My Body(12)

I wish that a couple of years later when, breathless and sobbing, I’d revealed to my mom that I wasn’t a virgin, she’d hugged me instead of looking disappointed. I didn’t give her the details—Owen, the carpet, the blood—I only said that I’d had sex. We were in her car, pulled over a few blocks from her sister’s house. I was in the passenger seat, still not old enough to drive. The fabric of the seat was hot against my back. “We wondered, but we were sure: not Emily,” she said, her eyes fixed on the windshield. I could see her already thinking about how she’d share this news with my father. I winced. She exhaled. “We’re late to see my family.” Her tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth. She started the car back up.

I took deep breaths and slowly managed to calm down. I tasted my snot and bit my upper lip. I felt gutted, as if my insides had been hollowed out. My body was light and fragile, like a shell doomed to shatter, as I walked through my aunt’s front door, a bell jingling as it swung open. I greeted my extended family, feeling my uncle’s cool skin against my cheek when I hugged him, knowing that they’d be even more disapproving of me than my mother had been. I felt bad for her; sorry to have confessed something about myself that was so shameful she now had to hide it. I wanted to curl up and fall asleep forever, but instead I sat in the shadows of my aunt’s yard and pretended to smile.

Owen came over to my parents’ house once, unexpectedly. I remember how animated and sloppy he seemed as I opened our front door and he stepped into the living room. An air of drama surrounded him. His skin was red and his eyes glassy.

“My dad and I were fighting,” he announced, gasping, his face contorting.

I was awkward as we sat on a wooden bench on the back deck. Owen laid his head in my lap, and thick tears streamed down his nose. I looked at his profile, his large features and the red pockmarks on his face. Everything about him seemed fresh and raw, like a wound that had just broken open. His eyelids were practically translucent. I shifted uncomfortably beneath the weight of his head. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands.

I could sense my mother’s eyes on us, watching through the glass of her bedroom door. The house was quiet. My parents stayed inside and out of sight. It seemed as if everyone understood the role I was supposed to play. I inhaled and drew up a memory of how I thought a woman behaved when she comforted a man. Maybe it was a moment from a movie? I wasn’t sure. My mother had told me about her high school boyfriend Jim, that he came from an unhappy home and had often slept on her family’s couch. What did she do when Jim came over? I tried to embody that version of my mother, her love for Jim. I pushed away my tangle of confusion and slowly, very slowly, touched the curls in Owen’s hair.

“It’s okay,” I said tentatively. “I’m so sorry, Owen,” I whispered with more confidence; the warmth of his hot face radiated against my thighs. It felt good to do what was expected of me, but something about my comforting of him wasn’t right. I had been cast as the loving and concerned girlfriend, but I didn’t want the part.

After Owen left, my mother said to me, “I’ll never forget what you looked like, his big head in your lap.” She’d witnessed something theatrical. “Poor Owen,” she added.

When I started hanging out with Sadie and the other popular girls, they scoffed if Owen approached us. “He’s kind of gross, Emily,” they’d say. I didn’t like the way they looked at him, but it also felt good to have someone say I shouldn’t be with him; their disapproval gave me permission to avoid him. I began to feel more confident about ignoring his texts and less afraid of abandoning him.

After I finally broke up with Owen—or rather, after I escaped him—I was riddled with guilt. Food was unappetizing. I couldn’t sleep, knowing Owen might show up at my parents’ house or hurt himself to spite me, which he had threatened to do. My phone buzzed late into the night with text after text. He was relentless. He’d sit in his dad’s blue VW Bug across the street from my house, just in sight of the window of my living room. The blue stood out unnaturally against the foliage of the street; it was the same color as his eyes, both milky and crisp at once.

By the time I was fifteen, Owen had stopped parking across the street. One night, I made plans to go drinking with a group of girls who weren’t really my friends. I’d never spent time with them outside of school. They were cooler than me, or at least it felt that way. They all lived in big tract houses with walk-in closets and parents who never seemed to be home. We got ready for the night at one of these houses, in a pink room with a full-length mirror, watching ourselves and each other as we tried on outfits. One girl used a Sharpie on our arms to tally the shots of vodka we were knocking back. I remember tripping over a pile of clothes and looking down at the black lines that started at my elbow and traveled down to my wrist.

The next thing I knew, we were in a dark parking lot next to a car that smelled like leather. A grocery store’s sign glowed in the distance. My mouth was slick and my stomach felt tight and I could not stop throwing up. I could not hold myself up. The girls exchanged looks, annoyed, as they held my hair back from my face. The boy who was driving us must have called Owen, because suddenly his truck was there and he was pulling me off the asphalt and dragging me away. I’d not spoken to him in months. I squeezed the arm of one of the girls and tried to conjure the words to tell her he was not safe, but she’d already turned away. He’d come to claim me, and they thought of me as his.