I am What I am, and that's All that I Am

The relationship I have with my siblings is outstanding. I consider myself to be extremely lucky because of our ability to laugh and talk about everything. Even when we argue, the tiff swiftly devolves from a tangled ball of yarn to fine threads of gossamer, and finally, it dissolves before our very eyes. No apologies needed. No grudges held. This dynamic in our relationship is of key importance to the story that I'm going to relate.

A few months ago, my brother and I were having a heart-to-heart conversation in our basement, discussing life, love, and most importantly, sex. If you know a few things about me, you will probably know the following information: I have an obsession with the color pink, I sometimes speak in strange, Ron Burgundy-esque voices, and I am a virgin by choice. It is this final aspect of my character that often draws a few blank faces, confused stares, and questions. My brother, Matthew, is among those who can't help but ask, "Why?" With most people, it is easy to brush off the query with my response of "religious reasons," but with Matt, I dug a little deeper. Internally, I had marked a particular day as the starting date for my decision, but I never mentally filed it in my "reasons for virginity" folder. Not until my brother asked, that is. And so now I will tell the story to you in the same way that I told him. It is a story with which he and the rest of my family are familiar, but the specifics are never recalled in quite the same detail.

It was the winter in the year 2000. My sister, Dyana, had just turned 16, and after watching American Pie and hearing about sex from various sources, I was a very curious, hyper-aware 11-year-old girl. Unfortunately for Dyana, she had just started dating her very first boyfriend at the height of my curiosity, and I became the Sherlock Holmes of all things sex-related with Dyana as my prime suspect.

On this particular evening in question, I sat in my room doing homework after school. Dyana and her boyfriend spoke softly in her room, which was something that occurred often. The click of the locks on her bedroom and our shared bathroom doors, however, piqued my interest and struck me as irregular. When I began to hear music issue forth from her room, the familiar scene from American Pie made me highly suspicious. Creeping from my room, I pressed my ear softly against the bathroom door. Nothing was discretely audible, so I went a step further. Lucky for me, the tile on our bathroom floor is highly reflective. Stooping down, I peered into the linoleum, which conveniently reflected my sister's bed. In an instant, eight years of Catholic school came crashing down on me. All I could do was think, sin. SIN! Suddenly, the apple-cinnamon Glade plug-in made me feel nauseous. It felt like a dream. I had to escape.

Shuffling down the stairs, I desperately sought my mother. Finding her at the head of the kitchen table, I stared at her with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING UP THERE!?" I hissed. She looked back at me and told me to keep my voice down. WHAT? She knows and accepts this? I was in shock. Why was I the only one who couldn't believe what I had just seen? "They're too young," I shouted. "Why aren't you doing anything?" With each "SHHH!" she gave me, I raised my voice ten decibels. Finally, the faint click of a lock in the distance and footsteps on the stairs assured me that my cries had been heard. I swallowed hard and immediately fell silent.

Dyana's boyfriend, who I will refer to as Rob, walked into the kitchen. He stared at me. I glared back. He made a motion to move towards me, and I countered him by walking in the opposite direction around the kitchen table. Rob switched his course, and so did I. For a few moments, we engaged in this mock Tarantella Dance until I saw my only escape: the kitchen door. With no shoes, socks, or coat, I made my move and darted out of the house. The shock of the cold against my bare feet was not enough to impede me from running across the lawn that slept beneath a thick blanket of snow. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Rob was pursuing me. I had to think quick. WHERE AM I GOING? In an instant, I knew. The pool shed! I just need to get to the pool shed.

I ran for the gate that led to my backyard and tried to push open its door. The snow that lay behind it allowed it to swing open only a few inches. Frantically, I rammed my then-overweight, stout body into the door and nudged it open a bit more. Hurry. HURRY. I had to make due with the space I had created and wedged my plump frame through the gate like a mouse slipping through a crack in a door. Too close for comfort. I felt my teddy bear-emblazoned shirt rip, but I didn't have time to mourn the loss of the shirt's inhabitant's eye. Rob was hot on my trail, but even at my size, he couldn't squeeze through the space that I had made.

Sprinting through my backyard, I ran up the stairs to my deck, trekked across my pool deck, threw open the shed's door, and closed and locked it behind me. There is a key to this door! He can get the spare key! I swiftly slid inside the bathroom in the shed and locked the wooden door. There's no key to this. I'm safe. I caught my breath and watched as it rose visibly from lips. In my excitement, I had forgotten how cold it was. I suddenly became acutely aware of how frozen and in pain my feet were. Seating myself on the chill tile floor, I cupped my feet in my hands and tried to restore them to their natural state. I had recently learned that Napoleon had underestimated Russia's winter and that his unprepared soldiers' feet had become so frozen from the cold that their bare feet sounded like clogs when they made contact with the road. This is how Napoleon's men must have felt, I thought.

Moments later, I heard the shed door's handle jiggle. For a few seconds, Rob banged on the entryway, but soon, all went silent. He's gone, I thought triumphantly. I'll just wait a few more minutes, and... CLICK. The pool shed's door had been unlocked, and I listened anxiously as it swung open on its hinges.

THUD THUD THUD. Rob was now pounding on the final shield of protection I had, demanding entrance into the bathroom, "Amanda! Let me in! I want to talk to you!" I was silent as I rocked back and forth on the floor, still holding the feet I thought surely required amputation. What started as slow, intermittent thuds quickly sped up into a drum roll. THUDTHUDTHUDTHUDTHUD. Imagining his face on the other side of the object he was now treating as a speed bag frightened me. I started crying softly. Please go away! PLEASE GO AWAY!

Finally, he got tired, cold, or some combination of the two. There was one final BANG, and he was gone. It took quite some time for me to peel myself up from the floor. I walked back through the cold, snowy path I had run through thirty minutes before and scurried to my room.

We never really talked about it again. Like all other arguments and problems between my siblings and me, this one seemed to fade away before it was ever really concrete. No one acknowledged who was right and who was wrong. All I know is that whenever I smell that apple-cinnamon Glade plug-in from the bathroom, it triggers this flashbulb memory, and I feel a sickness in the pit of my stomach.