”
“I know. I told him to stop. Anyway, he assures me that I’m probably not asexual.”
“Was that a serious thought?” Vivienne asks. “I mean, it’d be okay if you were, but you’ve had boyfriends and seemed to like all the pregame activities. I bet you’ll like dick once you get some.”
“I’m just not a dick-for-the-sake-of-dick girl, I don’t think.” I bury my head in the cool pillow and breathe in clean linen. “I trust myself to know when and who.”
I’ve never been ashamed of my virginity; I’ve never avoided discussing it if people asked either.
Both my parents taught me to know what I believe, to articulate it first to myself and then to others.
If it’s any of their damn business, that is, which in most cases, it’s not.
But nothing is off-limits between me and these two girls.
“You’re in no hurry,” Kimba says from down below, “because you haven’t had it. Once you do…whew, child. Hard to go without.”
I’ve never liked the idea of my body making decisions my head and my heart don’t cosign. I’ve seen both of my friends crying, depressed, or dejected after some man disappointed them. No dick is worth that.
“Hmm-mm,” Kimba breaks the sound into two syllables and bites her bottom lip. “One taste, one good taste, and you’ll be hooked.”
“God, there’s nothing like really good sex,” Viv groans, closing her eyes and tipping her head back. “Even going a week without Stephen…ugh.”
“A week?” Kimba scoffs. “Try months. I’m in a drought, but I’ve read the weather forecast, and it’s raining in Amsterdam, honey!”
The three of us laugh and shift into planning for tomorrow. We have a week in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and we want to take full advantage of it.
“So I know we’re all a little jet-lagged,” Viv says, her voice drowsy, “but will you be refreshed enough after a power nap to go out?”
“Sure.” I yawn and tuck my arm under the pillow. “A few winks and we’ll be ready.”
“Good,” Viv mumbles. “Aya says we’ll start off nice and slow tonight. Just hit a brown bar, eat, drink. Maybe you’ll pick up something nice and blond to bring home, Kimba.”
“Fingers crossed,” Kimba says. “Legs open.”
“Oh, my god,” Viv groans. “Hussy. We need to establish mating rules. You better not be fucking some huge Norseman in the bunk below.”
Our drowsy chuckles intermingle and fade.
“We’ll work out a system,” Viv says. “Well, for you, Kimba. Ms. I’m Waiting for Mr. Right Dick over there won’t need a system.”
I’m used to the teasing, but is it so wrong to wait until it feels right? To wait until you feel like you’ve met someone you want to share your body with?
My mind wanders back to my Sunrise Dance.
The whole ceremony leads to that point when the spirit of Changing Woman supposedly inhabits you, even just briefly.
For a slice of time, you take something holy into your body, and it changes you forever.
I’m not saying sex will be holy, but the first time I share my body with someone, it will be special.
And I think it might change me forever.