Chapter 51

The weeks passed and I was enjoying my senior year of high school, except for one troubling thing. Debbie was depressed all the time. Heartbroken. I guess it was the way I had been when Mr. Roman died. But nobody died. It was Wally. He hadn’t called her since their fight in the back seat of Paul’s car at Canarsie Pier.

I was once again in her bedroom watching her cry. She was sitting on her bed leaning against the headboard, her face buried in her hands. She cried a lot since the fight. I sat at the foot of the bed not knowing what to do or say. Debbie’s hands slid off her face and she looked at me through puffy, watery eyes.

“Can’t Paul get Wally to double date with us?” Debbie asked for the umpteenth time.

“Paul doesn’t speak to Wally much. That asshole is too busy with his new college friends.”

“He’s not an asshole. Can’t Paul ask him?”

I thought about it before saying, “Do you really want to go out with Wally?”

“Yeah, I love him.”

“How can you love him after what he did?”

“I just do.”

“If you went out with him now, why would it be different?” I asked.

Debbie lowered her eyelashes. The tips sparkled with dots of tears. “I would let him do what he wants.”

“You said that’s only for your husband.”

“So, if we get back together we’ll get married. I always thought we would. That’s why I let him do what he did. But if I have to let him do more to get him back, I will.”

“He should want to be with you because he loves you, not because you let him fuck you.”

Debbie’s eyes opened wide and her hands flew to cover her gaping mouth. “I didn’t mean that! Oh, god, he wouldn’t want to do that, would he? I mean, before we were married? Would he?”

“He’s a boy, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but he knows how I feel about that.”

“And he knew how you felt about what he did in the car. He doesn’t care how you feel about it.”

Debbie looked down. “He isn’t that bad. He just, uh, got carried away. I overreacted. It was my fault.”

I scooted to the head of the bed and pulled Debbie into my arms. “It wasn’t your fault. He’s a jerk.”

Debbie wrenched free. “He’s not! He’s not really like that.”

“Well, Paul can’t reach him now that he has new friends.”

“Then you call him!” All of a sudden, Debbie was excited and bouncing on the mattress. “Call Wally and ask to double date.”

“Why don’t you call him?” I asked.

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“I don’t even have Wally’s number.”

“I’ll give it to you. Please, if you’re my friend you’ll do it for me.”

When I got home, I called Wally. Like Paul had said, he was out with his new college friends. But unlike with Paul, Wally called me back when he got home.

“Hey, doll, it’s Wally,” he said when I answered the telephone. “What’s up?”

Just hearing his voice caused a tightness in my gut and my free hand curled into a tight fist. “Yeah, um, I was wondering if you wanted to double date with me and Debbie.”

“How about you and me go out?”

I gasped. I must have misunderstood.

“That’s what I’m asking,” I said. “Me and Paul and you and Debbie. A double date.”

“Why do you think I always asked to double date with you and always took my car?”

“I don’t know. I thought you liked to double date, and liked to drive.”

“Nah, I liked watching you in the back seat when we parked. You’re hot. I might have been touching Debbie, but I was thinking of you. So how about we go on a date, just you and me?”

I wanted to punch Wally in the face. He was a pig. But I had to tread lightly. Debbie was blind to the true Wally.

“You know I’m engaged,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, but the knuckles of my fist turned white as my fingernails dug into my palm. “And Paul is your best friend.”

“He was when we were kids. No more. You should meet my new college friends. So how about it? Want to go out with me?”

I slammed the telephone handset down so hard it bounced out of the cradle and rattled on the end table next to my parents’ bed. My hand was shaking. I took a few calming breaths, inspected the handset for damage, replaced it, and went to my bedroom. How was I going to tell Debbie?

The next day when I met Debbie in front of my house to walk to school, she asked, excitedly, “So what did Wally say? Did you call him?”

“Forget Wally. He’s an asshole.”

“He’s not! I told you it wasn’t his fault. So did you ask him?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And he asked me out.”

Debbie gawked at me. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. He wants to go out with me alone.”

“But you’re engaged!”

“I told him that. And I—”

“No! That can’t be. What did you say to him? Did you lead him on?”

“Debbie, calm down. I asked him to double date with us, with you and him on a date with me and Paul like we always did. Just like you said. All he wanted to do was go out with me. That’s when I hung up on him.”

Tears welled up in Debbie’s eyes. “That can’t be. You must have led him on. How could you?”

“Do you think I would do that to you? Or Paul? I can’t even stand Wally. I hate him.”

Debbie fell back into her melancholy state. It took a couple of weeks, but she finally agreed to double date with Paul and me and a business friend of Paul’s. Wally wasn’t the only one with new friends.

The double date was a disaster. Debbie hardly spoke. Thankfully we went to a movie so there wasn’t much opportunity to talk. After we left the cinema, Debbie and her date were in the back of Paul’s car. She sat as far away from the boy as she could, pressed against the inside of the car door. I whispered for Paul to take Debbie straight home. Before the car came to a full stop in front of Debbie’s house, she had the door open. She jumped out of the car so fast her date had to run to catch up to her. And she jerked her head away when the boy attempted to kiss her goodnight at her front door. Paul dropped me off next. No parking. No making out. I had waited a whole week for the weekend to be with Paul and I ended up using my hairbrush for relief.

Before I knew it, it was Halloween, a favorite holiday of mine as a kid. I was going to a costume party with Paul and begged Debbie to go with us. I told her that Paul would get her a date. When she said she didn’t want a date, I told her she could go without one since there would be other people there without dates. She said that would be too embarrassing. I reminded her of New Years Eve when Paul was sick and she had convinced me to go without him. I reminded her that I had met a boy there. But I lied that I had fun at the party. What I didn’t tell her was that it wasn’t fun because of the disappointing sex with George Papadopoulos.

Debbie refused to go to the party without a date so Paul and I went alone. Now that Paul was making money, he rented costumes for us. Batman and Catwoman. I was Catwoman of course. Our costumes were a big hit at the party, but we ended up not appreciating them when we left early to park at Canarsie Pier to make out.

We were kissing passionately in the back seat of Paul’s car with him squeezing my breast over the costume. And then his hand left my breast. He pulled on my costume, tugging both the top and bottom with both hands. His tongue stopped moving inside my mouth. I waited. But his kissing didn’t resume as he continued to claw at my costume, pinching the fabric in different places. I pulled away from the kiss and stared at him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“How do you open this thing?”

Of course this thing was my one-piece costume. It was like a baby’s onesie with long sleeves and legs. So tight that I had to squeeze into it earlier. Literally. An inch at a time as I had wiggled and shimmied it over my hips and up my body.

“There’s a zipper in the back,” I said.

“How about the front?”

I already knew the answer, but I looked down my body anyway. There were no buttons in the front like a blouse. There was no skirt for Paul to slide his hand under or a waistband for access that way. I chuckled when I thought about my mother making me wear a skirt on dates. The skirt she had insisted on had provided easy access to my pussy. The only way Paul was going to get at my body was for me to completely remove the costume. No way! I wasn’t going to do that in the back seat of a car in public. In later years, when I was older, doing that would have aroused me, but back then I was still discovering who I was.