“The one that sailed away”
Elektra always wore a sailor hat on top of her short auburn hair that swayed when she drove home a contention in a debate. She was a year older than me and the hottest thing at debate camp in Cameron, Oklahoma. Best of all, she wanted me. Bad.
She made her intentions clear the day before camp ended, when we flirted through a debate we were supposed to be judging. The debaters weren’t pleased as Elektra’s hand ran up my arm instead of across her legal pad, but I was ecstatic. I suggested we play racquetball later to seal the deal (she played at home with nursing home residents—her quirks only aroused me further). It looked like I was going to finally get my first kiss, and from an older woman at that.
When I went back to my room the change, I found someone on my bed—not Elektra, but Umar, a guy from my high school who drank my Dr. Pepper all summer despite not even living with me. When I told him where I was going he decided to come along, even though I begged him not to.
Umar killed the mood and my previously-bountiful chances for action. What should’ve gotten Elektra’s heart pumping and scratched my itch for sweaty girls ended with Elektra and Umar arguing about the rules of racquetball until she stormed off. I qualified for the state debate tournament that year anyway.
—Will Sommer (SFS `10)
“This Garden State Kiss”
The summer I was fifteen, my boyfriend was going away to camp and would then be going to a different school. Obviously, to us this meant we would never see each other again, and our great love would be rent asunder. He was over at my house, and my mom was going to take him to the train to go home (for the last time!) and drop me off at my dentist appointment along the way. I got out of the car, hugged him goodbye, and then found myself bereft and heartbroken in the waiting room of my dentist. One of those lite radio stations was playing, and every limpid lyric or overdramatic key change of every song pierced me to the core. That’s how you know its bad—fifteen and crying in the dentist’s office, as Faith Hill or some other insipid artist made my pain into music.
The relationship actually lasted another year before petering out, and we broke up the next summer, in true New Jersey fashion, in the parking lot of a strip mall in West Orange. I drove myself home, and I didn’t listen to the radio at all.
—Shira Hecht (COL ‘10)
“Renaissance man”
There was so much for me to learn from my first Eurotrip at the impressionable young age of fourteen. Somewhere between the Uffizi and a billion beautiful churches, I got bored with culture. It wasn’t until I got to St. Mark’s Square in Venice that I learned a truly valuable lesson—don’t trust the beer goggles. Of course, I didn’t have any beer in Venice, but something about the romantic environment and the Italian string ensemble playing “Let It Be” made the fifteen-year-old American girl in front of me look like a supermodel. A year later I was reunited with my bella Italiana in Allentown, Pennsylvania—whoops. It would take another year or so before I discovered that Natty Light at night has the same effect as violins in Venice.
—Anthony Francavilla (COL ‘10)
“Not getting dessert…”
It was the end of August, and time to give my summer romance the proverbial axe. We had a cute, and unbeknownst to him, last date at the Chicago Art Institute, followed by a cozy dinner at one of our favorite haunts. Smack in the middle of the meal, he put down his knife and fork, folded his hands, leaned back, and asked, “So, what’s next?” I launched into my carefully prepared ‘wish-it-could-keep-going-but-once-college-starts-we’ll-be-600-miles-apart’ speech and was relieved to hear him say he had been planning to end it, too. I was not as pleased to hear him say, “I meant after dinner.” “What?” I asked cluelessly. “When I said, ‘what’s next,’ I meant, what are we doing after dinner?”
—Molly Redden (COL `11)
This Georgetown Life is a collection of stories written by Voice staffers all based on the same theme. [Cue trendy jazz music.]
