Inhuman Interest Stories

I slept with several girls during my senior year in high school. Now that I’m old, married and monogamous, this is basically irrelevant, but I still think about that year because some of what happened romantically was so fucking weird. This post is the first in an irregular series of entries intended to detail some of that insanity, just for my own amusement, if nothing else.

Teri (not her real name — you can just assume that every name I use is fake) had a pretty face. Her cheekbones were exquisite and her teeth were perfect. She was one of the few people I’d ever met who really was half Native-American. Her caucasian side showed in her light brown, wavy hair and pale green-brown eyes.

She sat next to me in English. A few days before homecoming she slipped me a note, asking me to go. It wasn’t the first time a girl had asked me out at that point, but I was still a sucker for that sort of thing. I wasn’t seeing anyone, so naturally, I said yes. Besides, she really was pretty hot, over all. In the next few days we began hanging out and making out, usually after school. The day of homecoming, she passed me another note, again in English class. Teri asked if I was into games. I returned the note, asking her what she meant by games. She responded, “love-making games.”

It was a weird way to put it, but I understood her perfectly. She was asking me if we could fuck after homecoming that night. After school that day I tried to clarify her meaning. She simply said, “you’ll see.”

Yep, she meant fucking. So we did…

This went on for a few weeks and I began to discover something; when Teri and I were out of bed (I had a room that was detached from my parents’ house, so sneaking girls in was ridiculously easy), we didn’t really get along very well. In fact, there was something about her that really unsettled me. Dealing with Teri in conversation was like biting into a twinkie only to chip your tooth on a stone embedded in the cream-filled center. She was from Texas and could be the sweetest southern belle you could imagine on the surface, but just beneath that syrupy veneer was something cold, cruel, and rock-hard.

In bed, things were just fine. Really fine.

But eventually, I chose to — as they say in the business world — ‘go in another direction.’

This did not set well with Teri. I don’t remember a lot of the details anymore, but she began a campaign of sociopathic malice towards me. It involved, in part, hitting up my most vulnerable male friend for info about me. He was vulnerable because he’d only ever had one girlfriend, and there wasn’t much to that. He was the very definition of a nebbish, a nerd. There was an unfortunate dichotomy in my friendship with Jim — it looked to outside observers like I was ‘the cool guy,’ and he was the geek. I used to get a lot of this: ‘why are you friends with a weirdo like him?’

I won’t digress much further here save to say this — under the surface, Jim and I had much more in common than anyone knew. When I hung out with him, I could revert to my nerdy, bookish self and not maintain the pseudo-jock-like, big man on campus veneer I’d developed throughout 4 years of high school. My friendship with Jim alone was worth a bad 80s movie, a John Hughes knock-off.

As weird and insecure as I was beneath the skin, I’d figured women out to some degree, and Jim had not. He hid his jealousy of the ease with which I could find a date pretty well, but when Teri started calling him and trying to charm information out of him about what I was up to, he spilled the beans. She was a great manipulator; she’d figured out that Jim thought she was hot, and knew how to make him think there might be some nookie in his future if he only came clean about me.

As it was, I don’t recall being up to all that much. I think I went back to an off-again, on-again ex, a girl who’d graduated from high school the year before and was taking a year off before attending college.

I must have done or said enough to set Teri off, though. I had my own phone line — a luxury for a teen at the time — and I began receiving calls at all hours of the night. Most were hangups. A few, however, consisted of variations on this theme: “FAGGOTFAGGOTFAGGOTFAGGOTFAGGOTFAGGOT!!!!!” (repeat until hoarse). Sometimes “FAGGOT” might be replaced by “FUCK YOU.”

The calls were from Teri. In school she was avoiding me as much as possible. We’d changed seating arrangements in English, and she was behind me. I could feel two hot burn-marks each day from where she leveled her psychotic gaze against the back of my head.

The calls got worse at Christmas time. Eventually, I asked my Dad what I should do. He said that if I thought there was a real danger from the girl, we could do something legal. This was before people took out restraining orders against each other as a matter of course, but in hindsight I’m fairly sure he was talking about something like that. I didn’t want to go there.

Ultimately, I didn’t have to. Teri found another guy, a football player at a rival high school. He apparently had no interest in kicking my ass on her behalf, so eventually, the nasty looks in the halls and in English abated, and the phone calls ceased all together.

Writing this I see that it doesn’t seem all that interesting; I’m re-hashing shit that was over more than 20 years ago and not nearly as interesting as it seemed at the time.

But the story is valuable because of the lesson I missed learning. From the moment Teri slipped me the note about games, I should have been wary. I wasn’t, though. Eighteen-year-old boys aren’t equipped to get their guards up, most of the time, if it appears as though an attractive female is offering up the golden prize. If the fruit is juicy, sweet, and hanging low, they’ll usually snatch it off the tree and take a big, lusty bite.

The world is different, now. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that similar stories between teens in high school are a lot more common, today. Young women have a different view of their sexuality, a better understanding of the power they can wield. My experience with Psycho Bitch Teri probably seems quaint.

To me, that’s just scary, especially since I have more than 1 son. Neither of my boys are high school age, but knowing what I do today, I fear for them. Those changes in the way young females handle boys may simply mean that where I only encountered one Teri, my sons may be in line to deal with nothing but latter-day versions of the same girl, once they do reach age 17 or so.

Still, my experience with Teri was mild compared to what came later.

Later on I would deal with lullabies, three-ways, unfortunate fluid exchanges, and lesbians who loved to give blowjobs. So stay tuned.