Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva by Deborah Voigt

respectful kid—too good and respectful for my taste, it turned out. Randy was one year older than me, but even less experienced. On the advice of his church buddies, we drove up into the hills on Skyline Drive where all the teenagers parked. The trick, his friends instructed, was to tear down the road when you saw a patrolling cop car approach, which they did on the hour, and then return ten minutes later.
    Randy had a car with a flat console between the two front seats and once parked, I hopped over the console to try some French kissing and nearly scared poor Randy to death.
    “If I wanted to kiss your tongue”—he pulled away, in disgust—“I would have kissed your tongue!”
    If Randy was too slow, my next beau was too fast. I still wasn’t officially dating age, and Richard was two years older than me, but he was on the football team and told me he’d noticed me in the halls wearing my silky blue dress with the elastic top—how could I say no to a man with such an eye for detail? Apparently, I could. If my parents were worried I was going to be taken advantage of, I wish they’d seen how I handled Richard. He was the kind of guy who knew exactly where to park and always kissed with his tongue. Making out one night on Skyline Drive, he kept slipping his hands under my T-shirt and inside my bra. Believe it or not, I still considered myself a good Christian girl and I had my boundaries.
    “No, Richard—no! I don’t want to do that. I told you, I’m not ready!” I pushed him away. “Why do you keep insisting?”
    “After the games, all the guys in the locker room talk about what they did with their girlfriends the night before,” he said, “and I never have anything to say!”
    I made him drive me home and I dumped him along the way.
    THEN CAME JOHN . I’d noticed him at the public library, where he worked in the audiovisual department with a friend of mine and I had a major crush on him. He was tall with long, dark hair, and handsome. He loved to sing, like me, and was into jazz, another genre I knew nothing about. He was also twenty-one and had no idea how young I was. A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, we were both at my friend’s house for a swim (by now, I’d succumbed to the bathing suit pressures of my new environment. I couldn’t get away with wearing a cover-up for the rest of my life while living in California).
    John sat at the edge of the pool, watching me as I lingered in the shallow end, still shy and keeping submerged. He gave me an intense look from the pool’s edge like no guy had ever given me before, so I paddled closer.
    “So, when can we go out on a date?” he asked.
    “Well . . . my parents won’t let me date until I’m sixteen.”
    He looked momentarily surprised, but that didn’t stop him.
    “Well, when are you going to be sixteen?”
    “In two weeks.”
    “Okay, then. Two weeks it is.”
    On the morning of my sixteenth birthday, when my mother asked me if I’d like anything special for my birthday dinner that night, I nonchalantly broke the news.
    “Ma, I can’t. I have a date!”
    I lied and told my parents John was twenty, thinking he’d sound safer if he was under legal drinking age. I’m sure they were still freaked out. What would a twenty-year-old want with their barely sixteen-year-old daughter? Well, they knew exactly what—but what could they say? They hadn’t given me a ruling on the age of my date. John picked me up that night with a wrapped birthday present tucked under his arm and took me out to dinner.
    We spent the next few months making out in his blue, two-door secondhand Monte Carlo, and I was crazy about him. With John, I broke from the confines of my strict childhood for good.
    He’d take me into bars and order me colorful, frothy girl drinks that tasted like fruit punch but were loaded with gin. And after my years of being held under lock and key by the Food Marshal, John offered this starving girl a banquet, and I devoured it