Practice
Stefan arrived in second grade, polite and quiet and coming from somewhere none of us could point to on a map. His parents had moved him from Belarus, changed his name somewhere in transit, and there he was—sitting in the back row with a funny accent that we laughed at and he laughed along with. We were all friends in the frictionless way that children are friends, which is to say we shared a geography and hadn’t yet learned to make it mean anything cruel.
By the time I hit secondary school he was barely holding on at the Hauptschule down the road, and the stories about him had changed. Still funny sometimes. Frightening often. Criminal occasionally. I’d see him at a small park ringed by grey apartment blocks—the kind of park that exists to give people somewhere to stand outside without any particular reason. Stefan would be on a bench with whoever was around, drinking beer and something unnamed from an old Lidl bottle that smelled like it had already been through one person at least.
I was twelve the afternoon Dana and I found him there with his usual crowd. Dana was my best friend, and by her own frequent testimony, more experienced than me in all the ways that mattered at that age. She was probably right. I was one of those obedient kids who got good marks and felt guilty about everything.
The conversation drifted toward sex the way it always did in those groups—gradually, mechanically, like a clock winding down to something inevitable. Had I ever gone down on someone? I laughed. Dana laughed. Everyone laughed. Obviously, I said. Obviously yes.
Stefan’s leather jacket was so thin and cheap it looked like it would keep out neither wind nor self-respect. I remember finding it disgusting and wanting to bring him something warmer at the same time. He pressed me toward the fence, unzipped his jeans, took the condom his friend pressed into his palm—"Don’t want the little faggot giving you anything"—and everyone laughed again. Nobody pushed me to my knees. I went down on my own.
I didn’t open my mouth.
"Don’t be such a baby," Dana said. I looked up at her. She was smiling the way only a best friend smiles—warm, encouraging, completely unhelpful. So I opened my lips. And my teeth. I don’t remember Stefan’s cock. I remember the smell of latex. I remember my own saliva making it hard to breathe. I remember being terrified that someone would walk past and see me there.
After maybe ten minutes Stefan laughed and pushed me off. He couldn’t come, he said. I didn’t have what it took. I should practice before I came near him again. Dana laughed. He zipped up, settled back onto the bench, lit a cigarette. An elderly woman walked a dachshund along the path like nothing had happened, because for her nothing had.
I didn’t categorize this as assault. That night I lay awake going through everything I might have done wrong. Why he hadn’t come. Whether I’d kept my lips tight enough. Should I have used my hand more? Was it the cold? The condom? The fact that everyone was watching?
That question—what did I do wrong—was exactly what was spreading across Twitter in late January 2013 under #aufschrei, a hashtag that started when journalist Laura Himmelreich published an account of senior FDP politician Rainer Brüderle pressing against her at a hotel bar, making comments about her body, treating her presence as an open invitation. What came out under that tag weren’t the screaming headline incidents but the smaller ones—the gym teacher’s hand, the neighbor who looks at you a specific way, the first moment you understood that your body existed as an object in someone else’s inventory. The small reorganizations. I thought about Stefan a lot that week.
I only saw him a handful of times after that afternoon. I heard he eventually got a girlfriend, moved south—nothing dramatic, no arrest, no comeuppance, not even the kind I’d vaguely wished on him. Sometimes, even now, even with considerably more experience behind me, I think back to that park and that bench and that Lidl bottle. About what I probably did wrong. About doing better next time. Because I had practiced.