I kept walking. We pushed through the doors and into the Schoolhouse. The steps were loud with bodies rushing up and down.
He leaned into me. “You and I are kinda friends,” he said. I considered whether this was true. “I don’t think Rick and Taz should get the last word. You know what I’m saying?”
I didn’t.
“I think I can show you how it should be. Done right.”
I ignored this and turned the corner for class. When I looked back, just before heading into French, he was still standing there, in the hallway, watching me.
By that point, halfway through my junior year in high school, more of my friends were sexually active than weren’t. There was nothing particularly momentous about having sex at St. Paul’s. Third formers did it in the shower, fourth formers did it in the back of Memorial Hall, everyone did it at someone’s house over a long weekend away from school. I hadn’t made a fetish of my own virginity, and had no fantasies about how and when I would give it away. Nothing much beyond protecting it from Rick and Taz, at least—but that was not for the metaphor of innocence. That was because I didn’t want to get pregnant or die of AIDS.
Budge’s dark genius was to speak only of my virginity. He didn’t even say “have sex.” His repetition—I am going to pop your cherry—made the idea of virginity itself seem absurd. You’re going to deflower me now? I was already a step ahead of him. I knew virginity to be the teacup construction of a world that holds female sexuality to be a possession. And it hurt me. The thought hurt. It reminded me only of what I had lost. To speak of my virginity was to mock me, and Budge knew it. It was the glass slipper without the ball.
Furiously, almost feverishly, I ran in my head a mathematics of dominance. I would hold on to and cherish and groom this splintered lack of experience only to hand it over to a man, who would—listen to the words—take it from me? (No man receives a woman’s virginity, no matter how freely given.)
No, thanks.
If it was something they wanted, then by God it was nothing to me: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Nothing to see here. Nothing to steal.
He followed me. He showed up in every doorway. “Fine,” I told the boy called Budge. “Fine.”
After that our encounters became something almost darkly sweet. We were conspiring to take away this thing that we both knew was a lie. It was like planning a surgery, a bit grueling but necessary, with the inherent power differential that one of us would be wounded and one of us not. I moved from class to class in a bell of silence, resting my throat (which had broken out in sores again) so I could sing at evening rehearsal and avoiding the eyes of people who might have been my friends. I needn’t have bothered—they weren’t trying to make contact with me. My friends didn’t exactly speed up when I joined them on a pathway, but they no longer waited for me, either.
When I saw Budge, I could relax into the candor of his brutishness. He knew everything there was to know.
“Your room or mine?”
“Not mine,” I said.
“You on top or me?”
“Me.” Definitely me.
“Tonight?”
“I have Madrigals.”
“After?”
“That’s check-in.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Budge, I have to go. I have a math quiz.”
It was almost protective, the way he watched me walk away.
When I was twelve and in the eighth grade, my best friend, Wendy, was five foot six and I was four foot nine. She had started her period. I did not have even the beginnings of breasts. My hips were as narrow as my brother’s. There was not a womanly hair anywhere on my body. I was miserable.
“Mutt and Jeff,” said the teachers, as we girls walked down the hall.
“Mutt and Jeff,” said Wendy’s parents, picking us up from skating or soccer.
“Mutt and Jeff,” said my mom. I figured, incorrectly, that I was the mutt.
Still, my parents started to worry. My dad wasn’t tall but he wasn’t short, and my relatives on my mom’s side were quite big. “I just don’t understand it,” Mom said. “My grandfather was positively statuesque.”
I had been an average-size child, so we’d never had reason to worry about this. “Just hang on,” Mom said hopefully. “I promise you things will start to change.”
When they did not, she took me to see my pediatrician. He was close to retirement by then. I did not like him, but I don’t remember him being unkind. Mom thought he was brilliant (he’d had a fellowship at Harvard; he was on the faculty at Children’s in the city). The fact that he was old was what she loved. “Intuition is worth more than anything,” she said. “Once, when you were little, he heard you talk and said, ‘This child has strep.’ And he was right. I’ll never forget that.”
I was measured and weighed, and Dr. K. plotted these points on a standard growth curve. It was true—I was falling quite demonstrably behind. He leaned into my mother and said something quickly and quietly to her, and she left the room. The doctor put his head out the door and then returned with a nurse. While she stood by, he had me undress to the waist, lie back, pull my knees up, and let my legs fall open. I remember exploding with misery at what I was being forced to reveal. I squeezed my eyes shut. Gloved, he used his fingers inside me and a palm on my abdomen to confirm that my reproductive organs were in place and intact. There was blood on the paper when he was done.
“You can get the mother now,” he said to the nurse.
Later, Mom said, her eyes sideways, “It’s all fine. Your parts are
