“What’s going on?” asked Brielle.
“Let me ask you a question,” said Damon. He hesitated, and then squared his shoulders. “Are you a virgin?”
“Of course,” said Brielle. She pulled her sweat jacket closer around her slim shoulders and hugged herself. “I’m only sixteen. Aren’t you?”
“No,” said Damon, looking her straight in the eyes.
Brielle was disappointed. She wanted to be the first and only girl in Damon’s life. Even though people had been telling her about his prior girlfriend, Brielle had blocked out any information that wasn’t to Damon’s credit. She had already decided that Sasha was probably sleazy and deserved whatever treatment he’d dished out to her. Even Jada had told her about Damon’s crazy girlfriend last summer, but Brielle knew that Jada thought that Damon was a jerky older brother so she hadn’t really wanted to believe that he would dog any girl.
“Why are you telling me this?” asked Brielle.
She shrugged philosophically. A boy as fine as Damon must get girls sending him extraneous invitations over text message to get together for a little something every minute in the day. It was too much to hope for that he wouldn’t accept a few. Not from Brielle, of course. She was too scared.
“Because,” said Damon. He moved closer and put his arm around Brielle’s rigid shoulders. She stiffened. “Relax, okay? I’m not going to rape you, girl.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“You being a virgin is part of what I like about you,” said Damon. “You’re still pure and good. Sex makes stuff so complicated.”
He looked across the hall at the cream colored cinder block walls, concentrating on a hanging sign, as though the answer to the world’s problems was printed there instead of a locker room use schedule.
“What do you mean?”
“I met this girl last year and she was all into me. She was a senior and at first I thought she was all that. When we had sex it was nice, you know. I liked it. But, she kept telling me that she was in love with me and how we were going to be together forever. And I wasn’t into her like that. After a while, it made me feel like dirt.”
“Oh,” said Brielle, nonplussed. Then she got indignant and frowned. “But if you weren’t in love with her, why did you have sex with her?”
“The first time, it just happened,” he said, on a sigh. “She kept offering and it felt so good, I just kept going back for more. I never thought about it, about how she must be feeling. She was older than me and knew what she was doing. I just thought she was having a good time, too.”
“So why didn’t you keep doing it?” asked Brielle, now more interested than upset.
“Sasha started acting all crazy, like we were supposed to get married or something,” said Damon. “I’m sixteen. I kept trying to tell her that I wasn’t into her like that. But she kept leading me and giving it up and I just kept taking advantage of the situation, like I was doing her a favor or something. She’d start crying if I said no. It was like a drug that I just couldn’t let go of.”
“Really?”
“And then, one day, I woke up in a nightmare,” said Damon. “She kept calling me and writing me these notes. She’d go through my locker and tear up my pictures. You know, I had pictures of Jada and all her friends in there. She actually got bolt cutters and cut the lock.”
“For real?”
He nodded.
“She fronted me off in the hall if I spoke to another girl. It was crazy. Sasha even got in Jada’s face before she figured out that she was my sister. I thought Jada was going to wreck on her.”
“She sounds like a major stalker,” said Brielle.
“She was,” said Damon. “I finally had to tell my parents. My father said the girl was unstable and to leave her alone.”
“Did you?” asked Brielle.
“I did,” said Damon, with a firm nod. “I was really mean to her and finally she left me alone. She cried every time I saw her. I felt like I destroyed her whole hook up. I felt like such a dog, even though she started everything.”
“If you were sorry, did you apologize to her?”
“No,” he said, and hung his head. “She would have thought that I wanted to be with her, and that wasn’t true. I didn’t think I should say I was sorry. I didn’t want to be with her like that, you know what I’m saying? If we weren’t kicking it, I didn’t want to be with her.”
“Don’t touch me, anymore,” said Brielle, blinking back tears. Brielle slid out from under his arm. “That’s the worst thing anybody ever told me.”
“I know,” mumbled Damon. He leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees and buried his face into his hands. “Later, I found out she was just using me to get back at her old boyfriend anyway.”
“How do you know that?”
“She told me,” he said. “After I told her that I wasn’t feeling her like that. Then, later, her ex pulled a knife on me in school.”
“Why’d you tell me this?” Brielle was angrier than she’d ever been in her whole life. She wanted to smack Sasha.
He lifted his head and turned to look at her. She almost recoiled physically from the suffering in his eyes.
“I know what’s going around school. I see the way you look at me, like you’re wondering. I really care about you,” he said. His voice broke and then he cleared his throat and started again. “I really care about you. I’ve known you a long time and I respect you, because you’re different. And I didn’t want to start with you without you knowing the truth.”
“So, now I know,” said Brielle.
“Now you know,” said Damon. “I was stupid. It’s been messing
