Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's ＂Learned＂(18)

Now he’s inside me, but he’s only sort of hard. I look onto the floor, by his pale bent knee, and see he’s taken off the condom. Did I tell him to wear a condom? The condom came from my first-aid kit. I knew where that was, he didn’t, so I must have crawled for it. A choice. Why does he think it’s okay to take it off?

I come to a little, realize this is not a dream. I tell him he has to put the condom back on. He’s not hard, and now he’s going down on me, and he’s pushing his dick in my face. It feels like a finger without bones.

I moan, as if to say, I like this, so much.

He calls me baby. Or says, “Oh baby,” which is different.

“Do you want to make me come?” I ask.

“Hunh?” he asks.

“Do you want to make me come?” I ask again, and I know that if I make these sounds and ask these questions, then it is, again, a choice.

Now we’re across the room, our bodies in a new formation. I tip my head back as far as it will go. And up, in my roommate’s tree, I see another condom. Or the same condom. A condom that isn’t on him and maybe never was.

Now I am pulling myself up messily like a just-born foal, throwing Barry and all his clothes out the sliding door into the parking lot. He’s clutching his shirt, struggling with a boot. The winter air seems to sober him up, and I shut the door and watch from behind the glass as he looks for the direction home. I wouldn’t want to run into him now. Now I am hiding in the kitchenette, waiting for him to be gone.

Now I wake up. My roommate isn’t home. Later, I will learn she heard sounds from outside the door and went upstairs to sleep with a friend rather than interrupt me.

Before sunrise, I diligently enter the encounter into the Word document I keep, titled “Intimacy Database.” Barry. Number Four. We f*cked. 69’d. It was terribly aggressive. Only once. No one came.




When I was young, I read an article about a ten-year-old girl who was raped by a stranger on a dirt road. Now nearly forty, she recalled lying down in a gingham dress her mother had sewn for her and making sounds of pleasure to protect herself. It seemed terrifying and arousing and like a good escape plan. And I never forgot this story, but I didn’t remember until many days after Barry f*cked me. Fucked me so hard that the next morning I had to sit in a hot bath to soothe myself. Then I remembered.




The day after Barry, Audrey and I meet up to do homework in the computer lab. We are both still in our pajamas, layers and layers to guard against the cold. In the bathroom we are washing our hands, letting them linger in the hot water, and I say, “I have to tell you something.” We crawl up onto the ledge above the radiator, and we huddle together, and I describe the events of the night before, finishing with “I’m sorry about your wrap dress.”

Audrey’s pale little face goes blank. She clutches my hand and, in a voice reserved for moms in Lifetime movies, whispers, “You were raped.”

I burst out laughing.




That night I am Gchatting with Mike. He lives in San Francisco now, works at an ad agency, and dates a girl with a pill problem and what he calls “a phat ass.” Her Myspace name is Rainbowmolly.


12:30 AM

me: fool

i called you

Mike: i know

i’ve been hung ove

r

hungover

me: me too


12:31 AM

Mike: REALLY

me: i got so drunked up

Mike: nice

i vomited on myself

me: ew

are you ok?

Mike: yes


12:32 AM

i haven’t

left my house

me: i did something so retarded

you will laugh at me

Mike: tell me


12:33 AM





TELL ME


me: i went home with you weird friend Barry

Mike: --------------------

haha





HAHAHA


me: i know


I dial Mike on my hot-pink flip phone, not sure whether I want him to pick up or not. “How weird is that?”

“Well, Barry called me today, said he woke up in the hallway of his dorm. Said he deep-dicked some girl, but he has no idea who.” He laughs, a mucusy exhausted laugh.

“Deep-dicked” will never leave me. It will stay with me long after the sting inside me, like rug burn deep within my body, is gone. After I’ve forgotten the taste of Barry’s bitter spit or the sound of him cursing through the thick glass of my sliding door. Divorced of meaning, it’s a set of sounds that mean shame.



The next week my vagina still hurts. When I walk, when I sit. I thought a hot bath the morning after would cure it, but it’s just getting worse. I’m home on winter break, freezing except for this hot place where nothing will settle down, so I go to my mother’s doctor, the one who delivered my sister. Gently, she examines me and explains it is getting better slowly. It’s like a scrape on your knee, a scab rubbing against jeans.

“It must have been pretty rough,” she says without judgment.

The next semester, after Barry is gone, my friend Melody tells me that once her friend Julia woke up the morning after sex with Barry, and the wall was spattered with blood. Spattered, she said, “like a crime scene.” But he was nice, and he took her for the morning-after pill and named the baby they weren’t having. Julia wasn’t mad. “But you should know,” she says, “that he lost his virginity to a hooker in New Orleans.”