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Junior Mints
The summer before I went to college, my former camp counselor Finn called drunk from a bar, announced that he had broken up with his fiancee, and wondered if he could see me. I was staying with my parents in New York City, working a miserable administrative job for a law firm in the World Trade Center. They put me in a windowless file room, sorting, papers on a pro bono case. Every day I would buy a box of Junior Mints for lunch-dessert and eat them all as I read Love in the Time of Cholera. Sometimes I would lock the door of the file room and read into the afternoon. If any of the lawyers came down to look for a file or to check on me, I would tell them that I was afraid to be alone in that deserted part of the office. Their faces said that the room reeked of sugar and deceit.
The night that Finn visited conveniently happened to be the only night of the summer that my parents were out of town. It was also the night before my last day of work. The map of the city was still a jigsaw puzzle to me--scattered pieces that, with only slight attention, would soon be assembled. I meant to bring Finn to the East Village, but I turned us the wrong way coming out of the subway. We were near Washington Square, but at the time it seemed like a vast residential neighborhood with no restaurants to be found. We went to Dojo's, a cheap college joint, and drank pitchers of sangria. Finn told me about his failing relationship. He was as I had remembered him: sincere, but enigmatic, handsome, charming and seemingly convinced that I had grown into the woman he had always imagined I would. I was wearing Birkenstocks. The toilet in the women's room was broken and had overflowed, but I used it anyway, being thankful in my drunken way that the soles of my shoes were thick enough that the flood on the bathroom floor hadn't reached the level of my bare feet.
On our way uptown Finn, to my disbelief, bought a six-pack. He sat in the rocking chair in my room, smoked a joint, and drank three beers. I had a shot of whisky and promptly fell asleep on top of the covers of my single bed. Some amount of time later--maybe two minutes, maybe an hour--I awoke with a start and realized that this night, this night that was literally drunk with opportunity, was going to slip away. Finn was sitting exactly where I had left him, drinking the last of the six-pack.
"I thought we had lost you," he said, apparently not fazed by the possibility.
"No," I said, with the astounding verbal capacity that hits me at two in the morning, on a Thursday night, after several rounds. I walked to the side of the rocking chair to kiss him, but found that I was too tall to do the deed. Had I any experience or innate grace, I might have pulled him to stand. Instead, I found myself kneeling next to the rocking chair. It rocked forward. We kissed.
"I never would have touched you first," he said, removing all of my clothes in one gesture.
"Oh, aren't you the gentleman," I said. "You just got me wasted."
He stopped and put his hands on my shoulders. "Look," he said, "I'm trembling. I'm not to drunk to know that I have wanted this for a long time."
"Okay," I sighed into his neck, "but right now I have to sleep."
The next morning we walked the family dogs together.
"In return for your room last night," I said, "you are the scooper."
Back in the house, we sat on the couch. I leaned against his shoulder, falling back asleep. I woke to his fingers creeping up my skirt. He still wanted me, I realized with surprise and delight. It was morning and he still wanted me. Names ran through my head--the names of all the people who wouldn't believe that this hopeless adolescent love was actually coming to fruition. Years of pining were being rewarded with flesh and blood. My imagined prince, the face that had been my fantasy boy prop for all my adolescence, had come, had let me seduce him, had sobered up, and still wanted me. Jessie, my friend from camp, had to be notified immediately, not to mention the tenth-grade English teacher who had used my case to define "unrequited" to her class.
As he kissed me, I realized that my half-dry hair was plastered to my head on the side that had been on his shoulder. I would not make a fine impression on my last day of work.
We eat Junior Mints in the file rooms of the summer jobs that come and go. We eat them with popcorn until we are ill. We cry at movies, or fall asleep, then forget them. Finn had arrived, in impossible fulfillment of every wish that lay buried in the ground I tread on my way to school. The loves of our youth build themselves into elaborate knights in shining armor until their images eclipse life itself. Sometimes they become reality, but then, even if they aren't the cliched disappointment, they still fail for the same old reasons. One person moves away, or the other gets bored, or they run out of things to talk about. Our desires start young, are unreasonable, and can't be trusted. But there's always another box of Junior Mints.
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