Christmas With Assholes
Looking back on a time before I knew how badly my boyfriend (and his friends) were treating me
Looking back on a time before I knew how badly my boyfriend (and his friends) were treating me
When I met my first boyfriend’s best friend, the first thing he did was pull me close, hug me with a hard slap on the back, and declare, “You’re so much hotter than the last one.”
We were standing and getting snowed on at an outdoor mall in downtown Denver. It was nearly Christmas—my first break in college and my first trip away from home that wasn’t for family or speech and debate. I had only known the boyfriend for a couple of months, which now seems to me like nothing at all, but everything was hazily new, and I was young, and I wanted all the time with him I could get.
I had planned to work at Hallmark all break long, then one day, he showed up in his dad’s pickup, about to drive off to his home state. After my shift, I cried while holding his hands in the Arabica coffeehouse, and he asked me if I would go with him. There was nothing I wanted more, so much so that I felt like I needed it to breathe. Everything was shimmery on the edges of my vision, like a fake version of a dream in a movie, and I couldn’t believe I felt that way about him—didn’t know I was capable of it—and now he wanted me beside him, and of course, I said yes.
I had only known the boyfriend for a couple months, which now to me seems like nothing at all, but everything was hazily new, and I was young.
He couldn’t fly, so we drove. It didn’t seem threatening or unsafe; it seemed like the only thing I could do to get more time with him. I was sure at every moment that things would end, and I feared it, but I planned for it too. It was an effortless drive, the only long trek with him that was innocent and pain-free.
We stopped in Nebraska and had sex; we kept track of the states we’d had sex in for our whole relationship’s duration. There, the sky was grayer and lower and stretched on longer than I’d ever seen before. We made it to Colorado, and I got altitude sickness. The solution, I learned, was a combination of water, not smoking, and time.
He was from Colorado, but his parents had moved away while he was in high school. He spent his last gasp of adolescence sleeping on a doggy bed on the floor of a friend’s apartment. This time, though, we had a bed to share at his best friend’s house.
The best friend was Jewish, still in high school, bitter, and struggling with mental illness. His mother was gone, so his house was empty, save for him. She was a lawyer, a big deal kind of one — a large environmental law case had taken her to California, home of all the people who visited Colorado to ski and get altitude sickness like me.
And so it was just the three of us in this massive house. The best friend got drunk on 40 ounces of Mickey’s, opened his Hannukah presents, threw them at the wall, and detested his mom openly. We arranged ourselves on massive white couches around the TV. Jeopardy was on; there came a question about the Freudian theory of the Oedipal complex.
My boyfriend’s best friend cocked a glance over to me. “What’s the female version of an Oedipal complex?” he asked, but not curiously.
I was a psychology major, and I read and knew things, so I told him, “Electra complex.”
He nodded approvingly, looked at my boyfriend, and said, “She’s a smart one.”
At the time, these compliments he threw out felt like earnestly good things. I felt a weird surge of approval and pride in my chest every time he gave me one of them.
He had this girlfriend who was super enthusiastic and touchy, and whenever she wasn’t around, my boyfriend’s friend would talk shit about her. He would say she was super dumb or clingy. She was thin, with pale skin and dyed black hair that was stringy on the sides of her face and long dark purple bags under her eyes and baggy sweatshirts hanging off of her. She adored him, and he kept breaking up with her because she wouldn’t do anal or something like that.
He slept in his mom’s bed so that we could sleep in his, which was in a tiny lofted room with a ceiling that cut down at us at odd angles. It was a comforting nest. But we got food poisoning and spent the better part of two days thrashing and sweating next to one another, rising only to vomit and evacuate our bowels.
Then the snow came. Five feet, maybe more. We were stuck inside. At first, the door could barely open. Living out in a plush, thinly populated Denver suburb, there was nowhere for us to walk to and nowhere to get food. Our supplies began to dwindle, except for the 40s, which was the only thing they’d had the forethought to stock up on.
We ate tiny slivers of chocolate and cereal, and the boys drank the 40s. I watched Elf on the massive TV. The stomach issues subsided, and then my period came.
There were no supplies in the house. The friend’s mother didn’t menstruate anymore. I stalked up to the bathroom and wadded up toilet paper. I took huge wads of the stuff and rolled it up tight like corkscrews and shoved them inside me. I constructed makeshift pads out of remnants of toilet paper, layers atop layers, folded makeshift wings across their centers, and wrapped those several times around my underwear. I walked around the house all wadded up, my legs swinging out like a toddler’s in snow pants. I didn’t tell anyone. They were too drunk to notice.
Finally, days into our isolation, a friend came with a Jeep. We dug our way to his car door to welcome his delivery: meat, some peapods, and more booze. He cooked for us, and they all became drunk while I sat on the steps.
Time passed. The sun returned. The thing about Colorado snowstorms is that they melt as fast as they come. I was this close to missing my flight home and losing my real Christmas entirely. At the time, I was bursting with tears at the thought of leaving. Now I’m just thankful that I made it.