Seventeen

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired

Janis Ian, Seventeen

I learned the truth the day before my seventeenth birthday, on a long bus trip with an Ace of Base cassette playing on a continuous loop. The bus was heading towards the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh, on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, where my family and our hosts were to spend several days of relaxing at, and snorkeling in, the Red Sea.

This little excursion marked the end of a nearly month-long "vacation" in Egypt. I use quotes because while I technically was on my summer vacation, it was a working holiday. Our hosts were old friends of my younger sisters, and one of their many side enterprises was a summer camp of sorts, and my sisters and I were volunteered to help out. My mother came along to keep us out of trouble.

Our hosts' apartment and the camp itself were in Cairo's Maadi Gadeedah district, and the daily routine consisted of running out to a street vendor for some fresh fooul (essentially a fava bean concoction) or other breakfast, bundling over to the camp for a day of hair-brained insanity, and bundling back home for dinner with a side-trip for mouth-wateringly-fresh ingredients thrown in for good measure.

Most of the kids in the camp were what would be called "young tweens" now. Yes, I was helping educate, entertain, and generally herd a pile of eight-to-twelve-year-olds. Once I got over my impulse to flee screaming, I apparently did a pretty good job; the kids warmed over to me and I to them, and I genuinely enjoyed myself. In hindsight, my desire to teach grew from this experience.

During the first two weekends, most of the kaboodle piled into the aforementioned bus and drove to an apartment outside of Alexandria, overlooking the pearl-white sands and impossibly-blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. With that aforementioned Ace of Base cassette playing during the three-or-so-hour drive.

We swam a lot, relaxed a lot, I read general aviation training manuals (having exhausted my own meager supply of books fairly early on). I got the only earache I've ever had the first weekend. The next weekend, I fell asleep draped over a far-too-small couch while a birthday party of ten-to-twelve-year-olds raged on around me. And more swimming. And pool with missing balls. And sand castles. And card games. And then it was back on the bus again for the bouncy drive back to Cairo, Ace of Base blaring over the partially-blown speaker.

For the final (extended) weekend, it was just our hosts, my family, and a bunch of scuba divers, heading towards the Sinai Peninsula and the Red Sea for a bit of true R&R. Wait, Scuba Divers? I guess I need to back up a little first.

My sisters' friend, MT, was a former classmate of theirs who moved back to Egypt with her mother, DT, for reasons that escape me at the moment, as well as her father's name. He was still working in Saudi Arabia that summer, so it was just DT, MT (and the young'in, ST) in their apartment. And us Peachys of course.

DT's brother (whose name also escapes me now) owned a dive shop, and it was his shop's hired bus that carted the kaboodle around. The trip to Sinai was a regularly-scheduled dive trip, and as such there were a bunch of other people along for the ride this time. So that explains the divers.

So what does all of this have to do with my learning the truth?

Over the course of the preceding three weeks, I'd naturally spent a lot of time with MT. She was two years younger than me (fifteen), smart, pleasant, and attractive, not just physically but also in that "sure of oneself" confident sort of manner that she got from her mother (a true force of nature, I might add) -- Not that I was particularly (and/or consciously) aware of any this at the time. Like her mother, she wore a headscarf around me. A proper, demure young Muslim lady.

The bus trip to Sinai had quite a few strangers (to us) on it, so we clustered together. I had my usual seat in the right rear corner of the bus, but this time, MT was sitting next to me. and we didn't have a herd of kids to corral. It was dark, so I couldn't read; I was in a moving vehicle on relatively crummy roads, so I couldn't sleep, especially with the intermittent blinding headlights of oncoming traffic. And then there was Ace of Base, though by this point I could probably recite the lyrics in my sleep.

Thanks to the haze of time, I don't remember exactly how it started or progressed, but she ended up leaning against me, apparently asleep. At some point, I put my arm around her. Still later, our fingers met, and laced together. But what really blew my mind when she squeezed. She was awake, and an active, willing participant. In whatever it was that was going on. She and I sat that way for what seemed like hours. And it may have been, but my sense of time was pretty badly warped at that point. While part of me was basking in the "holy crap, this is something I've never felt before, and man is it good.." sensations, the rest of me was freaking out.

Growing up, my family was never particularly close or open. There was little real communication, and even less physical contact. I never felt I could really talk to my family, especially not my parents, about my problems. It seemed that I got back the kind of "why on earth would you think that?" blank stare at best, or at worst, anger that I'd question something they took for granted. In all fairness, it wasn't as bad as all that, but I always felt different from the image they projected, both consciously and unconsciously, in public and private, leading me to wonder from a very early age indeed, "just what am I? I wish I knew, but I know I'm not 'this', whatever 'this' is, but this can't be all there is..."

This was compounded by growing up (and going through puberty) in the highly segregated, repressed Saudi society. About the only interaction I had with non-familial females were the few on my school bus (provided by my parents' employer as we lived in company housing) that were even younger than my sisters, or the occasional friend my sisters brought home, MT included, not that I can really recall anything in particular about her before that fateful summer. In any case, there was nobody I felt I could really talk to.

My companions were books; I had few friends, and only a handful over the many years that I would have considered close. Saudi Arabia was a transitional place, and us expatriates were never sure if our contract would be renewed the following year, so few lasting friendships were possible. I later discovered the wonders of BBSes (yeah, this dates me, I know), and that became my lifeline to the world, but even while there may have been females on the other side, there was never that physical contact that I needed so badly. Not that I knew I needed it at the time.

So on the eve of my seventeenth birthday, I learned the truth; I learned that there was indeed something else I was missing, and while I didn't really understand what that was, that revelation completely shattered my world.

I didn't know how to handle it; so I did the only thing I knew how -- I tried to be logical and analytical. So despite the beautiful backdrop of snorkelling over coral reefs outside Sharm El Shaikh and swimming with a dolphin outside of Nuwaibah (with the Saudi coast visible in the distance!), I was a withdrawn zombie. I clamped down hard on my newly-awakened feelings, unable to express, talk about, or even let them out. It took me the better part of three years for this to finally break (during my sophomore year at Georgia Tech), and it wasn't until fairly recently for me to look back, understand, and accept what actually happened, and why.

Nothing was ever said on that bus trip, nor was anything said during that long weekend, or the trip back. I think I was too afraid of the watchful eyes of our respective mothers, and how (on the surface) it was a bad thing to do, bla bla bla. Yay, for a strict-ish religious upbringing and overbearing, judgemental parents! I don't know if it really would have been all that bad, but it sure felt that way.

After several days of navel gazing, I eventually wrote MT a letter, including a gawd-awful attempt at poetry, and just before I left, she handed back a reply by way of my sister. In what appeared to be the same envelope, so I originally thought my letter was being returned unopened. I wish I could remember what she'd written, though I suppose it doesn't really matter any more now. She remained in Cairo, and I returned to Riyadh. And that, as they say, was that.

We all play the game and when we dare
To cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
That call and say, come dance with me
And murmur vague obscenities
At ugly girls like me
At seventeen

You never forget your first, they say; not only was MT was my first crush, she showed me that there was an entire world out there that I'd been completely oblivious to, even though it was years before I realized exactly what had happened to me, and many more before I truly understood it.

So what ever happened to MT? Over the years, I've received a few out-of-the-blue communiques from her sister ST (who by now has probably graduated from university), but also from MT herself, mostly in the form of invites to random yet-another-social-network-site-I'd-never-heard-of. I've replied to some of them (and never heard anything back), but after the last one, I went digging to see what I could find out. She'd apparently gone on to medical school and became a dentist or oral surgeon (or something like that) and runs her own practice now. Smart, tough, and tenacious. She still has a love of the water, and if the photo I found is any indication, the years have been very kind indeed.

I have many memories of that fateful summer; fresh limeade, getting into and out of all sorts of trouble, wandering around Cario on foot for hours on end (yay for getting lost!), herding hordes of children, eating many delicious meals with wonderful company, swimming in the White Sea and the Red Seas, my first encounters with Israelis (arrogant pricks!), stroking the pocked and scarred belly of a wild dolphin, coming face-to-face with a tiger shark and a lionfish, discovering the sheer brilliance that is David Brin's Startide Rising, that I really don't like Ace of Base, and of course, the truth I learned, but didn't learn, at seventeen.