Rebecca van Laer

Charlie Kessler 

There is a certain kind of boy who considers himself a romantic—who, despite the trail of unhappy girls left in his wake, indeed in part because of it, believes that something always goes wrong not because of his insincerity but because of a tragic misunderstanding which in almost every case has to do with the assumption that he is incapable of love, a reputation that he continually tries to overthrow with each new alluring girl who comes into his circle, only to find that he has once again inadvertently and undeservingly cemented it, which in turn makes him only more pining, more hopeful, and yes, more romantic.

Charlie Kessler was such a boy.

It was well known to all the girls who hung out on St. Marks Place—all those fifteen-year-olds in combat boots and t-shirts cut into tank-tops—that Charlie would eagerly take your virginity. This was not to say that they thought he was a creep. First of all, he was only seventeen himself. Second, just as he seemed sincere in his own eyes, he appeared earnest when he cupped his chin in his palm, watching a new girl eat her folded pizza. And he wasn’t actually hot enough to manipulate anyone. He was soft-featured and pale, always dressed in baggy camo pants from the Army Surplus Store paired with t-shirts featuring a variety of holes that may have been from wear but could also be from scissors, which most girls used liberally on both shirts and tights.

It wasn’t so bad to be temporarily admired by such a puppyish boy; it was even flattering.

As for sex, he at least knew the basics, since he had already done it with Carrie and Alex and Bridget, none of whom seemed too angry in the aftermath. If he came up in conversation, they were likely to roll their eyes, shake their heads back and forth, and smile. “Oh God, Charlie,” they’d say. 

Observing his squinting blue eyes, his shy smile, Heather could almost believe that they’d all broken his heart, one by one. And if he was a male slut, well, no one should be slut-shamed, especially if they held only the pure, even holy intention to love and be loved.

The first time she went to Saint Mark’s Place, Heather traveled with Bridget first on NJ Transit, then the R-train. Upon disembarking, she completed what would become her ritual circuit: first, a slice at Ray’s, then a trip to the bodega that didn’t ID teens buying pear-flavored Woodchuck hard cider, then a trip to Subway for a cup to pour it in, and finally, a trip to the Astor Place Target to complete the transfer in the dressing room. With Bridget, she went back out into the late April sunshine laughing.

They encountered Charlie halfway through their magnum. He sat next to them on the stoop with his friend Mike, who had a mohawk and a leather jacket with so many spikes that it was actually a little intimidating. Feeling woozy, dazed, Heather was struck by the sudden jolt of realization that she should buy a lot more pins for her denim vest, if not today in front of her friend and these boys, then later on eBay.

But Charlie put her at ease. Charlie addressed her directly, asking questions about how she liked Edison, and her school, and what she was into besides punk rock—movies? Literature? She liked books more than film, she told him, and then rattled off a few of her favorites: Wuthering Heights. The Sun Also Rises. She had just read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and she was getting into poetry. He asked if she liked Faulkner, and knowing the difficulties that come with lying, she said she didn’t know enough to form an opinion. He grinned and told her that he’d have to give her a copy of As I Lay Dying. Already, from that first day, he’d seemed so certain that they would see each other again.

And then he made it so. He asked for her phone number.

“Well, what do you think?” Bridget had asked on the school bus the following Monday. “Do you wanna smash?”

“Isn’t it kind of weird that he’s your ex?”

“That would be an exaggeration. It was literally nothing.”

“Do you think he likes me?”

“Of course he does. He likes everyone.” Bridget looked down at her flip phone, either missing or ignoring the way that Heather’s face turned red. How embarrassing, that she wanted Charlie to like her specifically, that she wanted to be special.

But she also wanted Bridget to think she was cool. And for Charlie to. And Mike. She wanted to stop being a child.

This was exactly what Bridget was suggesting. That she get it over with and enter the portal into adulthood.

She had come close the previous summer while working at an ice cream stand. Her manager, Paul, was twenty-one, home from Cornell before his senior year. Right away, she had been impressed by his height, well over six feet, which was in and of itself attractive. When he began to make her a new invention in a puppy cup at the beginning of each shift—bizarre combinations like cotton candy with Reese’s and gummy worms—she thought it was somehow related to his major in Hotel Administration, his aspirations of opening his own restaurant. It had taken her an embarrassingly long time to realize this was flirting, not a real way to solicit her feedback. But, once she understood, it was not long before she accepted his ride home and made out with him in the front seat of his Honda and then in the backseat and then let him rub her over her shorts and say “Oh God, I want to fuck you.” When she said, immediately, “Me too,” he withdrew and explained that it would ruin both of their lives. Not just because of the age of consent in New Jersey, but also because it would be too good. It would drive her crazy. She would get too attached.

Heather didn’t want to be seen this way, clingy. And perhaps, in wanting Charlie’s actual admiration, she was already proving herself to be so. But he was the one who was always texting. Every day after school, she opened her flip phone and found a message asking her how the day had been, what her homework was, when he would see her again.

They saw each other two more times during which nothing happened. On the first occasion, he snuck into CBGB where Bridget and Heather, bereft of fake IDs and bravery, could not follow. On the second, Bridget wanted to go home with Mike, and Heather didn’t know how to get back to Jersey herself, nor where she would go, since she had told her parents she was spending the night at her friend’s. She ended up in the bottom of Mike’s bunk bed. Mike played heavy metal the whole time, so she couldn’t even hear anything else from above.

Then, finally, summer came. They could spend all day in the city. In June, in the late afternoon, the group of teens having finished a magnum of Woodchuck cider and drunk a little whiskey from Mike’s flask, Heather went off with Charlie to make out in a stairwell. He seemed to know exactly which steps to descend; these particular stairs led not to an apartment door but to a dead end. In the half-dark, the late afternoon light streaming in from only one side, he kissed her—the second person to kiss her in her life—and touched her breasts over her tank top. His mouth was sour and smoky, his odor equal parts All Spice and sweat. She felt like a character in a movie, making out in public like this, and the scene only became more ridiculous when he got down on his knees on the concrete and started trying to pull down her fishnets, to put his face up underneath her pleated pink and black skirt. She couldn’t help but laugh at the feeling of his thick wet tongue on her thigh as she heard, up above, someone walking by with their dog, saying “Good girl, what a good little poop.”

“What?” He said. “You don’t like being eaten out?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Do you want to just do it?”

She paused, stalled—“Do you have condoms?”

He did not have condoms, not even an old one in his wallet.

So they went together to the same bodega where they bought Chuck, and he asked for a 3-pack of Trojans, specifying the ultra-thins in the light blue package. Heather could barely contain her embarrassment, was afraid to see the way the cashier looked at her, but when she finally raised her eyes from her phone, she saw that he wasn’t looking at them at all, but at the little TV screen perpendicular to the register, his eyes drifting back to it while counting Charlie’s change.

It was getting dark. “Where are we going?” Heather asked.

“Back to the stairwell.”

“Really?” Heather asked. That wasn’t the way she pictured it happening, dirty and dank.

So they took a walk. They went East, through Tomkins Square Park, where people were drinking malt liquor out of brown paper bags rather than Subway cups, nothing cute or youthful about it. They walked through clouds of cigarette smoke and jumped across puddles that could be beer, water, piss, anything. Every block or two, Charlie stopped to kiss her in the street, to press her against a building or a lamp post and express his lust again.

When they finally got to the water, it was pitch black, abandoned, illuminated only by a few streetlights. Charlie sat down on a bench and unzipped his pants and pulled what must be his cock out, and Heather went and sat next to him, but he put on the condom almost right away. Somehow, she had worn the perfect skirt to get onto his lap, the pleats billowing out to conceal them both. Perfect, if not comfortable: her shins were on the splintery wood. He pushed her panties to the side, then wrapped his arms around her.

So this was sex. This was what he had done with Carrie and Alex and Bridget, in that order. This was what Paul had denied her, had said would ruin her life.

Did it always feel like this, so startling yet so mundane?

Did Charlie always do it here, or sometimes in the stairwell?

Was the aftermath always the same, the girl sitting on the bench while he unrolled the condom and walked to a garbage can underneath the nearest streetlight?

Was there always applause from a small group of people who she could suddenly make out six benches down, two or maybe three figures in hoodies?

Was the applause for her or for him?

On the walk back to Saint Mark’s Place, Heather felt either elated or shocked; she was not sure which. To try and confirm her reality, she told the story to Bridget on the R-train.

Bridget laughed. “God, he just loves to fuck in public. The first time we did it was on a fire escape.”  And then Heather knew more about her new best friend; Bridget was the kind of girl who could make light of anything.

The following day, Bridget left for Virginia Beach. Heather didn’t feel equipped to go to the city on her own, to navigate the trains and subways in her skirt and fishnets. She spent the mornings before Charlie was up on her parents’ patio, sunning her pale flesh in the gentle morning light. She was not going back to the ice cream shop; her parents had said it was more important to study for the PSATs. She went through the thin pages of the workbook, reading and responding to test questions that felt utterly removed from experience. But occasionally, she came across something that reminded her of Charlie—a mention of Faulkner, or a poem about heartbreak, or a math problem that involved imagining a train—and anticipation took hold. Her body became tense. It was obvious enough: she was waiting to hear from him.

Sometimes he texted a few lines. How r u or sup

He only asked her explicitly once over two weeks, want to come to the city this wknd?

I wish. I have a thing with my parents…she said, a complete lie. Her dad was on business in China, her mother was dead, and her stepmom was teaching at a summer ballet camp, all facts she didn’t even know how to begin telling him.

Bridget, on the other hand, texted her every day about the skater boys of Virginia.

And then, the day before she came back,  one missive on a new topic:

Ummmmmmm she began

??? Heather wrote back

Have u seen Charlie at all?

Nooo just chillin at home

Well Ali told me he was hanging out with this new girl Stefanie? Like have u talked?

Wtf, Heather wrote.

She called him up.

He didn’t even try to deny it.

“I really like you,” he said. “It’s just that I never see you.”

It had been fifteen days. Fifteen days, exactly, since they fucked on a bench. Fifteen days since she’d lost her virginity. And yes, fifteen days since she’d seen him.

Was that so long for him to wait to fuck her again, on a roof or in an alley or in a park?

Strangely, a light feeling descended, something leaden in her gut or her heart bubbling up into her skull and expanding, pushing at the edges. She shuddered. Was she a little light-headed? Actually going crazy?

“Are you laughing?” Charlie asked.

She was, she realized. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to go.” She hung up, then looked at her cell phone in her hands. What would she say to Bridget?

lol Charlie… she typed. She sent.

How could Paul have misled her so? Had he really thought she’d become obsessed? Or had he known exactly what she now understood would have happened: that she would have come to see a college student sleeping with a fourteen-year-old as desperate, pathetic?

Heather saw Charlie only once more, almost fifteen years later to the day in Brooklyn.

She was at her friends’ apartment in Williamsburg after a bottomless champagne brunch. They walked back in the heat of spring, sweating a little in their skinny jeans, not yet equipped for the warm weather.

“You know what would be perfect?” Laura said.

“More wine?” Heather asked.

“Lambrusco.”

“Oh my God, yes.”

They ordered it on Drizly. Thirty minutes later, the doorbell rang, and Laura buzzed the deliveryman up.

Once he walked in, Heather recognized Charlie immediately. She stared at him, making eye contact as he opened his zippered cooler case. He had put on so much weight, all in muscle. His calves looked like sculpted marble. But still, he had that same youthful face. How old was he now? Thirty-two?

Charlie looked back at her and smiled a little. But it was not, she could tell, a smile of recognition. It was, if anything, flirtatious. Here was this girl, this woman, staring openly at him, drinking him in from head to toe.

There is a certain kind of woman who can never make sense of the absurdity of it all: how this thing that has been built up to be so consequential and powerful—sex, desire, love—comes to feel so impersonal, even surreal, over time, when each new betrayal is from one vantage point heartbreaking, but from another objectively funny, encapsulating how ridiculous it is to have a body, and to think that a sense of wholeness might arise from rubbing it against another person’s, when in fact the most frequent outcome is becoming more alienated not just from that person’s body, the fingers that once grazed your collarbone now bizarre to behold, but also from your own body as you remember that you once let it jerk and shudder in that other person’s strange arms—as you admit you once believed something so animal and ordinary might be sacred, meaning that you were once not just romantic but also delusional.

Only after he left did she tell Laura who he was.

“That Drizly driver took my virginity.”

“Oh my God. Stop it. Are you sure?”

“Like 99% sure.” She started looking up his Facebook profile.

“Good for you,” Laura said.

“You think he’s cute?”

“No. I mean, good for you that you’re so hot and not a delivery person. He must feel like a loser.”

“Oh, no. He didn’t recognize me. But I think I found him. I’m going to message him.”

Hey did you just deliver wine in Williamsburg? She typed into the little gray square. Into this box of text that would reach out across time and space to a person who now, apparently, went by “Charles.”

It took him an hour to respond. Wow, yes, I thought I recognized you. Or I did, but I couldn’t place you. How are you? Do you live in the city now?

Lol all good. Remember that time you took my virginity in a public park? She wrote back.

This time, he didn’t respond.