want to be with Maggie. They are talking about the man who was inside her as though they know him and he’s garbage. After they leave, Maggie pulls up her pants and sits on the toilet and cries for an entire period.
On top of feeling impure and gross, she longs for the man to whom she lost her virginity. She can’t talk to the guy she had sex with. She can’t email him or Facebook message him or see his face on Skype and resuscitate a private joke. She can’t talk to her parents about it, nor does she want to. Her parents—their very existence—make her feel like a slut. Her classmates are treating her like she’s diseased. Nobody in the world is on her side.
At home, she doesn’t smile or eat, but otherwise tries to act normal so her family won’t think she misses her rapist. She rearranges the food on her plate to fake its disappearance.
Before bed one night she’s sitting at the desk in her room, feeling the loneliest she has ever felt, when a thought comes to her from a wiser portion of her brain. The image of a potential savior flashes in her eye.
She begins to handwrite a letter. She likes to write longhand. She can think better that way. She used to write her dad letters when he pissed her off. Her tone is less barbed than it might be over email.
Knodel, she writes (because he is either Knodel or AK these days, he’s not Mr. Knodel anymore, he is still a teacher but he’s also a pal), let me tell you why this semester is going to blow—
And she commits to the page the sex with Mateo, tells Knodel it was her first time, and that may be a big deal, but it’s hardly the point. Even though, for one definite thing, she no longer felt pure afterward. No child of God. Purity was eradicated and replaced with a set of new feelings. The way he made sure she felt full on blackened chicken. The way he gave her his bedsheet for a toga before he even knew her. The way he felt sad that she hadn’t complained about being cut by the rock. The way he laughed at her jokes; and the way he gazed at her like a fresh fish he’d caught and was holding up high; and how, unlike a high school boy, he wasn’t ashamed of his desire. Additionally, there were all the things about herself that she now saw and appreciated through his eyes. Her long, wild hair. Her strong thighs and her soft breasts.
She tells Knodel a lot of it, the feelings that come out of sex, what she’d only heard about and thought were clichés until they happened to her. She explains the way her feelings intensified, almost immediately after they slept together.
She tells him, too, how it ended.
A few days after the event, Melia drops Maggie off at Mateo’s house for a bonfire. The tree houses on stilts glow in the night. Melia asks, What time should I pick you up? Maggie says she wants to stay over. I will sleep on the couch, Mateo tells Melia. Later, in bed, Maggie doesn’t intend it, but the words fly out of her mouth.
I think I love you, she says.
Right away, she knows. She feels her face flush in shamehot. She knows he isn’t going to say it back. She starts to cry.
Hey, he says.
She doesn’t want to look at him. Probably he will look better than he did twenty seconds ago, when she was still able to find fault.
He takes her face in his hands. He tells her she means a lot to him but that he can’t love her just yet.
The hurt doesn’t disappear, but it changes. It turns the manageable color of a bruise.
She writes to her teacher that for the next few weeks it was business as usual. She meets many of Mateo’s friends. She is not a girlfriend but she is not the opposite of a girlfriend. Every day she has gone out with him there have been little rituals. Doing her hair, applying lotion. Oahu is a giant clam. She has been living inside a clamshell, able to see a chunk of the wide blue world past the edges and walking along porcelain veneers in the meanwhile.
The end comes on a sunny day. They are stealing a kiss at a barbecue at Dane and Melia’s house. Someone sees them. Melia is