rare times he would go to some kid’s bonfire, I would slide on over to him as casually as I could. Southern rock was massive then, so there was always a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers to be heard. At every party, Steve Miller’s “The Joker” was played at least twice. You’d find young Nickie, standing next to a fire, talking to a white boy in a Skynyrd T-shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag. These young bucks, scions of upper-middle-class families, wishing they were back in Dixie. Away, away. And then there was Billy, looking as out of place as me. He was more into driving around playing Sir Mix-a-Lot. I’d hang on to every word he said. He would complain about Alice, and I would chime in, coaching from the sidelines as only a friend could do.
“Just tell her how you feel,” I’d say, thinking, Just tell me how you feel.
They broke up, and my determination to be noticed by Billy only grew. At one of the parties at his house around November of sophomore year, Billy gave me a sign. He looked at me in such a way that I just knew.
“We should hang,” he said.
I felt invincible.
HERE’S HOW IT WENT: ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1988, BILLY AND I made a plan for him to pick me up at my house after I went to a Warriors game to celebrate my little sister’s birthday. I still remember the score: the Warriors beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 107–100. I borrowed my friend Danielle’s light blue denim skirt, and as my parents slept upstairs and I waited for Billy to pull up in his GMC, I checked myself in the mirror roughly fifty-six times. When he finally showed, I walked out the front door and left it unlocked.
We drove to his house and he led me straight to his parents’ bedroom. Remember how it felt as a kid when you went into your friends’ parents’ bedrooms? They just felt grand. Holy shit, I remember thinking, I’m so not supposed to be in here. We’re in here and we’re going to fuck.
I lay down and the panic set in. He’d already had sex with Alice, the ball-fondling sex acrobat, so in my mind I saw Alice smirking at me, always so sure of herself in those fucking soccer warm-ups, that neon scrunchie barely able to hold the glory of her hair.
In comparison, I was so black, I was so not cool, and I was so inexperienced.
Billy started to kiss me. My mind was racing. What if my vagina looked like a fucking dragon? I had another friend who was really into trimming and shaving her pubic hair. This same girl would even sometimes shave her vagina using a mirror. She would then brag-slash-explain to all of us using very adult words: “Well, if you don’t know yourself . . .”
And I don’t know myself! At all! And now Billy’s going to see me and even I don’t know what he’s going to see. Then it occurs to me: Oh my God, he is going to have sex with black pussy.
I knew, even though I was so inexperienced, that in interracial porn there is a lot of “Give me that black pussy” talk. And I had always thought it sounded so dirty. Now I realize that in fact I have black pussy. Did he have sex with that black girlfriend back in Fremont? I hadn’t thought about my vagina in relation to other vaginas he’d seen. And I hadn’t done anything to mine in preparation. So now, I thought, he is going to see this black Teen Wolf pussy. It’s going to look different, smell different, be different. He is going to be repulsed. And if this doesn’t go well it will be because he is rejecting my black pussy.
We got under the covers and I pulled up my skirt to fumble out of my underwear, doing as inelegant a job as possible. We left our shirts on.
“I’m a virgin,” I said.
He smiled. I later found out that this was his thing. He was the Deflowerer. It’s not why he had sex with me, but he was known for being a lot of people’s first time.
He didn’t even look at my vagina. He started to put his dick in and then he looked at me, trying to gauge: “Am I killing you?” I was silent. It was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t, like, crazy painful.
And then it was. I start making