At Christmas time, when she still lived at home, I asked
Ruth for the same present every year: "please write me a story."
Here's one she sent me recently just because she knew I would remember her
first boyfriend.
From Ruth:
Some mornings, my dad would ask me if I knew anything about the artifacts that
had appeared in our side yard overnight. “Teenage scat”, he liked to call it:
menthol cigarette butts, a soda bottle, handwritten love notes, a potato chip
bag. I insisted on my ignorance but I knew exactly who had left them: my
boyfriend, who had ridden his bike the 10 plus miles from his home to mine in
the middle of the night, high on the promise of my sneaking out to meet him. I
always chickened out, or fell asleep, or a combination of both, but that never
stopped him from showing up, he had no reason to stay home anyways, no one
cared where he was or what he was doing.
It was 1997; I was 14 going on 15 and deep in the throes of teenage girlhood.
Alanis Morrisette, Curt Cobain and the Spice Girls were the soundtrack of my
life, depending on my mood, and my friends were my entire world. I had met this
boy by the lake at my grandma’s house. He was 6 months older than me and
immediately took interest in who I was. I reveled in the attention.
He had big brown eyes that pleaded for someone to love him and even at my young
age I could tell that the scars covering his hands matched the scars on his
heart. His life had not been an easy one, and he quickly fell into a pattern of
following me around like a puppy, which I welcomed with girlish delight. He
never wanted to go home, and although I never asked, I could sense why.
Once, I got permission to leave my grandma’s house to meet up with him for a
couple hours. Not long after I left, huge black clouds rolled in, bringing with
them a summer afternoon thunderstorm. We ducked into a thicket of trees for
cover. It was as if we had stepped through the wardrobe. In a land all our own,
we stood, body against body, as the fat warm raindrops pelted us. We stood
locked in an embrace, more in solidarity than in any type of love or lust and
rode out the storm together.
I was grounded big time for that one, my grandma worried sick.
I would have done it again in a heartbeat.
I got my own phone line that year, the pinnacle of teenage cool. I spent hours
holed up in my room, talking with girlfriends I had only parted with earlier
that day, rehashing details of our bus rides home from school, who our crushes
were, what we were going to wear tomorrow. Later, in the evenings, my boyfriend
would call, after he got home from his job of bagging groceries at the local
Winn-Dixie, and the rest of the night we would spend on the phone, sometimes
not even speaking, as I did homework or we listened to CD’s together. He never
wanted to hang up, and I got the feeling he just didn’t want to be alone, that
he needed someone there, even if not physically in the same room. Some nights I
would fall asleep cradling the receiver as he whispered, “Are you still awake?”
Time moved on, and we lost touch. That troubled young boy grew into a troubled
young man. I moved across the country and would only hear snippets of news
about him. The years didn’t get any easier for him and it seemed that anytime
life presented him with a fork he chose the wrong tine. I learned that he took
his own life a few years ago, the details surrounding his death as dark and
muddy as his eyes were when he smiled at me. I shudder to think of the events
leading up to his exit from this world.
In my memory, he will forever be a sweet young boy with freckled olive skin and
a voice that cracked with puberty, lost in the world, his footing never quite
stable. And I hope, wherever he is now, that he has finally found love. — with
Ruth Haller Grubb.
