Rookieville

As featured in Columbia College Chicago’s Hair Trigger 38 (2016) and winner of a Certificate of Merit from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Circle Awards 2016

Sailor Jerry and Coke. That’s what he tasted like. And underneath, something like spoiled milk, like he didn’t need to try, like he was doing me a favor. We kissed in the dark of my dorm room, still dressed in our Halloween costumes, The Blob quietly buzzing on the TV. The Blob, of all things. The Blob: through my inebriation, through the awkward party at the stranger’s apartment, through the entire handle of rum and two-liter of Coke, through the sloppy kisses and the stale cigarettes. Even as I texted him at two in the morning knowing that he would respond because the flirtation had been embarrassingly frank, “I’m bored. Come cuddle.” I was Blob-like but I was horny.

We lay like bent and anxious reeds in my twin bed, unwholesomeness brewing beneath the candy-striped comforter. He said little before dipping his head down to kiss me, and I was so intoxicated with the moment and myself and the liquor humming through my system that I didn’t worry about the fact that I had only kissed one other boy in my entire life. His name was Jeff, too. I just puckered and prayed, eyes closed in anticipation of the sort of sensation you see in other people but never really feel in yourself. There was no electricity, no spark, just two warm slabs of meat clumsily seeking each other in the dark. Me, dressed as a housewife from New Jersey: pink plastic curlers pressing into my scalp, my penciled eyebrows as thick as my mouth. He remained unfazed.

Hands like flames singed my arms and cupped my breasts roughly. And then the ugly floral housedress pinned my arms to my sides, and my bra was thrust up, and his mouth was greedy. I could tell that he thought he was good at whatever it was he was trying to do, breathing hot sighs into my ear. I couldn’t decide if being drunk numbed my pleasure or if he was really just that bad. He stuck his tongue in my mouth and left it there like a carcass rotting in the desert. The experience was about as erotic as a trip to Walmart.

I don’t remember my tights coming off, or my underwear. The voice inside my head, the one beneath the moment, kept saying, Enjoy this. This feels good. The comforter slipped off the bed onto the floor and my naked belly and hairy crotch lay exposed to the cold air. I made him get down off the bed, he who was still fully clothed, and retrieve the blanket. As he crawled back up, I pushed him away with a hand on his chest, his beady eyes little more than flecks without his glasses.

“You know, I’m a virgin.”

“What? That’s crazy! You’re so hot!” he said and then buried me with kisses again.

For as much porn as the average heterosexual male watches, it’s easy to hope that some of them know how to make a woman feel good. Or, at the very least, find and operate the clit: that site of eight-thousand nerve endings that quivers under even the softest touch. I was tender between my legs in an unfounded, unused way. And dry. Dry because I didn’t understand that a woman had to be wet and apparently he didn’t either. With one ferocious thrust of his fingers he was inside of me and I was gasping in what he mistook as happiness. It was a mechanical in-and-out and in-and-out, and more of those stupid, hopeless kisses.

“No, wait,” I said between the moans because the pain was coming on too strong and I thought maybe he would tear me in two. And still he went on with the thrusts and I started to burn but not in the way that I wanted to, not in the way that I had imagined. I was being consumed by something unholy. He kept going and I felt him puncture my hymen. The blood trickled out of me like a pitiful last defense. And in the middle of it all maybe there was something that felt good and maybe I was saying his name because I enjoyed it. Or maybe we were both in denial.

He went again and again, not satisfied with making me cum just once. It stopped feeling good after the second time. It stopped feeling like anything. I heard the scraping of his fingers against the drywall beside my bed; he was wiping my blood off his hands. In the morning there would be rusty lines as reminders. Through my daze I heard my roommates tiptoe through the kitchen and balance themselves on the living room sofa to watch me over the half-wall of my room.

Maybe things were more coherent to them than they were to me. Maybe they understood why I finally told him I had had enough, and yet still wanted him to kiss me between my legs. Maybe they understood why he stopped licking after five seconds. Maybe they understood why I did the same when I offered to blow him through his wiry orange pubes. I was too tired and his dick was too small and I didn’t have the energy to try so hard with someone I liked so little. I accidentally kneed him in the balls on the way back up the bed, and I always look back on that moment more fondly than any of the others from that night.

He left when he finally understood that his dick wasn’t going inside of me that night, or any night thereafter. In the bathroom the last of my blood smeared on the toilet seat, almost neon compared to my periods. My periods, which for all of their pain felt so calm and necessary now. And this, this moment and this injury, was fractured and bright like a wound.

The next day I stared at the streaks of dried blood on the wall, the ones I never bothered to clean. The entire female body responds to sexual stimulation and my brain was still buzzing from feeling wanted beneath his desperate attention.

“I’m in an open relationship,” he’d said on the soft sheets that I hastily changed after his departure. The asshole smoked out of a corncob pipe; why hadn’t I noticed his hipster bullshit before then? Why could I not stop myself from caring, from hurting, when his girlfriend came to visit right before Christmas? She was tall and masculine and they wore matching ugly sweaters. And I should have pitied her for being blinded by a guy like that, but really I was just jealous.

Later I’d learn that he’d gone back to his apartment that night and drunkenly announced to his roommates that his dick was covered in blood.

And then we’d be at the same party, and he’d flirt with other girls five feet from where I sat, and I’d text him about how horrible that made me feel. And when he showed his buddies my words and they laughed at me in the corner, I’d go home, and I’d lie down. I wouldn’t take the sleeping pills because I was tired. I would take them because I didn’t want to think. The luxury of sleep is the lack of responsibility. And then somewhere in my drugged stupor, I would text my friends and tell them what I had done. The luxury of a suicide attempt is the pity. And when they threatened to call 911, I would make myself puke the pills back up because I didn’t want to pay for an ambulance. And instead I’d crawl into a fetal position, the way I had crawled into a fetal position after he had left me that night, and I’d stay that way forever.