I, Monster

A few days ago, I was at the mall, drinking coffee and talking to a young woman I will call Mary. Mary had started the conversation, which I was enjoying, because who else wants to talk to me? She was 22, but looked much younger. She told me that she tries to look after her 12 year old sister, who is getting interested in boys and fashion.

I’m always interested in young people who have grown up with social media. I wonder how it affects their lives, or if they even think of the internet as something separate from their lives. So I asked her if she spent a lot of time scrolling through shit on her phone, like I do. She seemed at once casually grown up and sweetly naive.

I started going on about how sad I was for young people, who would never know innocence, who would see hundreds or thousands of naked bodies and sex acts before they ever had a relationship. I deplored the lack of mystery that is now a fact of life for young people. I asked her if this worried her, and she said, Not really.

Then, because it’s one of my favorite stories, I told her about the time my kid brought a new friend home for a play-date, and they disappeared into his room. They were probably around 13 at the time, and my kid was already a prodigious coder.  After around three hours, the friend’s mom called to see how things were going. She then advised me to supervise the kids’ computer use, because her son had recently been caught looking at bestiality.

The punchline of the story is me going, “WHAT??? YOU’RE TELLING ME NOW, AFTER THREE HOURS?”

So I finished my story, expecting Mary to laugh. Instead, she looked confused, and said. “What’s  bestiality?”

Shit, I thought, oh no! I didn’t think I could just say, Never mind, now that I’d said the word. So, very sadly, I explained, “It’s when people have sex with animals.” Her eyes bugged out and her hands flew up to her face. “But how would they do that?”

Suddenly, my husband appeared, as we had planned to meet outside the coffee bar. Overcome with guilt and relief, I blurted out, “Hi honey, this is Mary. I’ve just destroyed her innocence!” Mary laughed but I still felt mortified.

As my husband and I walked to the car, he joked about me picking up kids at the mall. I told him that in fact, she had picked me up. Then I remembered reading that the men who get caught having sex with horses always blame it on the horse. “The horse came on to me, it wasn’t my idea!”

Just kill me.