The temptation of Saint Agnostic 3: Riley

Part 1 and part 2. All identifying words and names have been changed.

Oh dear -- so many possible tales to tell about this comely queen bee, who I knew when she was 15 ("and a half!") to 16, while I was 25. Riley seized every chance she could to provoke me sexually to see if I'd crack. It was relentless. By the end of our acquaintanceship, though, she'd toned down the pranksterism and developed a crush on me, which she confessed in a discreet and feminine way. In working with teenagers, especially after turning around trouble cases, you can be struck with quite a heady spell of Pygmalionism.

Where do I start? Once, to make sure she was studying her vocab book, I asked her what her words for today were. Little did I know she had to learn a naughty sounding prefix: "My words for today are... [some prefix I forget] and... cum-... Omigod, Agnostic! -- what does CUM- mean?! Do I have to write a sentence about CUM-?!" Another time she looked pretty exhausted, so I asked if she'd tired herself out from sports or something before showing up. "Omigod... you don't wanna know what I was doing..."

I overheard Riley and her friends using sexual profanity when there were younger students around, so I looked over and told her that nobody needed to hear that. "What, Agnostic. We're just talking about BLOWJOBS!" she said wide-eyed and with a cocky smile. Other times she would slowly stroll across the front of my personal space, no more than a half-foot away, while glancing over her shoulder to smile and say, "Heyyyyy, what'suuuuuuuup?"

One of my tattoos says "fiat lux," and when I showed them to her, she said, "Yeah, I'm gonna get one like that right on my butt -- FIAT! LUX!" she screamed, smacking her left and then right buttcheek with each shout, all while bending over and looking at me over her shoulder.

She was quite jealous of other girls I was working with, swooping in to mercilessly tease them about their nose, or what-have-you, to shove them off her territory. Only once did the other girl fight back: Riley was wearing yellow athletic shorts and a red t-shirt, and the other girl bit back with, "And who are you anyway -- Ronald McDonald?" She was left speechless and slouched away, probably the only time I thought she would cry.

Pretty girls with dominant personalities get away with everything during adolescence because the other girls are too afraid of her plotting against them, and because the boys are too afraid of her not talking to them. It's good, then, that she ran up against me, to learn that she'll be in for a rude awakening once guys no longer worship her. When she tried to cross out the score I'd written in her binder, I wrote a note next to it with the original score and my initials. "I'll just tell the next teacher that the score you wrote isn't right." And who do you think they're going to believe, Riley -- me or you? "Ummm.... the attractive girl?" she said, only half-playfully.

Girls like her become so accustomed to steamrolling over everyone else that they sometimes speak like autistics or toddlers, not having needed to learn the subtle signs and rules of polite communication. I was busy helping another student when she waltzed over to me, matter-of-factly saying, "Hey four-eyes, I need some help with this..." Her tone-of-voice wasn't insulting or condescending at all, and she didn't even recognize she'd said anything wrong. I looked at her, stone-faced, and said, "Not if you talk like that. Now get out of here, I'm busy." She meandered back to her desk, visibly stung, but someone needed to whip her into shape.

Just to let her know that I didn't hold a permanent grudge, a few days later when she asked for help, I explained whatever it was she needed help with, and as she began to turn away, I added, "And thanks for not saying 'four-eyes' this time," with a "gotcha" look on my face. "What???!?!?!?!" she beamed, an OK-you-got-me smile breaking out across her face, as she came back toward me. As she listened to me explain that her attitude would get her into trouble pretty soon, when she enters the world of guys who no longer bend over backwards for a pretty face, she rested casually on the desk with one leg dangling over the edge, her foot lightly kicking the air, and the other leg resting on the tabletop with her knee bent and the ankle touching her inner thigh. By this point, I think she'd learned her place.

The unintended side-effect is that she becomes more infatuated than if you were any other cute boy: you're the only one (aside from perhaps her father) who's kept her under your thumb. She's finally met a guy who has bigger balls than she does, and a feeling of girly vulnerability washes over her typically testosterone-soaked brain.

Later, she totally let her guard down -- something she hadn't done for anyone. Instead of her usual cockiness, Riley was timid in calling me over to her. "Hey Agnoooostiiiic...?" Yeah. "Um... how old are you?" Awkward pause -- twenty-five. She responded shyly, "Oh, well... I think age is just a number, y'know... like if two people love each other, age shouldn't matter." From the mouths of babes...

I didn't encourage her, just nodded openmindedly, and neither of us mentioned it again. I thought she may have been joking, but her demeanor that day was unusually shy. Having an alpha cutie drop the bitchy act and confess her crush -- bashfully -- convinced me that teenagers have the greatest girlfriend potential. With an older alpha, once you crack the bitchy shell, the kernel of girliness has shriveled into an inedible pebble.

By the way, at the time she had a filthy rich, high-status boyfriend her own age, and she was still more excited to hang out with me. (He probably took her shit and threw money at her, while I shut her down every time she acted up. And I was surely smarter and more ambitious than he was -- his family owned a bunch of real estate, and that's it.) This goes against the idea that the only girls who would go for an older guy are losers who don't know yet what having a high-status boyfriend is like. I just checked her Facebook, and her current bf shares his first name, pretty boy face, and slender frame with me -- some things never change, eh Riley?