Losing my virginity changes Amy and me for good. Maybe she sees my carelessness and doesn’t know how else to express her concern. Maybe she’s jealous of how easily I can relinquish my body. Maybe she thinks I’m like Jennifer Levin, putting myself into dangerous situations for no reason she can see. Or maybe she just thinks it’s shitty that I have sex with people I don’t care about and who won’t care about me. I’m not sure. But I see it as my opening to get out. When school starts up again, I go to a party and make my way toward Jennifer A. She’s the prettiest, the one most boys at our school would like to get. She’s also the quietest. She has a feline quality, sleek and slow-moving. She stands now with a beer in her hand, her legs crossed, one finger twirling in her hair. She looks bored. I prepared for this.
“Want to do some coke?” I whisper.
She turns to me, her eyes wide and sparkly. I can see my plan is going to work.
“You have coke?”
I nod. I took it earlier from my dad’s drawer, which he has kept refilled since that party a few years back.
She smiles. “Let’s go to my car.”
We head outside and onto the street. The night is still warm from the summer. Dark leaves rustle from oaks that stand majestically in front of the house. I don’t even know whose party we’re at. She unlocks a Honda, and we get in. I file this: Jennifer A is not so rich as to have a Beemer or a Jeep Cherokee like most of the kids at our school. Like me, she has to come from enough money to go to our school, but maybe not as much as the others. She takes a CD case from the door cubby, and I dig out the packet of foil from my pocket.
“Here,” I say, handing it to her. “You can do it.”
She opens the foil and smiles. “This looks nice.”
“It’s my dad’s,” I tell her. “Which means it’s going to be really good.”
She dumps some of the chunky powder onto the CD case and pulls a credit card from her wallet to break it up. “Your dad does cocaine?”
I nod. “He has so much, I can take this amount and he’ll never know.”
“Very cool.” She keeps chopping with the card. “You’re Kerry, right?”
I nod again.
“Why haven’t we hung out before?”
I smile, feeling great. “I don’t know.”
She slices the powder into lines, takes a twenty from her wallet, and rolls it, just like the dollar bills I used to find rolled in my dad’s apartment before we moved in together, back when I didn’t know what they were.
“Your shit,” she says, handing me the CD case and the bill. “You get the first line.”
I take it from her and, using the bill, sniff in the thinnest line. The drug is sharp inside my nostril, and immediately I feel a course of lightning through my body. Razor-sharp, quick, bracing, like I’ve just plugged myself in. I give it back to her, and she snorts quickly. She dips a fingertip—nail bitten, I see, just like mine—into the edge of the powder and rubs it on her gums.
A SUNDAY. Mom calls. She’s been back in the States for a few years now, living in Chicago. I sit on the leather couch in the living room and pick at a hangnail. She tells me about seeing Tyler in her new dorm room, how she thinks Tyler’s thriving there. Last time Tyler called she said she had a boyfriend. A boyfriend. My withdrawn, matronly sister. I told her I was happy for her, but really I was seething with jealousy. How can she have a boyfriend when I don’t? What is so wrong with me?
“And you?” Mom asks. “What about you?”
I look at the rows of pictures on the entertainment stand. Tyler and me as children. Dad and Nora on a recent cruise. Most of the photos are outdated, from when Tyler and I were much younger. Dad’s many electronics and all their wires clutter the stand—the large TV, two VCRs so he can copy Nova and war-footage videos, all the stereo equipment. Our apartment is always cluttered, old computers and their parts heaped in corners, mounds of mail that’s never been sorted, and the living room is no exception. Since hiring an interior designer when he first bought the apartment (one whom Mom claimed he was sleeping with), he has allowed the place to go to hell. Dad pays a cleaning lady from Nigeria forty bucks to come once a week, and she does our laundry, dusts and vacuums, and cooks us meals that she seals in Tupperware and puts in the fridge. Without her, I guess, we would live like bachelors, eat cereal for dinner, let laundry pile up in the hallway. Mom’s apartment, by contrast, is like a wonderland. Like Dad she has lots of stuff, but hers is all valuable and carefully arranged. Local artists’ colorful work lines her walls, bizarre sculpture juts from corners. She has an installation in her dining room, rows of tiny blue kites illustrated with clouds that flutter and wave when there’s a breeze. It’s a minuscule version by the artist of an installation actually hanging in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Every item she owns, from toothbrush to kitchen whisk, is a piece of art. She likes to say it’s because she wants to surround herself with beauty, but her need for unique and beautiful things has always struck me as excessive, maybe even frantic.
“Kerry?” My silence makes Mom uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to know how I’m really doing. She would never approve of the way I spend my free time, chasing boys and partying. If she could have her way, I would be like Tyler, waiting at home for her calls.
“I’m good,” I say.
“No more parties?” she asks. There’s a familiar edge in her voice, the one that’s there whenever she mentions Dad. “Your father isn’t leaving you alone while he goes off on business anymore?”
“God, Mom,” I say. “That was ages ago.”
“It was a few years ago. I hope your father’s learned something.”
I sigh. He doesn’t talk about you, I want to scream. Why are you still talking about him?
“Can we drop this?”
“I have a right to an opinion when it comes to the parenting of my children.”
“Not when you’re not around to parent them yourself,” I blurt and immediately regret it.
She goes silent, her code for feeling hurt. I close my eyes, wishing for once it were my feelings that mattered here. I’m the one who got left, I want to say. But her silence warns me against saying anything more. I can’t stand her, especially when she’s like this, but I still need her. She’s my mother, after all.
“I’m going to go,” she says in a tight voice.
“Fine,” I say.
We hang up, and in the silence I hear a small moan from behind my father’s closed door. I get up, march down the hall, and slam my bedroom door.
AMY SEES ME laughing with the Jennifers during lunch. I never say anything directly, but she gets the hint and begins to keep her distance. We say hello in the hallways. We talk briefly. There is no blow-up or tantrum, as I feared there would be last year. It turns out Amy is accepting, as though all along she knew I would leave our friendship.
I make friends with the Jennifers’ peripheral friends too, especially Rebecca. We share a sense of humor and a love for pot smoking. And soon, as spring arrives, I find a boy. Heath, Rebecca’s boyfriend’s friend from another town. Heath is round-faced, funny, and gregarious. He is just OK-looking, but he is one of those people whose personality is so great and his confidence so strong that he is magnetic. Heath sees me first at a party. Rebecca tells me about it on the phone, excited at the idea of it, her and Jeff, me and Heath. We’ll have so much fun.
Two weeks later, the four of us go together to a party. Heath makes jokes, trying to impress me. He watches me with admiring eyes. On the ride back from the party, people pile into the car, leaving little room, so Heath pulls me down on his lap. He holds his arms around me in a hug. I feel light and breathless. Elated.
The next day he calls me, and the next and the next. He goes on a vacation with his friends to the Bahamas, and he calls from there, too.
“I miss you,” he says.
I grip the phone, letting myself feel this, a boy missing me, wanting to be with me. The truth is I don’t miss him. I barely know him. We saw each other once since the night of the party. We made out on my bed while Jeff and Rebecca were in the other room. It doesn’t matter. I like the idea of him, of what he will be for me. So I tell him I miss him, too.
When he comes back he brings me a woven leather bracelet he bought at a stand on the beach. I put it on, loving it without question. It’s proof he thought of me, he likes the idea of me, too.
Finally.
A boyfriend.
We have sex for the first time that night.
When I tell the Jennifers, Jennifer C, the one I connect with the least, the one who frightens me with her harsh, cutting laughter, says, “I appreciate you telling me first, but I’m fine with it.”
I don’t say anything, confused.
“We only went out for like a week.”
“Oh,” I say. “Good.”
She flips her curls back and makes a face.
“He annoyed me pretty quickly.”
I nod, unsure what to say.
“Some stupid comment about how he liked I knew how to drive stick.”
I nod again. He made the same comment to me, except I had liked it. It made me feel sexy and powerful. I didn’t tell her that.
“He says stupid stuff sometimes,” I say.
She laughs, that mean, high-pitched laugh. “If you can stand him, I wish you guys the best.”
I laugh too, hating myself for laughing. Hating I can’t be myself with the Jennifers, I’m so bent on being one of them. This is one of the reasons I like Rebecca so much. She doesn’t care what the Jennifers think about her. If she were in my shoes right now, she would tell Jennifer she likes Heath just as he is.
Rebecca comes over after school and we get high in my bedroom. I shut the door, but that’s just a courtesy. My father knows I smoke pot. He doesn’t care. Once he even joined me and my friends in the living room as we passed around a joint. He had walked in the front door, and everyone froze. But he just introduced himself, and then asked for a hit. When he went into his bedroom afterward, my friends were in awe.
“That’s so cool,” one said.
“My dad would fucking kill me if he saw me smoking pot,” said another.
“And yours smokes with us?” This one shakes his head. “Dude. That’s awesome.”
I smile and nod, but lately I’m thinking sometimes I’d rather have a dad who would kill me for smoking, who would never smoke with my friends. Having a dad like mine can make me feel out of control and anxious, like I’m standing on a high wire hundreds of feet aboveground. It makes me feel like no one will catch me if I fall.
Heath and I talk on the phone often, and on the weekend he and I get together with Jeff and Rebecca. We laugh and do bong hits and listen to music. We go out for dinner and to the movies. Sometimes, Dad is home and he jokes with us in the living room. One time he even brings out a joint for us to share. Later he tells me how cute Rebecca is, with her long blond hair and her adorable figure. When I tell Rebecca, she jokes I’ll come home one day to find her and my dad in bed doing bong hits.
“Shut up,” I say, laughing. But really, I don’t think it’s funny at all.
Once Rebecca, Jeff, Heath, and I go to a Japanese restaurant where the chef chops and cooks the food on a burner on the table, and Heath is so hysterically funny imitating the guy that I laugh hard enough to choke. At the end of each night together, Heath and I get alone and have sex. We begin to build our own private jokes. Like once, after sex, we go to my kitchen to get water. We are quiet, careful not to wake my dad. He pours the water from the dispenser on the fridge, and then he turns on and off the little light in there.
“Isn’t that cool?” I say. “I love the way that light looks.”
From then on, whenever we go to the kitchen, he says, “Let me get the light,” and he turns on that stupid little light on the refrigerator.
Another time, after a great round of sex, he asks me what I’m thinking.
“I’m thinking I just had a fucking religious experience,” I tell him.
From then on, we call sex “going to church.”
I am sure I’ve never been happier.
Only once do I go to Heath’s house, and only after much cajoling from me. I take my sister’s old Honda and arrive in the afternoon after school. I park and ring the doorbell, but no one comes. I listen for footsteps, watch the doorknob, willing it to turn, my heart beating too fast, that old rush of nervousness moving from my feet up my body. The uncertainty. Has he decided he is done with me? A cry makes its way from my stomach to my throat. Then I think I hear something. Talking. I walk down the front steps and listen. Yes! Heath is talking on the phone! He’s in the backyard! Relief floods me as I see him there, lying on a lounge chair, facing the other way.
“Welcome,” he says when he sees me.
I smile, trying to look nonchalant. Like I wasn’t just on the verge of tears. I want badly for him to kiss me, to hold me in his arms. I want to yell at him. He knew I was coming, why wasn’t he listening for me? How could he let me feel like this? Everything unsteady and angled.
He hangs up the phone, but he still sits there. It’s a nice day, one of the first warm, sunny days of the season. Irises and daisies blossom on the other side of the yard. I know his parents are divorced and he lives with his mother and younger sister. But he doesn’t talk about them. Even that information I had to wrench from him. Many times, I find, I feel like I just did on his doorstep, knocking at the door, waiting for him to let me in.
“Aren’t we going inside?” I ask.
He frowns slightly. “It’s so gorgeous out,” he says.
“I want to see where you live.”
He looks off into the yard where his cat is chasing a flying bug and laughs. “She never catches anything,” he says.
“Heath,” I whine.
He looks at me. “Oh, all right.” He stands and I follow him to the back door. He moves slowly, leaning down to greet another cat lounging on the back porch. “We don’t have much money,” he says as he opens the door and steps into the kitchen. “Don’t expect much.”
I laugh. “I don’t care about that.”
He walks me through the small kitchen and den and up stairs that are carpeted with brown shag. “Come on,” he says when I stop to look at pictures of him and his sister as little kids. There’s a hint of anger in his voice. We go up another flight of skinny stairs leading to an attic room. Half of it has a twin bed and fish tank. His clothes are scattered on the floor. The other half has an easel splattered with paint, rags, and a card table covered with tubes of oil paint. He explains his mother paints on one side, but the other is all his. I sit on his bed and smile, wanting him to join me. He’s acting weird and distant. I need him to touch me, to get close, inside me. I need to know he’s still mine. He starts to pick up his clothes from the floor.
“Forget those,” I say. I take off my shirt and dangle it over the floor. “I’m only going to mess it up again.”
He hesitates, but he looks at my chest. I straighten my back a little, pushing out my breasts. I smile again. He drops the clothes on a chair and comes to me. It’s so easy like that sometimes to get what I want. We have sex, using a condom. When it is over we lie together a moment. I bury my nose into his neck, smelling his scent. A car beeps, and Heath jumps up, pulling on his boxers, and looks out the open window.
“Denny,” he yells. “What’s up?”
“We’re going to Riverside,” the friend yells.
“I can’t, dude,” Heath says. He gestures back toward his bed, and me. “I’m busy.” He laughs, and Denny laughs too.
“Ah, OK, dude. I got it.”
I smile, liking this, being the object of Heath and his friend’s attention. Being the one Heath has sex with. When his friend leaves, though, Heath doesn’t come back into bed. He starts pulling on his clothes. I get up and do the same, figuring it’s what he wants.
When we get down to the second floor, I ask to use the bathroom. Heath points to it.
“It’s small,” he says uncomfortably.
I go in and close the door behind me. The bathroom is indeed tiny and cluttered. There’s a brown stain in the sink. But I don’t care about that. Why does he think I care so much? I pee quickly and flush, then run the water and wipe my hands on a damp bath towel. He’s in his mother’s bedroom when I come out, but when I join him he quickly makes for the stairs again. He waits at the door.
“You better go,” he says. “My mom’s going to be home soon.”
“I’d like to meet your mom.”
He grimaces. “Maybe another time,” he says. “I’ve got a bunch of homework.”
I nod. “OK.”
I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him.
“I’ll miss you,” I whisper.
He pulls away first. “I’ll catch you later, OK?”
In the car, I try to shake off the feeling he’s going away. His words echo in my head. Maybe another time. There will be another time. He said it himself.
SINCE I CAN’T be with Heath as much as I would like, I fill the rest of my time with friends. I go to one of the Jennifers’ houses and do cocaine or we sit in the smoking sections of diners and drink coffee for hours. Jennifer B and I, it turns out, have many of the same interests. We drive together up Route 9W to Nyack, New York, a small, artsy town that has cute little shops full of goods made by local artists. We buy beads and handknit hats. We gossip about people at school. She has a boyfriend too, a cute Filipino boy a grade below us, and we exchange stories from our relationships. She’s been seeing her boyfriend for close to a year, so her stories are more dramatic, funnier. They have a lightness to them I can’t get to with Heath, aware as I am of this constant nagging feeling he’s about to end things with me. But I keep this to myself, laughing along with her when I talk about the weird way Heath doesn’t want me lingering in his house.
With all the regular sex I’m having, I start thinking about birth control. Until now, I know, I’ve been lucky. Only once or twice has a guy not initiated the use of a condom, and usually only because there were none around. I am rightfully scared about pregnancy. After one of those condomless nights with someone I barely knew, I was terrified I was pregnant. When my period came a few days late, I promised myself I would never ever do that again. But I did, leading to another pregnancy scare.
I’m afraid of pregnancy, but I’m not really afraid of STDs. I should be. This is the eighties, when AIDS has begun to destroy person after person, taking them down as if with a machine gun. One of my mother’s good friends has been diagnosed as HIV-positive, and another is already dead. But in the eighties, adolescent girls aren’t afraid of such things. AIDS is relegated to gay men and IV drug users. It will be a number of years before females, and then African American teenage girls, become the groups with the highest rate of growing AIDS cases. Being a young girl, I don’t think STDs can touch me. I assume, as many teenagers do, I am impervious to diseases like herpes and chlamydia. Those things just don’t happen to people like me. I’m more concerned about getting toxic-shock syndrome from tampons. Media hype has convinced me this is the thing to worry about.
It’s the pregnancy worry that makes me call my mother one evening. She’s doing her residency now in gynecology in Chicago. She’ll be able to get me what I need.
“The Pill?” she asks when I tell her why I called. “You’re having sex?”
“I have a boyfriend,” I tell her, defensive. I sit cross-legged on my bedroom floor. I assumed telling her would be no big deal. She’s the one who pushed all those books—What’s Happening to Me? and Our Bodies, Ourselves—on Tyler and me when we were younger. She’s the one who told Tyler and me, too much actually, that sexual feelings were normal and healthy and even nice.
“I just want you to be careful,” she says.
“That’s why I want the pills.”
“Not just that kind of careful, though,” she says. She hesitates, and I wait, a sick feeling starting in my stomach. “Boys don’t like girls who give it away too easily.”
I set my mouth. “I told you, I have a boyfriend. We’ve been together for over a month.”
But inside, that sick feeling spreads.
She doesn’t say anything.
“Forget it,” I say. “I’ll just go to Planned Parenthood.”
“You should get an exam anyway.”
“To look for diseases?” I ask. I feel like I might cry.
“Everyone should get an exam before going on birth control.”
“I thought my own mother might help me out,” I say.
“I want to help.” Her voice is calm and steady. She’s using the tone she gets when it’s obvious my feelings are growing out of control. It’s patronizing and fake, and it’s one of the reasons I usually hide my feelings from her. “But I would never prescribe pills without an exam.”
When we hang up, I feel like I might throw up. I go to the kitchen and down a glass of water. I dial Heath’s number, but it just rings and rings. Then I go to the living room and flip on the TV. I do anything. Anything to get away from the fact that my own mother assumes I’m easy.
REBECCA GRABS MY ARM and pulls me into the student lounge.
“You got me in trouble,” she says.
“What are you talking about?”
She sighs and looks around, making sure no one else can hear. “Heath told Jeff you did it doggie-style with him,” she whispers.
I bite my lip, embarrassed. “So?”
“I won’t, and now Jeff is saying if you do it with Heath, then I should too.”
“We only did it once like that,” I tell her.
“You know how they are,” she says.
I do. All the boys in Jeff’s crowd are obsessed with anything concerning sex. One ripped off a tag from an airplane life jacket that said JERK TO INFLATE, and he wore it in his fly for the day until a teacher made him take it off. They all have this ongoing joke about doing it from behind. They answer every question that way: “What are you doing?” “Doggie.” “How would you like that prepared, sir?” “Doggie.” They think it’s hysterical, but we girls roll our eyes. “That’s so canine,” we tell them, which makes them laugh even harder. Now, though, I’ve been caught. Now Rebecca knows my rolling my eyes has been a bunch of crap. I think back to the time Heath and I had sex like that. I didn’t particularly want to. But Heath begged, and wanting to please him, I did. The whole time I hated it, how impersonal and dirty it felt, as though I could have been anyone beneath him.
Later, I call Heath.
“Why did you tell him?” I ask accusingly.
“I don’t know,” he says. “That’s what guys do. Haven’t you ever heard of the locker room?”
I take a deep breath, frustrated.
“You didn’t seem to care when my friend was outside that time and I let him know we were having sex,” he says. “I would say you even liked it.”
“Fuck you,” I blurt.
“Fuck you too.”
I close my eyes, wanting to get us back to how we were. I’m not really mad at him. I’m mad at myself, that I do these things and then pretend I don’t. I spend half my life lying about who I am and what I want. I don’t even know who I am most of the time.
“Listen,” I say. “Let’s just forget it, OK?”
“Whatever,” he says.
But I can tell he’s still annoyed.
The next time we talk, he tells me he wants to break up.
I sit on the floor of my bedroom, my body empty, my heart wrung.
“Why?” I plead.
“It’s just not fun anymore,” he says.
“We can make it fun again.” I close my eyes, knowing I sound desperate.
“Kerry,” he says. I grip the phone, holding on to my name, his voice saying my name. “It’s over.” He wants to get off the phone, be done with it. He and his friends call having a girlfriend “dealing,” and now he doesn’t want to deal anymore.
“Can we at least talk in person about this?” I ask.
He sighs. “You can come here now, I guess.”
Twenty minutes later I park the Civic in front of his house. Before I have a chance to get out, he comes out the front door and slips into the passenger seat. Keeping me away from his home again. My heart is pounding, my mouth dry.
“What did I do?” I ask.
He leans his head back against the seat, revealing his pale neck, his Adam’s apple. I wish so much he would just gather me in his arms, but I know that isn’t going to happen.
“I just wanted to have some fun, you know?” he says.
“We were having fun.”
“Yeah. But things changed. You’re starting to sound like me, do you know that?”
I stare at him, confused. “I am not.”
“You are,” he says, a million miles from me in the next seat. “You say ‘dude’ and ‘baked.’ Those are things I say. And you make your voice do the same things mine does. I don’t like it. You just want too much.”
I lean back, that sick feeling spreading through my body. The feeling of being seen, exposed. My ugly needs giving me away once again.
“I’m over it.”
I nod. I get it. My wanting makes me unlovable. It’s something I already know.
“Let’s just say we had a nice time and move on,” he says, and smiles. This doesn’t bother him at all.
My throat is tight with despair, but I smile back. We hug and he gets out of the car. I watch him go up the stairs to his door and disappear inside. He doesn’t look back.
At home, I put on Roxy Music and listen to the song “More Than This,” wanting the song to make me cry, but it doesn’t. The music only lodges the sorrow more deeply inside. I go to the bathroom, and on the counter are the pills I finally got from Planned Parenthood. I just started my first pack, and in a month Heath and I would have been able to have condom-free sex. Stupid me, thinking it would last that long. I look at myself in the mirror, my flat, brown hair, the freckles sprinkled across my nose. I have never hated myself more.
The next morning I stay in bed, not wanting to wake up. The morning turns to afternoon, and at some point, Dad knocks and opens my door.
“I’m sleeping,” I say, and turn over. I pull the covers over my head.
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon,” he says. I listen as he walks to the bed. He pulls back the covers a bit and gets in beside me. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” I say. “I’m just sleeping.” I can smell his familiar scent so close. He puts his arms around my middle, like he used to when I was little, when we would cuddle together while watching TV. But I’m older now, and it feels weird, so I try to pull away. He holds tighter.
“Mmm. You’re so warm and nice.”
“Get out of my bed,” I say, kicking him off. A panicky feeling is making its way through my body. I’m only wearing a T-shirt and underwear. I don’t want him touching me like this, my father in my bed.
“What,” he says, “I can’t show my daughter a little affection?”
When I don’t say anything, he gets up.
“Jeez, you’re an ice cube.”
He shuts the door and I let out my breath.
TWO WEEKS LATER, Rebecca, Jeff, and I go to a party. I know Heath will be there, so I dress as sexy as I can. A miniskirt, a tight-fitting top. I take a curling iron to my hair. When we arrive, he’s flirting with one of the blond girls from my school. Jealousy seeps through my skin like water, but I try to act nonchalant, like I’m fine, like I don’t need him so much. But as the night wears on, and as he drinks more and more, I grow frantic. Finally, I approach him.
“Come home with me,” I whisper.
He winces. He can barely look at me. “I’m staying at Jeff’s tonight.” His breath is sharp from beer.
“Fuck Jeff’s,” I say. “Come with me.”
He looks around, stumbles.
“I’ll make it worth your while,” I say.
He turns back to me, his eyes blurry from the booze.
“Drive me to Jeff’s,” he says. “His parents are away.”
I scramble to find Rebecca and Jeff and convince them to leave. And soon, Heath is in my car. He pokes at the radio, looking for something he likes as we follow Jeff and Rebecca. I try to think of something to say, something that will endear me to him, get him back to who he was in the beginning. But when I look over at him, his eyes are rolling back in his head. I shake him awake when we get there.
Inside, he ignores me. He finds himself food, then turns on the oversize television to play a video game. I follow him from room to room, my throat tight, until finally he leads me upstairs to Jeff’s parents’ bedroom.
“Look at this fucking room,” Heath spits out.
It is massive, with a king-size canopy bed. I know Heath struggles with this, with the fact that all his friends live in huge, luxurious houses while he lives in his simple home. He cares too much about it, like how I care too much about what people think of me, especially boys.
His mouth is tart and clumsy, and he yanks off my clothes in a hurry. He feels different, angry or annoyed. I don’t know what. But I let him keep going. He pushes himself inside me. I was going to tell him about the Pill, but he doesn’t get a condom anyway. He just pushes and pushes, jabbing and hammering, like I’m nothing beneath him. That blond girl, maybe. Or no one at all. Tears come to my eyes.
“Come on,” he yells when I don’t respond. “What’s the problem?”
I look away, tears streaming.
He pulls out of me quickly, not done, and runs into the bathroom where I hear him retch.
I roll over and wrap my arms around my bent knees.
When he comes back, he lies on the other side of the bed and falls fast asleep. I sit up and see my clothes on the floor. Twisted shirt and crumpled skirt, my underwear rolled into a ball. I gather them up, my throat dry. I know I should leave. It is the only dignified thing to do. But then what? I’ll be home, alone in my room, unable to sleep there, either. I think about the next morning, waking up with this ugly night weighing on my mind. The thought is simply unbearable. So I settle back down and wait for sleep to come.
In the morning, I wake to the sound of Heath in the room. He has put on his jeans and he sits at the end of the bed with his head resting in his hands.
“Don’t say anything,” he says when I sit up, “or my head will split open.”
I put on my clothes, which I realize I cuddled with all night, and I get out of the bed. I’m thinking about how he said I want too much, and I’m desperate to get out of there, to prove him wrong, even though I’ve just proved him right.
“Do you need a ride?” I ask as softly as I can.
“I’ll get Jeff to take me home.” He doesn’t even look at me.
I wait another second, but he doesn’t say anything else.
For a brief moment, I see myself as though from a distance: my wrinkled clothes, my mussed hair, mascara smeared beneath my eyes, waiting for something from this boy who is done with me. I am pitiful, wretched even. I need to end this for myself. But in the same instant, the vision is gone. I wonder now if I had been able to maintain that perspective for maybe a few moments longer, perhaps I wouldn’t have kept going down this path. Perhaps this would have been the turning point, the place where I learned my lesson and found a way to love myself. But my desperation was too strong. It was like a tidal wave, pulling me deeper into its current. And the rest of me was not strong enough to fight it.