Though I pined for Layne, it was a girl named Cam who actually showed up at my house to take me out to the movies that year. Cam was a recent transfer student from Idaho, and being just a little older than I was, she’d already gotten her driver’s license. We’d met through mutual friends and had already run a 5K road race together. This, however, was our first official date.
“Where are we going?” Cam asked when we’d gotten into her car.
“The old theater. They’re showing Much Ado About Nothing. I thought you’d like that.”
“Shakespeare? Really?”
“Hey, I’m not some heathen.”
“You’re just trying to get back at me for beating you in that 5K,” Cam replied.
“I’m not,” I said seriously. “Any time you want to get in the pool with me, I’ll be more than happy to even our record.”
In fact, I liked that Cam had beaten me in that 5K. It was part of what made us work as a couple. She was as accomplished a cross-country runner as I was a swimmer. I’d been a little surprised when she’d beaten me, sure, but then, I think that Cam was astonished by how hard she’d had to work to put me away.
The final result suited us both.
Driving out to the movies that night, I looked over at Cam and smiled. With her red hair and heavy freckles, she was far from the prettiest girl I’d met at Fallbrook. That wasn’t important. I felt freer with Cam than I’d ever felt in my life. Sure, she and I had similar interests and a few of the same friends. A big part of the attraction, though, was the simple but very new experience of being with someone who could just go wherever she wanted. I’d spent the past year with my head underwater dreaming of glory. Cam had spent that same time period on running trails in the backwoods of Idaho. When we were together, we had something that was close to a normal high school experience. We both finally had that thing we were missing when we trained.
But it wasn’t like I loved Cam. What I felt was more a mix of curiosity and admiration. I enjoyed her company. We kissed after the movies that night, and we kept going on dates. We went places—more movies, dinner, high school dances. We stole kisses in the parking lot and walked around holding hands in the quad at school. A lot of times, we just hung out at our respective houses and talked. Cam was a smart girl, smart enough that I connected with her easily. This and our shared athleticism gave us a physical connection that was quite a bit more profound than anything I’d previously conceived, much less experienced.
We went to Homecoming together. Cam wore a frilly black party dress, and I wore a patterned sweater and tie—what passed for Southern California formal wear. I got her flowers, and then we danced the night away under a strobe light in the gym. The DJ played The Cure, Depeche Mode, and half the soundtrack to Pretty in Pink. Afterwards we wound up fooling around on my parents’ couch. INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart played softly on the radio.
It didn’t take long before our kissing got serious. It turned to touching, and suddenly my shirt was open and off. Cam’s dress wound up tangled on the floor; her bra became an afterthought. I probably should have been worried that my parents would walk in, but with the skin of our bodies getting warm, I was, for once, totally incapable of rational thought. My fingers started roaming and then headed south, driven by animal urges that I barely understood. I kept waiting for Cam to catch her breath and say something, but she seemed at least as into it as I was. Another moment, and there weren’t going to be any barriers left to cross.
“Wait,” Cam said at last, a little breathlessly. She looked up. “I don’t—”
The moment broke, and my mind belatedly kicked back into gear. “It’s alright,” I said. I pulled away and realized I was trembling. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but whatever it was, we were way past it. Aloud, I said, “I don’t want to do anything that you don’t want to do. That’s not who I am.”
“I’m just not sure.” Cam looked at me, her pale eyes searching mine. “I’m not saying no, Dan. I just don’t know what I want.”
I’d been expecting resistance, maybe even anger. Cam’s acceptance threw me. I didn’t know what I wanted, either, and suddenly that seemed important.
I played for time. “Maybe we should just get dressed,” I said. “My folks could wake up any minute.”
Was that disappointment on Cam’s face?
“Sure,” she replied slowly. She sighed then said, “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
I thought about this some later and was glad with how it had turned out. I could’ve pushed it, I knew, but who would that have helped? I remembered what Danny G__ had said when he talked about why he hadn’t taken advantage of the captain of the JV girls’ cheerleading team.
“Because she would’ve let me, and then where would we be?”
I’d been lucky in my life to have my share of male role models, men who’d shown me more ways to be a man than the typical macho caricature. I didn’t want to be the kind of man who acted on base impulses or who took what was offered unthinkingly. Still, the reality of the moment scared me, and I reacted badly in its aftermath. I did exactly what I knew that I shouldn’t have done. I started pulling away, seeking a way out of the relationship. I never confronted the issues nor offered poor Cam any sort of explanation. I just sort of stopped calling.
To her credit, Cam was not the kind of girl who would take this quietly. She ran the six or so miles to our house one Saturday afternoon and sat down in our driveway, waiting for someone to come home. She wanted to hear for herself what the Hell had gone wrong between us. I was off swimming somewhere, unfortunately, and didn’t get back for hours.
Alas, my mother did.
Mom never liked Cam. “You can date her now while she’s your way around town,” my mother said repeatedly, “but you’ll have to break up with her once you get your driver’s license. She’s just not pretty enough.”
For better or worse, my image-conscious mother had a very specific vision for me in her head, and a flat-chested redhead with freckles had no place in it, no matter how smart or athletically talented that redhead happened to be. In my mother’s mind, I was this laid back beach bum of a kid who was by far the most popular boy in my school. I was good at swimming because I was good at everything. My wildest successes were a natural byproduct of my very existence. This was what my mother had always wanted for me. She hadn’t seen the actual practices, the pushups in my room, the gasping for breath through those first few months with the Vista Swim Team. She did all the driving, but this was the only part that she understood. She couldn’t see the desire that had fueled my freshman year, nor was she overly fond of the grizzled intensity I’d learned to bring to life’s most important challenges.
In my mother’s mind, I couldn’t date Cam. Not if I wanted to be the popular boy that lived in her high school fantasies. For that, I needed a string of bleach blonde drop-dead knockouts, the kinds of girls who would be complementary accessories to my triumphal conquest of Fallbrook Union High School.
I didn’t know what my mother said to Cam that day in our driveway, but Cam never spoke to me again. In fact, she went to some trouble afterwards to ensure that we were never again in the same room together.
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