Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It(2)

(Wasn’t that the point?)

Lucas didn’t seem to mind my thigh hair, though, as his sweaty hand rested on top of it. In my fantasies, Lucas would hold my hand, rubbing gentle circles around my thumb as he looked into my eyes and whispered, “Gosh, Phoebe, you’re so beautiful.” His damp hand certainly would not be pressed against my upper leg like this, and he definitely would not have a whitehead in the corner of his nose that looked like it could burst at any moment.

The air in the room was ripe as the bodies of hundreds of adolescents packed together like sardines. I thought about Prince Damon, the protagonist from the latest book I’d bought from Mrs. Wilson. Despite being captured and tortured for information, he never gave up the location of his beloved, the lost princess of Alencia. He died protecting her. But I was sure that if you had forced the prince to withstand the smell of this auditorium for more than five minutes, he would have talked. Lucas, who I’m pretty sure opted for Abercrombie & Fitch body spray in place of deodorant, was partially to blame. I subtly leaned toward him and took a whiff, wondering if I could at least detect notes of sea salt and summer, like Nicholas Sparks said I would.

Instead, my eyes watered from the smell of onion.

Principal Roxbury queued up a welcome-back-to-school montage, a collection of photos from years past thrown into iMovie and set to “Good Riddance” by Green Day.

Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road, the song began.

Lucas put his arm around me. I expected the pressure to feel like a weighted blanket, that specific kind of heaviness that makes you feel safe. But instead, his touch sent a chill through me.

My insides started to shiver.

Wasn’t I sweating just a minute ago?

An iciness spread across my palms. I tried wiggling my fingers, hopeful that the movement would restore some warmth to my hands.

But they were frozen solid.

I turned to Lucas, prepared to ask him if he, too, was experiencing the sudden drop in temperature. When I opened my mouth to speak, the words were stuck, blocked by a giant lump in my throat.

I can’t breathe.

I became desperate to get rid of the lump. I kept trying to swallow, over and over and over again, but it was impossible. My mouth had gone completely dry.

My breath started coming in uneven, shallow spurts.

My throat is closing up.

I tried focusing on Principal Roxbury’s presentation, but I was consumed by the weight of Lucas’s arm wrapped around me. He started rubbing circles on my shoulder, faster and rougher than the ones I had imagined him tracing gently along my thumb. I could feel my heartbeat in the center of my clammy palms, I could hear it ringing in my ears, and I could see it in the corners of my eyes as my vision started to blur.

I’m dying.

Was this what it was supposed to feel like before your first kiss? I thought back to my books. Not once was there a mention of something like this happening to any of the characters leading up to a kissing scene. This wasn’t right.

And for the first time, I thought: There’s something really wrong with me.

The tighter Lucas’s grip around me became, the larger the lump in my throat grew, until I was convinced he could see it poking out of my neck. Cheers echoed through the room as my classmates spotted themselves on the screen, blissfully unaware that there was a seventh-grade girl about to die in the back row, and as the song started on its final refrain, Lucas leaned in. I kept my eyes trained on his whitehead as I sat completely still, bracing myself.

His mouth was only inches away from mine when an image of the cereal I’d had for breakfast popped into my head.

How odd.

My stomach churned. Our lips didn’t even have a chance to make contact before I projectile vomited.

All over him.

He screamed.

Every head in the auditorium swiveled away from the presentation at the front and toward the chaos in the back. Lucas got up and ran to the exit, still yelling and covered in the contents of my stomach. The speakers blasted the song’s final line, I hope you had the time of your life, as the doors slammed shut behind him.

I wondered how long I could get away with staying behind the pole. Forever wouldn’t have been long enough.



* * *



—

It’s been seventeen years, and I’m still haunted by the memory of my regurgitated Frosted Flakes slowly dripping down Lucas’s face. I live in constant fear of something like that happening again, of slipping into a state of total panic and losing control of myself.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars in therapy trying to figure out what went wrong that day in the auditorium and why it’s kept happening over the years, why the lump in my throat comes back at the thought of getting physical with someone. Or even going on a date.

I still have no answers.

But despite not knowing why I am the way that I am, I’m absolutely sure of two things:

I’m going to be thirty in a month.





This one is a given.

I’m still a virgin.





This one, though, I’m determined to change.

Starting now.





1


Monday

(Thirty Days Until Thirty)

“You know if you keep saying you’re going to kill yourself, I’ll have to conduct a formal risk assessment, right?”