Anatomy of a Boyfriend Read online

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Humblest gratitude to my editor, Joe Cooper; to my agent, Scott Miller; and to everyone at Random House and Trident for their tireless perfectionism. Deepest appreciation for my professors Dr. Patrick Allitt, for his guidance, and Dr. David Edwards, whose Psychology of Love course exposed me to the pioneering work of Dr. Dorothy Tennov. Infinite love to my parents, Stanley and Michelle, for their unwavering support, and to my sister, Leslie, for being my best friend and introducing me to the world of Judy Blume. Endless thanks to my friends, teachers, and loved ones for their feedback and encouragement, and especially to Allan Pepper, for always making time for me. Finally, this book is in loving memory of Valerie Kay Hardy, who inspired me to write.

  ANATOMY OF AN AUTHOR

  Q: What inspired you to write Anatomy of a Boyfriend ?

  A:Every year thousands of high school seniors face the painful decision of whether to continue dating their home-town sweethearts following graduation, so I wanted to tell a story that focuses on that precarious time in a girl’s life when she’s both excited about going off to college and terrified about how it will shake up her world.

  Q: How do people react to your realistic sex scenes in the book?

  A:Thankfully, most people respond very positively to the sex scenes precisely because of their realism.

  Anatomy of a Boyfriend doesn’t glorify or in any way promote premarital sex; it merely demystifies what the experience can be like physically and emotionally, good and bad.

  Q: Were you embarrassed to show this book to your family because of the sex scenes?

  A:Of course not! Well, maybe a little bit…. Okay, fine. Yes, I was! I was so embarrassed, in fact, that I never let anyone in my family read the book until after the publisher had bought it and I knew I couldn’t hide it any longer. I wasn’t ashamed of having written any of these things, but Anatomy of a Boyfriend does represent a side of me I don’t reveal to my family, for obvious reasons. It goes both ways—I certainly don’t want to know anything about my relatives’ sex lives, either! Luckily, though, the Snadowsky clan could not have been more supportive.

  Q: Who are your favorite authors and why?

  A:I dedicated Anatomy of a Boyfriend to my two favorite authors, Dr. Dorothy Tennov and Judy Blume.

  Dorothy Tennov, a friend and psychology professor whose work I studied in college, is the author of the groundbreaking Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Limerence is a word Tennov coined to refer to that crazy, roller coaster–ish kind of romantic love when we feel infatuated with someone and our mood depends solely on whether that someone reciprocates our affections. One of my goals in writing Anatomy of a Boyfriend was to illustrate limerence from a teenage perspective, and Tennov helped guide me through this process. Sadly, she passed away less than a month after Anatomy of a Boyfriend ’s hardcover release. I’m so lucky to have known her, and I remain in awe of her legacy.

  As for Judy Blume, I was ten when I discovered Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., which shook me to the core because it felt so real. (I first read Margaret while on vacation with my family on Captiva Island, Florida, which is why I chose to set much of Anatomy of a Boyfriend there.) Blume transformed me again at age twelve when I tore through Forever…, which showed me that it’s possible to write explicitly about sex without its being gratuitous or sensationalized. I don’t know Blume personally, but she did receive the manuscript and she e-mailed me that she thought it was “so good” and she “had trouble putting it down.” Since then she’s even blogged about the book and compared it to Forever…. Talk about a dream come true!

  Q: How did you choose the title? Is there any significance behind the characters’ names?

  A:It took forever to come up with a title that worked! For months my editor and I e-mailed each other possible contenders such as The Crazy Kind of Love and Love in the Time of Instant Messenger.

  Finally, when we were throwing around the Anatomy of a Boyfriend idea, I knew I loved the ring of it but didn’t believe the title related enough to the story itself. I e-mailed my editor that Anatomy of a Boyfriend would make sense only if Dominique were an aspiring doctor or biologist. He wrote back,

  “Great! Run with that!” So, rather late in the revision process, I worked the premed thread throughout the plot.

  The name Dominique was inspired by the heroine, Dominique Francon, in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead —both Dominiques start off as self-assured, goal-oriented women, only to have their priorities turned upside down by love. I decided on Dominique’s last name, Baylor, while I was in law school and we were learning about bailors and bailees in property class. (The classic example of a bailor is someone who brings his watch to a pawnshop; the bailee at the pawnshop has a duty to safeguard that watch until the bailor reclaims it.) I reasoned that when we fall in love, we become bailors of our hearts, and we can only hope our chosen bailees won’t break them.

  I named Wes after Westley in The Princess Bride because Westley stands for the archetypal hero/rescuer/perfect man that many girls, Dominique included, expect their boyfriends to emulate. Calvin Brandon, a boy who likes Dominique during the last half of the book, gets his name from Colonel Brandon in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Like Colonel Brandon, Calvin is very chivalrous but under-appreciated.

  I thought it’d be cute for Wes to drive an Explorer, since Wes and Dominique explore each other in its backseat during one of their “dates.” Dominique attends Shorr Academy because she is very sure of herself and her future prior to meeting Wes, but she’s no longer as sure after she falls in love and graduates from Shorr. I once received a MySpace message asking if all the characters with C names (Caitlin, Chapin, and Calvin) are Christ figures. Interesting reader analysis, but no.

  Q: What has been the most surprising thing about your book-publishing experience?

  A:That boys love the book, too! They really empathize with Wes and appreciate that he’s not portrayed as a popular, suave womanizer or a bad-boy social outcast or any other stereotypical love interest; he’s just an ordinary high school guy—decent and well-meaning but clueless about women. Most surprising are the e-mails I receive from boys who identify with Dominique. Just goes to show you that both sexes can fall into the throes of obsessive love (or limerence) equally intensely.

  My best friend, Amy, wants to wait until college to “do it,” but until then she’ll do “everything but” with boys she thinks are cute and have good bodies. She thinks lots of boys are cute and have good bodies.

  One of Amy’s favorite activities is scoping out the jocks at the annual seniors versus teachers football game at East Fort Myers High, which everyone calls EFM. It’s the largest local public school, and as lame as it sounds, this game is the hottest ticket in town the day after Christmas.

  I couldn’t care less about sports, let alone ogling athletes, and a school is the last place I want to be during winter break. But I’m tagging along this year because I’ve been holed up in my room all week finishing college applications, and I desperately need a change of scenery. Not surprisingly, Amy’s boy-crazy jabbering makes it impossible even to pretend to focus on the game.

  “See him?” she asks me while pointing to one of the senior team’s broad-shouldered linebackers, who’s also in her woodworking class. “I had this amazingly intense dream about him last night. We were in this, like, psychedelic art studio, and I was posing nude for him—”

  “Amy!” I cut her off. We’re sitting on the bleachers one row ahead of a pack of pervy-looking freshmen, and I know they’re eavesdropping.

  “What?” she looks at me innocently. “It was really hot! Then he knocked over his easel, tore off his overalls, and said, ‘My canvas is your body
, and my paintbrush is my peni—’”

  “Shhh!” I almost choke on my hot dog as I press my hand over Amy’s mouth. “First of all, gross!

  Second of all, the entire population of Florida does not need to know this.” I motion with my eyes to the cackling pervs behind us. “Can you please tone it down?”

  Amy tears my hand away. “Oh, c’mon, Dominique. You sound like a librarian…and not the kinky kind.”

  She grins at me mischievously before turning her attention to the buff, freckled junior on her right. I just roll my eyes in resignation.

  If we weren’t in a public place, I wouldn’t mind hearing the steamy details of Amy’s dream. That’s the key to our friendship—we can be open with each other past the point of too much information. She ends up doing most of the talking, though, since she has a lot more experience to draw from. But the fact that I’m probably the only seventeen-year-old in Fort Myers who hasn’t French-kissed a guy yet does not

  mean I’m a prude. My dreams at night can get just as X-rated as Amy’s, and sure, I guess I’d like to have a boyfriend. I just wouldn’t want to hook up with a guy unless I really, really like him, and in my experience all boys can be classified as either assholes or bores, unless they’re both.

  Maybe it’s a blessing, because the last thing I need is relationship drama to sidetrack me from my grades. Amy, on the other hand, has never been the studious type but still managed to score an early acceptance to Amherst College. She’s a master painter and graphic artist, which makes sense given her expressive, exhibitionistic personality. I’m way more introverted.

  My biggie Sprite makes itself known a few minutes into the third quarter. I maneuver my way down the bleachers toward the row of light blue Porta Pottis behind the end zone, but when I get to ground level I see I have competition. A chunky mom type with a bulging fanny pack is waddling in the direction of the only unoccupied stall. Nature is calling loudly, so I start chugging across the green, eyes on the prize.

  That’s when I feel my feet slip out from under me, and the next thing I know I’m sprawled facedown on a patch of newly watered grass.

  “Shit!” I shout as I scramble onto all fours. I look down at my sweatshirt and shorts, now coated with wet topsoil. I don’t care if you’re the most confident person in the world—when something like this happens, all you want is the superpower to become invisible.

  “Jeez, you okay?” a deep voice asks.

  Startled, I gaze up through the strands of my bangs, now shellacked to my forehead with sprinkler water. All I see are blazing blue eyes against a halo of high-noon sunshine.

  “Um, yeah, I’m fine,” I gasp, half-frightened and half-hypnotized by his proximity.

  “You were fast. You should go out for track.” He grins.

  I force myself to laugh. “Thanks, but I think mud wrestling’s more my style.”

  He grins a little wider in a cute, bashful manner. My stomach suddenly feels uneasy, but not in a bad way. I don’t need to pee anymore either.

  “Let me help,” he says.

  Without giving myself time to think about it, I reach for his outstretched hand. He clasps my forearm, since my palms are caked with dirt and grass, and pulls me to my feet.

  I’m still squinting from the sun’s brightness, but it’s clear that this boy with the sparkling blue eyes is around my age. His angular features are balanced by his gentle, soulful stare and the shaggy blond hair falling softly over his ears. He’s skinny and tall, around six feet. Amy and I are both five six, except I look shorter because I tend to slouch, which my grandma never fails to give me a hard time about.

  “Hmmm.” The blue-eyed boy crinkles his brow while staring at my legs. “Your knees—they’re pretty scratched up. I have some Band-Aids in my car just over there.” He looks at me expectantly.

  The part of me that’s humiliated to be standing there dripping with mud wants to run away. But this boy’s rare combination of niceness, humor, and good looks is drawing me in. I can hear a tiny Amy on my shoulder whispering, Whatever you do, keep talking to him!

  “Thanks, but I’ll be fine. Um, so, do you go to EFM?” I ask, going for the obvious.

  “Yep. I’m a senior.”

  “Oh? So why aren’t you out there on the field?”

  “I’m not into football, but I know some guys on the team, so I’m here rooting for them.”

  “Cool. Well, I’m a senior too. Not here, though. I mean, my best friend goes here, but I—”

  “Chiiiild, are yeew alriiiight?” I hear in the world’s most grating Southern drawl. “Ya fell like a rock in a pond.”

  Damn! It’s that fanny pack lady I was trying to outrun. I instantly hate her for jarring me out of my cute-boy moment.

  “Ya pooor li’l thing,” she croons as she wraps her fleshy arm around my shoulder. “Ah woulda come to ya right away, but Ah hadda go somethin’ awful. Those hot dawgs go through ya like a bag o’ prunes.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I respond, too horrified to come up with something better.

  “Now, Ah’m a registered nurse,” she continues, “so lemme take a look at those legs.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m fine. Really.”

  Oblivious to my brush-off, she bends down to study my knees and in the process displays some major ass crack. The cute boy is visibly grossed out. I sense blood rushing to my face in helpless embarrassment, and all of a sudden my urge to pee returns with a vengeance. It’s like I traveled from heaven to hell in the space of ten seconds.

  I’m racking my brain for a polite way to tell the nurse to get lost when a breeze streams by, carrying with it the Porta Pottis’ pungent stench of human waste. I can feel the puke rocket up my esophagus.

  “You sure you’re okay?” the blue-eyed boy asks, looking concerned—or maybe just repulsed.

  I avoid making eye contact with him as I keep my mouth clamped shut and nod. Then I shake the lady’s pudgy fingers from my knees and scuttle to a newly vacated stall. I hear her tell the boy, “Ah guess she hadda go bad too.”

  Upon slamming the flimsy plastic door behind me, I barf up my hot dog and ketchup for the next two minutes. When I’m done I peer into my compact mirror and groan as I think about the boy’s last image of me: a swamp thing racing for a foul-smelling Porta-Potti. Does Guinness World Records have a Worst First Impression category?

  After peeing I clean my hands, shins, and face as well as the few remaining sheets of toilet paper allow.

  Then I take off my mud-spattered sweatshirt, turn it inside out, and wrap it around my waist so it’s hanging over the front of my shorts, concealing the mud stains. Finally I undo my ponytail and let my hair fall over my face. Sufficiently disguised, I slink back up the bleachers and collapse onto my seat. Amy’s still flirting with the buff, freckled junior, who’s punching his phone number into her cell. When presented with a member of the opposite sex, some of us get numbers and some of us throw up.

  “Did you fall in?” Amy asks when I tap her shoulder to get her attention.

  “Well…I fell.”

  “What the hell happened?” she shrieks, pointing to the dried blood on my legs. Then she picks a blade of grass out of my hair. “You look like one of my smocks.”

  “Thanks,” I say sarcastically, trying to ignore the pervs cackling at me for the second time today. Then I tell her that I just had the worst twenty minutes of my life and I want to go now.

  Even though I hope the blue-eyed boy can’t see me, I can’t stop myself from scanning the bleachers for him as we leave. I don’t find him, of course, as most of the thousand-plus spectators are too far away to make out. No matter. Even if I did spot him, I wouldn’t approach him. I’d be afraid I’d lose my cool again, especially in my current state of extreme fugliness. Why am I even obsessing about this? I never get worked up over guys. Maybe that’s the problem—our interaction wasn’t long enough for him to ruin his good first impression with the inevitable stupid comment or dude behavior. A minute longer and he would ha
ve belched in my face or tried to touch my butt. Boys are all assholes or bores, anyway.

  “We’ll find him,” Amy announces confidently as we drive back to her place. “This is exciting, Dom. You met a guy besides Matt who you actually want to get with !”

  Matt, Amy’s gorgeous stepbrother, is a junior at Cornell. He’s also been with the same girl since high school. But in a way, that makes things easier—since I know he’s taken I’ve never had to worry about getting him to like me back. Still, stealing glimpses of him sunbathing in his Speedo whenever he’s home on vacation remains one of the perks of being Amy’s best friend.

  “Want to get with?” I exclaim from the backseat, where I’m changing into Amy’s gym uniform, which lucky for me she keeps in the car. “I just said he was nice. I never said I want to get with him.”

  “Well, you should! You spend hours staring at bodies in textbooks, yet you’ve never gotten off on one.

  It’s just not healthy.”

  “Whatever.” I crawl into the passenger seat. “I haven’t gotten sick yet.”

  Amy loves making fun of the fact that my favorite book is Gray’s Anatomy (basically the bible of human biology), which in my opinion is a lot more interesting than the trash romance novels she reads. The truth is, I’ve wanted to be a doctor ever since I played my first game of Operation when I was six, and I’m constantly amazed at how strong and complex our bodies are, especially considering we all start off as single cells and are composed mostly of water.

  Meanwhile, Amy’s convinced my fascination with human anatomy is really some kind of Freudian sublimation of my nonexistent sex life. (Amy’s mom, Dr. Susanna Braff, is a psychotherapist, so Amy’s picked up a lot of the lingo.) I think that’s all nonsense, but maybe she’s right about my wanting to get with the guy at the game today—I’m a lot more enthusiastic than I expected as we spend the next hour