I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends Read Online Free Page A

ultimately won my mom over by making her laugh and pretending like he didn’t care too much. On their first date, he picked her up in his burgundy Buick Regal, smoked with the windows up, and took her out for drinks instead of the expensive surf ’n turf dinners she’d been getting from other men. He may not have rolled out the red carpet, but his sense of humor and hardworking ways won her over. She felt like he had a promising future and would take care of her. So after dating for three years and avoiding his marriage proposal, my mom finally caved and said, “I do.” Today, thirty-four years later, they’re still together.
    For my mom the bottom line with men was simple: with the exception of my father, men were disgusting and to be avoided at all costs. As Rachel and I got older she became paranoid. She was convinced that “perverts” were going to snatch us right off the street, or that a male family friend would kidnap us from school. If a family friend tried to pick us up, they’d have to know the secret Robertson family code word, which was “douchebag.” As for strangers on the street, we practiced a drill over and over again so I was prepared to escape their filthy clutches. After I identified the pervert, I’d drop my backpack and run like hell. I actually had to implement the plan when a scary guy got out of a truck and followed me home from the bus stop one afternoon. Practice made perfect. I immediately ditched my bag and left the pervert in my dust.
    Perverts weren’t only limited to men in creepy vehicles. I also wasn’t allowed to go to the local Big Surf water park because my mom didn’t want dirty old men to ogle me in a bathing suit. Not being able to go to a water park in Arizona? In the scorching heat of summer? Not fun.
    For all of my mom’s lectures against the male species, I was organically a guy’s girl. I couldn’t help it. I was a tomboy and played soccer and war with all of the neighborhood boys in our front yards. I was a hopeless romantic and dreamed of having one true love like I saw in my favorite movies My Girl, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin . But in my house, I couldn’t just announce on meatloaf night that I had a crush on my adorable neighbor, Dallas. My mom was too scary, plus then I’d have to sit through a mind-numbing sermon about being an independent strong woman, which at nine years old, was also not fun.
    Because I was terrified of my mother’s wrath and didn’t want to disappoint her, I got really good at crushing on boys behind her back. I was so good I actually had a secret boyfriend named Ryan for three months in sixth grade. He was the cutest guy in our class and I set my sights on him fearlessly. One afternoon a bunch of kids were hanging out on a hill. All the girls were just sitting there being lame, so I started rolling down the hill, even though it’d make me sweaty and grass stained. But Ryan noticed me. He came over and said, “I want to roll down the hill, too!” My mom may have been a ballbuster, but she’d also drilled it into me to be a leader, not a follower.
    My very first kiss was with Ryan during a strategic game of spin the bottle at my friend Bri’s house. Never one to play games, I just cut to the chase and pointed the bottle right at him. After a shot of Binaca we ran off to the bathroom for some tonsil hockey. As one might expect, the kissing was totally amateur, an alien tongue slobbery mess. I decided to give him a chance to hone his skills, so Ryan and I got serious after that. Well, as serious as you can in sixth grade. He’d walk me to class and hug me. He even bought me a silver ring to make our love official. But our steamy love affair was blown to shit at Track and Field Day at school, when Ryan’s mom innocently went up to my mom and beamed about how cute it was that we were “going” together. “Where the hell are they going?” my mom screamed at her. “Courtney doesn’t have a boyfriend!” She made such an