KarMel Scholarship 2005
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“Let’s Do It” By
Briana Lawrence |
Desciption of Submission: “A story told by a young girl, Brie, in
high school who is dealing with being in love with her girlfriend Nya.
It's the best feeling in the
world, isn't it?
When
someone puts their arms around you,
kisses you, calls you all kinds of
beautiful and
continues to tell you that they care.
Too
bad nobody told me
that it's only considered the
best feeling in the world
if that person is a guy, and
not a girl...
...
like me.
Let's Do It
By: Chibi
You could always tell
when driver's ed was over in a high school. You could
tell because the parking lot was overrun by sixteen year olds whose parents
finally let them drive the family car with promises of being careful and
buckling up. Overrun by kids who proudly drove that car they had been working
at Burger World or SavMart after school for, or that car mom and dad was nice
enough to get for them because they loved, also known as spoiled, their child
to death. You could always tell when driver's ed was
over in a high school. The number of students increased because they all wanted
to show off to their friends the new power they possessed called a license and
car keys.
I hated it.
I leaned back against
one of the several Jeeps in the parking lot, tying my hair back in two sloppy
ponytails that brushed against my neck. My hair had been doing the annoying
getting into my eyes thing since the wind decided to pick up and add to the
cool September air.
It only took another minute for the back doors to be slammed open
against the brick wall of my high school. Before my eyes the students of
Cresthill High who no longer had to catch the bus strutted out, book bags on
their backs and car keys in their hands.
I absolutely hated it.
"Oh look, it's
Brie." I turned my attention over towards a group of girls who stood at
the car across from the Jeep I was leaning against. The one who spoke, an
overly cheerful Barbie type girl, made a sick looking face at me. "Yuck!
She looked at me! Now she probably wants me!"
"Oh
no! I think she wants me too!" Barbie's sidekick shrieked.
"Let's go before we get her gay cooties." I was tempted to lick my
lips at them just to scare them but I didn't think I needed to have anymore gay cootie rumors about me. This was why
I hated the sudden boom in the student population.
It meant that there
were more people to make fun of me.
"Brie!"
I let my eyes move back over to the back doors instead of watching Barbie and
her gang drive off. I couldn't help but smile when I saw her running towards me. Nya Summers. The type of girl who could make you forget that a few seconds ago
you were having thoughts about a certain Barbie girl's car crashing. Nya
could make you forget that simply with a pair of big cocoa brown eyes framed in
glasses and a bright smile. She had the keys to the Jeep I was leaning against
in her hand, a car she had just gotten for her sixteen birthday from her
mother. There were two more Jeeps the same black color as Nya's but this was
the only Jeep in the lot that had a rainbow sticker on the back of it. When her
mother asked Nya just smiled sweetly and told her I like the colors of the rainbow, that's all.
Once she made it over
to me she pulled me into her arms and hugged me. Out of reflex I snuggled close
to her, my fingers combing through her hair that was long enough to tease the
middle of her back. "I hope you didn't wait too long." She said to
me, her lips brushing against my ear.
"No. You did,
however, just miss today's brilliant comment."
"Oh?" She let
go of me, threw her book bag in the back of the Jeep, and opened the passenger
side door for me so I could step in. I kissed her lightly on her cheek before I
took off my book bag and sat down in the seat, tossing it in the back with
hers. We always joked around and said that she was more of a gentleman then any
guy we knew. "What was it this time? Your secret crush
on our teacher, Mrs. Mino?" She asked as she went over to the driver's
side of the car.
"No. It was the
one about me wanting every girl I see. You know?" I transformed my voice
into something more high pitched. "'Brie is looking at me. She wants
me!'"
Nya laughed as she
started the car. I wanted to laugh but I think I was just tired. There was only
so much I could take from the students here since I swear every one of them had
to at least say one thing about us being together. Even the incoming freshmen
had a remark or two to give, as if making fun of the lesbians was a sort of
initiation into the school.
Nya pulled out of the
school parking lot and stuck her middle finger up high for the car full of boys
that drove next to us. They had puckered their lips up and whistled at us to
try and get us to kiss each other for their benefit.
"Oh come on,
baby." One guy said out his window while his buddies continued to smack
their lips at us. Nya ignored them and drove faster but my eyes stayed on the
boys who by now were rolling over with laughter, finding themselves incredibly
funny.
"Jerks."
Nya gripped onto the steering wheel tightly, making her way towards my house to
drop me off. I simply stared out the window at the passing scenery. I wanted to
say something but I really didn't have anything to say. What was there to say? Jerks like that infested our school everyday so at this point we
were both use to it. I began to watch the people we passed as Nya drove
me home. The woman jogging in a bright blue and pink jogging
suit, the music of her headphones giving her more motivation to run. The
old man we always saw at this time who walked his dog
in an attempt to stay forever youthful since the dog was a pretty playful
golden retriever who had a tendency to lead the walks him and the old man went
on. All the little kids running home to watch some cartoon or whatever and
pretend to be heroes of the world. I watched all those people around me and
wondered just how many of them were like those girls and those guys at school?
We'd usually make a
joke about what was said about us as we walked down the hallways of Cresthill
High, or made a joke at the hushed whispers shared in the girl's locker room
when we had gym class together. "Gods, they're everywhere." Nya would
say to me. When I asked her what she meant she'd say in a loud, annoyed voice,
"Straight people. I try to go to class and there they are. I try to get my
books and there they are. It's like a virus or something!" We had both
laughed and for a moment one of the girls in the locker room cracked a smile.
But it had been months since that event happened so now all those straight people were growing in numbers
and annoyance. Not all of them gave us a hard time, of course, but enough of
them did give us a hard time, such a hard time that we were both beginning to
run out of jokes to tell.
I had a pretty high
tolerance of ignorant people, but hearing them everyday was beginning to be too
much for my system to take.
When Nya stopped in
front of my house I didn't move to leave, didn't move to lean in and kiss her
like I always did. Instead I just sat there, looking over the bed of roses my
mother had planted, looking over the house I had lived in for my entire life,
looking over everything as if I were planning to never see it again.
Then, I said it.
"Let's do it." I didn't realize the full meaning of that statement
when I said it. Here I was, sixteen years old, still young and in love as they
say. A lot of people have said that I was too young to know what love is but
last time I checked love didn't have an age requirement. Nya turned to look at
me and gave me a confused what the hell
did my girlfriend just say to me look.
“Do... what?”
“Go.”
"Go?” Nya looked
lost. “Go where?"
"Away
from here, this place, this city. This
everything." It was something I had been saying for quite sometime.
Ever since it was decided that I was a bad person for falling in love with a
girl I had been saying let's get the hell out of here. I always made it sound
incredibly simple. We could just drive off one night in Nya's car and not look
back. We could get jobs as waitresses in a diner or whatever kind of job a girl
got when she ran away from home. But Nya was the sensible one who always
managed to convince me that leaving was a bad idea. We'd be leaving behind the
life we had known for god knows how long. She'd have to leave her mother, a
woman who only had her daughter to spend time with, while I'd have to leave
both of my parents and my cute little dog, Scruffy.
"Brie...
no. You know we can't go." Every time she said that I knew that
deep down she wanted to. It was in her voice, her eyes, her everything told me
that she wanted to leave.
"Why
not?"
"You just want to
leave everything behind?"
"Yes! I want to
leave everything behind, I just want to be somewhere where I can be with you
and no one cares."
"Who cares what
other people say? I thought you liked giving them all a hard time anyway,
that's why we make so many jokes."
"Nya... how many
jokes have we made lately?" She was silent. She just sat there, holding
onto the steering wheel of her car. I used her silence to my advantage and kept
talking. "It's getting to you, isn't it? All of this.
You want to leave, don't you?"
"Brie!"
I groaned softly and rolled my eyes before I looked over at the front door of
my house to see my mother standing there, waving to me with flour covered hands
that I just knew smelled like chicken. Why did moms have to be so good at
interrupting at a bad time? "Brie, come in the house please?"
"I'm coming
mom!" I snatched up my book bag and turned to look at Nya, waving to her
and smiling since I knew my mother was still at the door watching us. As fun as
it might've been to give my mom a heart attack from seeing me kiss a girl it
probably wasn't the wisest thing in the world to do. "I'll call you later,
o.k.?"
"O.K."
Nya looked up at my mother and waved to her. "Hey, Mrs.
Eiriksen!" My mother waved back to her and stepped inside the house
to wait for me. That was really odd, because that was usually my mom's cue to
invite Nya over for dinner. And she never stepped inside the house to wait for
me; she always stayed at the door and waited there so we could walk in
together. Maybe the food was close to being done or something.
I turned to face Nya
again and didn't even have to ask. She simply wrapped her arms around me and
pulled me close for the softest of kisses. Girls' lips were so much softer than
guys’ lips, something I had learned when I found myself with a boyfriend for
about two seconds before I made peace with myself by calling myself a lesbian.
Kissing that boy had felt sloppy and too forced, but kissing Nya always felt
like she was taking her time with me so we could enjoy each and every second of
our lips being brought together.
We didn't kiss for very
long, we couldn't since my mom was waiting for me and would probably walk
outside to call me back in again. So to prevent that from happening I said,
"love you, Nya," and stepped out of her car.
"Love you too,
Brie." I stood in front of her car for as long as I could before my spider sense kicked in and told me to
get in the house because my mother was getting impatient with me.
I was right. Mom was
cooking chicken. It was the first thing that welcomed me inside, beating little
Scruffy to the punch. "Hey there, you." I
petted him for a few seconds before he was satisfied and scampered off into the
living room to lie on the couch before my mom could come in and make him get
down then complain about the little white hairs he shed all over her lovely
floral decorated couch.
"Brie?
Come into the kitchen, please." For some reason my mom sounded very
serious. Seriousness was something my father specialized in, not my mother. I
didn't bother to worry about it too much; instead I stepped into the kitchen
and took a seat at the table. My stomach made happy little noises from smelling
and seeing the fried chicken my mother was pulling out of the grease.
"What's up, mom?
Did you want help with dinner or something?" I knew the answer to that was
no. Cooking was something my mother did alone, as if it were her own little
world. But I think she got a kick out of me asking anyway. At least she usually
did, because when she turned to look at me there was no smile on her face.
It was disturbing to
see her looking so serious.
"Brie..." She
looked like she didn't know how to start the conversation. "I got a call
from Nya's mom today."
"Oh?" Our
moms were pretty good friends and we both secretly wanted to have each other's
moms. Nya wanted a mom who didn't work all the time like her single mother did,
the single mother who made up for it by getting her kid a Jeep. I, on the other
hand, wanted a mom who was gone at least for an hour. But my dad was the one
who worked all the time while my mom stayed here and did things to get flour
covered hands that smelled like chicken. "What did Ms. Summers call about?
Is everything o.k.?"
"No. No, it's not.
You see... Ms. Summers had the day off today and decided to clean the
house." I gave my mom a blank look. I failed to see the problem. "She
was cleaning Nya's room and found her journal."
"Her
journal?" I tried to sound like I didn't know what was coming, but
I did. I knew exactly what my mom was going to say but instead I humored her by
saying, "So she put it back, right? Very exciting day,
mom."
"No. Brie,
she..."
***
"You read my
journal!?"
"It's the best
feeling in the world, isn't it?" She glared at me and practically ripped
that page out of my journal to read the next one to me, as if I didn’t know
what I had written. It was the first time I had ever seen my mother out of her
work clothes in such a long time, only to see her angry with me. "When
someone puts their arms around you, kisses you, calls you all kinds of
beautiful and continues to tell you that they care."
"Mom, stop
it!" I tried to reach for the journal but she moved away from me, moving
around my bedroom like a shark ready to take another bite out of someone's
heart. I tried to pay attention to something else, like my computer screen
saver of a kitten chasing a ball of yarn. Or one of the several posters of
None of this worked
because she just kept reading, actually tugging at her hair in frustration as
if she were reading a bad report card or something. I guess, to her, she was.
"Too bad nobody
told me that it's only considered the best feeling in the world if that person
is a guy, and not a girl... like me!" She threw my
journal to the ground by my feet. "You. Are. Not. GAY!"
***
"Why does it
matter?" I asked. My mother sat down at the table with me, clasping her
hands together and looking a lot like a teacher I had once in second grade who
had slowed down her words as if we couldn't understand her.
"Brie... that kind
of thing just isn't right."
"Why?"
"Brie.
Please." She lightly rubbed her head, seeming to be getting a headache
from tackling a problem that wasn't on how many minutes you let the brownies
cool down before you cut them. "You can't be this way anymore. It's
just... wrong."
***
"That's the only
reason you have?" I couldn't believe this was happening. My quote, unquote
cool mom was yelling at me. This
woman who was nice enough to get her daughter a Jeep, was nice enough to work
so many extra hours to support me and get me the things I wanted to make up for
the fact that she was rarely here... was yelling
at me and looking at me like I was some kind of fungus. How dare her do
this to me! She worked so much that she barely remembered what color my hair
was, and now she was going off on me because I was seeing a girl?!
"That's the only
reason I need.”
“It’s a stupid reason!”
“Don’t talk back to me.”
My mother looked like she wanted to slap me across the face. I was in so much
of a shock that I couldn’t breathe. I would think that finally, on a day she
had off, on a day where we could eat together and spend time together she would
use her energy on that, not on yelling at me for… for being happy! But I didn’t
say any of these things. I didn’t want to, and to be honest I was a bit scared
to. My mother, the only person I ever had before I met Brie, was screaming at
me. And it hurt. How was I supposed to deal with her treating me like this? “Listen
Nya…”
***
"You will not see
that girl anymore." I think my heart stopped when I heard her say that.
Not see... Nya? I think my mother seriously had lost
her mind to even suggested such a thing. I was going
to protest but then she frowned at me. "And you better do as I say, Brie,
or I'm telling your father." My father? He was
the kind of man that could make you cry from just raising his voice. He'd do
something drastic, like make us move away from this place that was spreading
this gay disease all around the neighborhood.
I couldn't believe this
was happening. I wanted to pinch myself to wake up from this nightmare but
instead I heard the front door open and close, heard my father cry out to us,
"I'm home!" I stared into my mother's eyes to see if she was
bluffing, to see that maybe she was just bluffing.
I learned that my
mother had an excellent face for playing poker, because she didn't even bat an
eyelash.
"Hey
you two. Mmmm, do I smell chicken?" I looked up at my mother and
nodded my head, but not to answer my dad's question about the chicken. He did,
however, answer as if I were responding to him. "Great! I'm
starving!"
"I'm not... very
hungry." I whispered.
"Awwww, come on
sweetie you gotta eat something." My dad was the type to always sound like
he was yelling, and at the moment that was not the type of voice I needed to
hear.
"Yes,
Brie. So set the table please so we can eat." I got up from the
table and did as I was told, not brave enough to test my mother's patience
right now. My father simply sat at the table, completely oblivious as to what
was going on, though if he would've been paying close enough attention to me and
not the food on his plate he could've seen how watery my eyes were.
I made it a point after
dinner to go to my room and slam the door shut. I continued to tell my mom that
I was too busy with homework to talk and since my dad was one of those my child is on the honor roll dads he
made her leave me alone so I could study. They had finally went
to sleep around eleven thirty since my dad had to work, as usual, and my mom
was the type of woman who went to sleep at the same time as her husband. I
tried sleeping but it didn't work. I watched my clock go from eleven thirty to
two thirty, cried twice while doing it but made sure to bury my face in my
pillow so my mother's spider sense of
her daughter's tears wouldn't wake her up.
Not like she would care
that I was crying over this. The only one who would care I couldn't even talk
to anymore.
At three in the morning
I decided to try and sleep again, at least for a little while. The crying had
tired me out anyway so maybe I could get a couple of hours of sleep before I
had to go to school and face all those people there. That made me feel a little
better, because I knew that someone would say something to set me off since I
was currently overemotional with what my mother had said. I could punch the
poor guy or girl in the face since I knew they'd trigger the sadness, the
hopelessness, and the anger I felt.
But imagine my surprise
when I heard rocks hitting my window as soon as my eyes closed to send me to
sleep. Imagine my surprise when I got out of bed and looked out the window to
see Nya standing there in my backyard by the old swing set and sandbox my dad
built me when I was five, tears in her eyes, and a book bag on her back.
"Let's do
it." She said to me. I gave her a confused what the hell did my girlfriend just say to me look.
"Do... what?"
"Go."
Let's
do it. I didn't realize
the full meaning of that statement when I said it. Here I was, sixteen years
old, still young and in love as they say. A lot of people have said that I'm
too young to know what love is but last time I checked love didn't have an age
requirement... or a gender one.
The End
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