Is it any wonder, then, that the first time she found a boy who wanted to touch her under her clothes she fell head over heels in love? Even though Mother was sick, Girl was still allowed to visit Father for three weeks. Jack was the son of Father’s office manager, and a few years older than Girl. His face was scarred with acne and his body was heading toward plump, but not there yet. He wore his hair in a sort of spikey, side-swept style kept in place with a lot of gel. His clothes were preppy and he talked a lot about all the cool parties he went to and how pretty his girlfriends were.
One day that summer he decided to kiss Girl. That was all she needed to fall in love, and her returning kiss was all the permission he needed. Quickly he was under her shirt, unbuttoning her jeans, and shoving rough fingers painfully into her. He told her to go underwear free, because the little girl panties her mother insisted on buying her were far too uncool for him to look at, and she gave them up, even though her jeans chafed. He didn’t wear underwear either. In the past year she had thought long and carefully about how much time she would need to go to the next “base” of sexual play, but Jack convinced her to throw the timeline out the window. Jack taught her how to touch a boy and talked her into oral sex, something she wasn’t sure she wanted to do. He held his hand on the back of her head and pushed it rhythmically up and down. He made it clear that Girl wasn’t cool enough to be his actual girlfriend, though, and Girl’s I love yous went unanswered.
It was summer and the Alaskan sun did not set. Perhaps if the night had darkened predictably, like at her mother’s house in New York, Girl would have been able to hold back her fervor. She had no rest from it, her circadian rhythm was off-kilter. The Anchorage night only faded to pale gray so her love grew unabated. Infatuation made her unable to eat, think, tie her shoes. The sun did not set and so Girl did not sleep at night. Jack did not fall in love with her, but he had been born in Alaska and was used to the cycles of the Arctic sun.
Girl knew Jack wanted to have sex, and she knew he didn’t love her. Mother and Stepmother were always warning her about how a lot of girls tried to have sex to make a guy love them and that it never worked. She knew they were right, but she thought maybe if they had sex he’d keep coming around, and maybe that would be enough. “Save your virginity for someone who loves you,” Jack said. “But if you really want to do something, we can have anal sex.” Girl knew she didn’t want to have anal sex. Nothing about it sounded good to her, but maybe if she was the only one who did it with him, he’d stop looking for a “real” girlfriend. Not that it would be enough to make him love her, and it wasn’t his fault that she was such a geek. She wouldn’t want to be seen with herself, either. She knew he loved her body, though. He was always talking about how she looked like a centerfold. Girl decided she’d try this thing for him. Maybe if she was willing, it might be enough. She was thirteen. At least she didn’t have to worry about him telling anyone about it, because he’d never admit to having any involvement with her whatsoever.
The day before she had to return to New York to go back to school they snuck into his house when no one was home and went down into the lower level living room, where his older sister lived and which was completely off limits. He wore a white T-shirt with a cool neon Forenza logo on it. He didn’t take it off.
It hurt. It hurt far worse than she had imagined, and when she looked back over her shoulder at him she could see that he had a spot of her shit on his shirt. She had been so nervous she had had diarrhea for a week. She didn’t know shit would come out during sex, and she hoped he hadn’t noticed. She didn’t know if it stained and if she had ruined his T-shirt, which was so much cooler than any shirts she owned. After a few minutes she told him it hurt too much, and he was very sweet about stopping. He didn’t push her to try a little longer at all.
Girl decided to move four thousand miles to live right down the road from this boy, even if it meant she had to live in her father’s house. When she was with him she wasn’t hungry. Her stomach churned and she didn’t eat for days. Her heart flooded with love for this pimpled, slightly chubby boy whose hair smelled of hairspray and whose clothes left trails of fragrant Downy in her bedroom.
Girl wrote a letter
