FOREVER SEVENTEEN
It’s better not to know, I reasoned. It’s better to pretend nothing happened.
My first college date seemed to be with a goddess.
We met up at a snow-dappled bakery downtown. The cold seemed to glance off of her fishnets and shorts, her bomber jacket and unguarded ears. I thought, that can’t be her. No way she’s sitting across from me. But she came up and confirmed my name and I smiled a soft, petrified smile—a medusa victim transposed into stone—and that was that.
We talked and I shrank. She hadn’t done anything to bring this feeling on. It’s more what she wasn’t doing: not stumbling over her words, not giggling at nothing, not clinging to basic conversation starters like “so what’s your major?” and “where are you from?” as lifelines in the wild sea of social interaction. She was confident. Natural. She told me about her feminist research between sips of coffee, always finding a new topic to fill the space with while I nodded thankfully, brain a blank space, personality forgotten.
She was amazing. And I was a kid.
Correction: I felt like a kid. A whispering grade schooler, playacting at romance, tittering because Lizzy likes Moira and Polly kissed Jeff and all that jazz. My winter coat puffed up around me like a swaddle. My makeup, what little I applied, felt suddenly haphazard, messy, naive.
She knew this game better than I did, it was clear. Sure, I had high school crushes, questionable pool parties, classmates I shared sundaes with in the backseats of newly-bought cars. But I had never been official with anyone—and even if I had been, we were all the same sort of girls from the same few schools, born and raised in a single city, our lives and passions and tribulations never more than a thirty-minute drive away from one another. Awkwardness was our language. Timidity was our culture.
In the diversity of college life, this culture had been upturned. People were more mature and more sociable, and romantic exchanges had become a song I didn't know the rhythm to.
As I sat across from the bomber-jacket goddess, tongue in my throat, I couldn't help but think about Claudia—and no, there’s no last name there. No family, no root. Claudia is a character from my favorite weird, twisted TV drama, Interview with the Vampire, and she joins the cohort of titular blood-sucking creatures early on after losing her life in a fire. She lives as normally as a vampire girl can, passionate about journaling and cute dresses and pink coffins, boys and vintage diner dates and dancing at galas. Like me, she dreams of her soulmate; she craves affection even more than she craves blood.
There’s only one caveat: Claudia was turned before she reached adulthood. She is fourteen years old when she becomes a vampire, and she is still fourteen years old decades and worlds later. She is doomed by her stature, her circumstances, her eternally frozen hormones, to be a teenager forever.
And it’s hard to find love as a teen immortal. Claudia exists in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, one that sabotages intimacy and repels desired affections. Simultaneously too old to be with actual minors and too young for any sane, mature adult to fall in love with, she spirals into loneliness. She tries to find connection with a like-minded soul, and she fails. Tries, and fails again.
Who am I supposed to love? she cries out at one point, frustrated by her fruitless efforts. A dry bite of croissant scraped my throat. Across from me was the coolest girl I’d ever been with, a girl I didn't think I deserved. What human would want me?
A twenty-minute walk later (where the other girl, of course, handled most of the talking), we part ways, I assume for good. I went to my dorm red-faced and let the silence of my pillow in my ears become familiar noise. I didn't hear from her for a while, which was okay, because I was scared of what she thought about me more than I was scared of being abandoned. It’s better not to know, I reasoned. It’s better to pretend nothing happened.
I wondered if I was even capable of a college romance, if I could ever make it past the awkward, blushing-little-girl phase of interaction with anyone I cared about. Maybe I just wasn’t designed for this sort of thing. Maybe I was Claudia—always too unwatered, always too grown. Maybe the semblance of adult relationships wouldn’t ever come to me.
But—a ping of a phone. A final episode, an optimistic note to end the game: maybe it would.
Because the thing is, Claudia does find love. It takes a while and it involves a snarky dressmaker, post-war France, and many spoilers, but it happens. It’s possible. I don’t have a hundred years, but I do have four (and I don’t need to eat people every night, which probably helps). If a moody vampire girl can escape the purgatory of teen romance, then maybe so can I.
The bomber-jacket girl texts again, eventually—she always reaches our first, another thing I have to work on. To paraphrase: sorry i’ve been busy with midterms. would love to meet up again. And maybe it’s dumb luck or a desperate dating scene that’s keeping us together, or, maybe, impossibly, she enjoyed my company, between the hollow giggles and the stammering. Maybe something of my true self came out through my mumbled explanation of the novel I’m writing, or the croissant I ordered, or just the way I listened, stunned silent, learning.
Bomber-jacket girl and I will probably stay just friends for now. I think I need time to solidify—to develop the sort of confidence that turns trysts into actual relationships, that lets me do my fair share of the talking, that tears pen names off articles like this one and bears something real to the world. It sounds hard, and I don’t think I’m out of the playground yet, but someday. I’ll turn eighteen within my lifetime. I’ll cross the threshold, become my own small goddess, make up for the experiences I missed out on with new and better ones—and, all things willing, I won’t even have to drink anyone’s blood in the process.
AUTHOR: Lizzy Sazegari
ARTIST: Madeline Kim