"So, I heard you finally lost your virginity."
Funny. Even though I knew what Sara had meant when she said that, the statement still gave me a slight pause. It'd been awhile since I'd had a girlfriend. I had lost my virginity sometime in the past, right? Sex wasn't something I hallucinated having, was it?
The memory of Hillary Henderson, aka, Hillary Hottie, came back to me. Yes, yes, 17, two weeks after prom. Prom night itself had been a duller. No sex for Greggo, that was for sure. Just me, a tux, and a slice of American pie.
Not that I've ever done that. Yeah. Um. Yeah.
As I fumbled around trying to remember exactly when the last time I had sex was (thankfully, that was not at 17. . .suave I am not, but neither am I a complete loser), Sara had clarified what she meant. The autopsy.
Oh. Yeah. That.
Sara got sick, she said. That surprised me for a minute, but only because I hadn't. I hadn't felt sick at all. I tried to tell her that and she misunderstood. Thought I was being macho. Being strong.
Funny.
I'm not strong. Never considered myself to be strong, never really pretended to be strong. I can pretend to be cheerful when I'm not, sometimes, but I can't pretend to be heroic or manly. I don't think I'd have had to stop and wonder when the last time I had had sex was if I could. I'm just a lab rat.
Actually, no. Not just a lab rat, not anymore. I was getting out in the field, or I was trying to. I might actually even make it. Prove myself. I'm not sure who I'd be proving myself to. Grissom, maybe. Everyone wants to prove themselves to Grissom. Show how responsible and grown up and awesome they are. Or maybe to Sara. Prove I am a man. I could, potentially, be heroic. I have lost my virginity. I'm not just nothing. Not invisible.
Maybe.
But I think Sara expected me to be sick. Doc Robbins probably expected me to be sick. And I know Grissom did. You could tell, that little smirk. He's not, ultimately, a cruel man, though this whole number 2 CSI hazing thing does beg the question just a bit, but Grissom enjoys watching people squirm, just like everyone else. He thought I'd be sick. I think even I thought I'd be sick.
But I wasn't. I didn't feel sick at all.
The guy on the table was just a body. I couldn't really reconcile the idea of him ever being a person. He couldn't have been a person, not alive, dancing, singing to Marilyn Manson, talking to his friend the other day about some girl he met at the bus. The idea that he had ever been a baby, gone to school, talked about stupid crap like coin collecting and the ideal toe length for girls. . .it was incomprehensible. He couldn't have had thoughts, had dreams, weird desires and even weirder phobias. He couldn't have been somebody who lost their virginity. He couldn't have been a person, not like me, because he was just a body on the table for cutting. Just a bunch of meat. And blood.
He couldn't have been a person. Not a real one.
Could he have been?
Of course he was.
But I still couldn't reconcile it.
Doc Robbins said that's all we really were, in the end. Meat. A body. Sara said it was what we did with our lives that counted. I wonder if she's an atheist. I don't think that would surprise me.
She seemed content with the idea, that we don't go on, that there's nothing inside of us. She made fun of me for thinking there would be a ball of light inside. I guess she should have. It's a dumb idea. But I expected something. Something to make me realize that this was somebody who had been alive, just like me. And there wasn't anything. And I didn't feel sick.
Do I think there's something more to us? Doesn't there have to be? Something more than just our brains and our bodies and our little screwy DNA strands? Can we really all be just meat? Just dead?
I don't know. I don't think so. But I don't know.
I wonder what Grissom would think.
He didn't mind my analogy. Foam, like on a beer. Sometimes he minds stuff like that, thinks it's inappropriate. Other times he seems fascinated by the way human minds relate to things. I used to think I was invisible to him. He used to make me nervous. He still does. But I wonder if I'm still invisible. If I am nothing to these people I've worked with for over five years.
It's hard to say.
Everyone expects me to be weak, and I probably am. Everyone expects me to be goofy, which I almost always am. Everyone expects me to be childish. To be silly. To be small.
Everyone expected me to me to be sick.
But I didn't.
My mind keeps going back to 17. I lost my virginity to Hillary Henderson. Hillary Hottie. A girl I should never have been able to score with, and one I wouldn't have scored with, if a few weird things hadn't happened. Namely bad days, bad relationships, and a whole lot of alcohol. A one night stand with one of the most popular girls in school. No one would have expected that, not from Gregory Sanders.
But it did. And I remember feeling like it was supposed to mean something, to be something special, and it really wasn't. It was just something that happened. I was a virgin and then I wasn't.
The man on the table was alive and then not.
Would I someday be dead? The idea was inconceivable.
But it was still true.
I lost my virginity today and I think I may have lost more too.