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

embarrassing scene that Ryan dumped me.
    After that debacle, my mom instituted a new rule: I wouldn’t be allowed to date until I was sixteen. As I raged through puberty, she refused to let me shave my legs and armpits, or pluck my eyebrows, which resulted in the lovely nickname Unibrow. Already taller than most of the boys, I was gangly, awkward, and really hairy (thanks Italian heritage!). I was as flat as a pancake chest-wise and wore baggy T-shirts from Target every day. Though I had inherited a lot of my mom’s fierce personality, I had not been blessed with her ample bosom. So, in addition to Unibrow, I was also dubbed Brick Wall by the meanest boys on my bus. I didn’t really care. I loved boys, even the mean ones.
    I always got along so much better with boys than girls. I did have a best girlfriend I’d known since kindergarten, Sara. Looking back, the circumstances of how we met would foreshadow my relationship with her—and women in general—for the rest of my life. Sara came from one of the richest families in the area. Her dad was a famous doctor in Arizona. My family was pretty poor when I was young. We couldn’t always keep up with our super rich neighbors. There were a couple times I had to drop out of dance or gymnastics classes because we couldn’t afford the dues. Instead of bringing a cool lunch box filled with delicious sandwiches and Capri Suns, I ate the $2 lunch provided at school (in grade school my sister Amy even worked in the cafeteria like Marley’s mom on Glee ). Oh, how I longed for an individual bag of potato chips, a luxury in my eyes! From an early age, I always tried to make extra money doing whatever I could: my dad would pay us a penny for each grapefruit we picked up in the yard, we ran lemonade stands, we pawned knickknacks, and once I even tried to sell leaves off of our mulberry tree. I was distraught that nobody would buy one, until my neighbor pointed out that she had plenty in her own yard.
    Before I met Sara, I wasn’t even aware of how poor we were. But the day I met her in kindergarten, she took out her shiny, new, gigantic box of Crayolas, the one with the sharpener in the back and fifty magical colors, like atomic tangerine, and it became crystal clear. My mom had sent me to school with a couple of broken crayons from Garcia’s Mexican restaurant. Since Sara had a beautiful bounty, I innocently asked to borrow one. “No,” she sniffed condescendingly. In that moment, I got a life lesson in both class warfare and cattiness. Naturally, I made her my best friend.
    I was also a cheerleader in junior high and then again in my sophomore year of high school, but the sorority vibe of it just wasn’t my thing. The girls were always complaining about something trivial, or talking about their feelings. I hated the whole fake Kumbaya vibe, when these girls were ripping each other to shreds behind their backs. I did have a close group of girlfriends growing up, but they were mostly jocks, not your typical girly girls. In the end, I really loved hanging with the guys. Less drama and fewer complications.
    I tried to skirt around my mom’s ban on boys, but her plan was extremely successful in one very important way. I had been raised to be a gigantic prude: I was completely naïve about sex and totally inexperienced. After my epic make out session with Ryan in sixth grade, I didn’t so much as kiss a guy again for another five (!) years. For my first two years of high school, while my girlfriends were hooking up and learning about sex and their bodies, I was still innocently passing notes to the boys I liked. Even though they flirted back, that was the extent of their investment in me because they knew moving forward would just mean blue-ball city. I wasn’t allowed to go to dances with boys, so I had to go stag with a group of girls freshman and sophomore year.
    Nobody was having sex with me—and nobody was even talking about it with me. Not my mom, not my sister, and not even