Nineteen
The schoolyard was a war zone. You had to be hard, had to seem cool, had to know all the filthy words—tits, fuck, blowjob—or you’d spend the next ten years with a target on your back. We were small and vicious. At home we were soft enough: Power Rangers bedding, Saturday night baths, that pure hit of dopamine when you caught a new Pokémon. But outside, in the real world, we were tiny killing machines with oversized dicks in our heads.
Once puberty hit, the question wasn’t if. It was how often, how many ways, with who. Thomas supposedly fucked blonde Jessica with the bat ears on the playground. Konstanze had Fabian’s balls in her mouth. Daniel and I had worked through half the class by fifth grade, or so the story went. Anything to make the noise stop for a while.
We had fake fuck lists, memorized terminology, encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy—or what we thought was anatomy. We were loaded for battle. The problem was we’d only ever seen naked women in those crumpled, sun-bleached magazines from the alley, and even thinking about it sent us scrambling up to our rooms to dry-hump a Turtles pillow. By twelve we’d all supposedly slept with everything, and nothing short of a court order would’ve gotten the truth out of us.
The thing is, I didn’t actually lose my virginity until two days after my nineteenth birthday. Maria was too tense. Before anything could happen with Karina, my aunt burst into the room. Helena felt wrong somehow. The village girl finally got it done. Nothing special about it. I caught up fast enough after that.
What kept me up at night sounds laughable now. Thomas never touched Jessica. She smacked him when he grabbed her ass on the monkey bars. Konstanze figured out she was into women when she was seven and never had a guy’s balls anywhere near her mouth except breakfast. Daniel, me, half the class—nothing happened. Nothing until senior prom, and barely then.
Why do we lie like that about sex? What makes it so important to have done it, to have numbers, to reset the score? It’s always about power anyway, about winning, about staying afloat. I remember sitting in the cafeteria watching Thomas brag about Jessica, and his face had this desperate quality—like if he stopped talking he’d vanish. I knew that look. Knew it from the mirror.