As if he’d magically stop if he knew how badly I didn’t want to do it. I kept saying no, as if it could save me. Then he unzipped my jeans, his arm a crowbar against my chest. He pushed down his pants anyway and put on the condom.
He said, “I know you really want to because of the way you’re kissing me right now.”Īgain I said no. Once we were on the floor, he asked me to have sex. He was the first boy I allowed below the waistband of my Bluenotes, and underneath my fluorescent padded bra. I liked the curved bow of his lips, the way his body made a question mark over his guitar, how his toes turned in like a pigeon’s when he walked. It reminded me of the way I held Pop Rocks underneath my tongue when I was a kid, pressing hard against the candy’s zing. When he kissed me, he tasted like beer, hamburgers and barbecue potato chips. Harder still when I told him to put the condom back in his pocket. He tried to charm me into a sip of his beer, grinning hard even as I said no. He shut the door, retrieved some beer he’d swiped from the party and took a purple condom out of his pocket.
They were having a party upstairs-a drunken din of Springsteen and raucous conversation. When I was 16, a friend raped me in his parents’ basement.
