gives me this cheesy grin. And then his face shifts into a genuine smile, and I can’t help it, I kiss the dimples on either side of his mouth, and then he’s kissing my throat, and just when I think my body might explode like a firework, it happens.
I’m in my body and out of it at the same time. Even as it’s happening, there’s a part of me narrating everything for myself: Now he’s opening the condom packet. Now he’s putting the condom on.
My head is taking over, and I just want it to shut the hell up and let my body be in charge.
Now you can feel him. Now he’s putting the condom in.
There’s the surprise of him inside me, even though I’m expecting it. It’s like my fifth-grade birthday party, when everyone hid in my bedroom, and I knew they were going to surprise me because Saz told me ahead of time, but I still freaked out when they started screaming and running at me.
He goes, “Are you okay, Captain?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
My mind tells my body to stop thinking about my fifth-grade birthday party and move, for God’s sake, so I move. But I feel like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, all jerky and stiff. And suddenly I’m thinking about The Wizard of Oz, a movie I don’t even like, and now I’m thinking about thinking about The Wizard of Oz so much that I almost forget to narrate what’s happening.
Now you can feel him—all of him. And there’s the surprise again. Not pain, necessarily, but the surprise of my body registering something entirely new. I actually suck in air. A loud, gasping, hiccupping sound that makes him stop what he’s doing and look at me funny. Before he can ask what the hell that was or change his mind about ever wanting to have sex with me, I kiss him. I wonder if I’m bleeding all over his couch, if my mythical hymen has actually broken. Even if it hasn’t, and even if it’s the most awkward, terrible sex that has ever been had on this planet, I know that technically this counts. This counts. Even though virginity is a heteronormative, patriarchal construct…
Now he’s moving on top of you.
And you are moving with him even though you don’t know how.
Please, please, please shut up, brain.
And then, by some miracle…my mind goes quiet. And my body takes over. It’s as if it knows something I don’t, as if my body and his know each other and understand each other, as if they’re meant to move together like this.
But then, suddenly, we’re done. Which means he’s done. And this is another surprising thing—the fact that the ending seems to depend on him. I almost tell him, Hey, I need more. I’m not done. But I don’t say anything.
And just like that, in a single moment, all those years of waiting are over.
* * *
—
Afterward, he rolls off me and we lie, me on my back, him on his side, squished onto this couch, which suddenly seems much smaller than it was moments ago, staring up at the mobile of skulls, which teeters and sways a little, the hollowed-out sounds of bone hitting bone.
He takes my hand. “When did that get there?” And somehow I know he is talking about the ceiling, which until fifteen seconds ago was shrouded in smoke from the fire we created, and beyond that a sky of stars. The brightest stars.
“I don’t know.”
I lie there, the sofa cooling beneath me, feeling my heart settle back into place like a good little organ. I think about how six days ago I didn’t know he could do a handstand and kiss me like no one else, and tonight I know everything about him.
I lost my virginity, and yet I tell myself I didn’t lose anything. This is my body. I’m the only one in it; I got to choose what happened. I knew what I was doing. I decided where and when to have sex. Just like I will decide my life. No more waiting for other people to decide things for me. I’m writing it right now.
DAY 6
(PART THREE)
My name is Claude Henry, and I just had sex for the first time.
It happened five minutes ago. Jeremiah Crew is in the bathroom, and I am sitting here on the steps of his blue house, dress and underwear back on, staring out into the night because it’s a million degrees inside