Barry leads me to the parking lot. I tell him to look away. I pull down my tights to pee, and he jams a few of his fingers inside me, like he’s trying to plug me up. I’m not sure whether I can’t stop it or I don’t want to.
Leaving the parking lot, I see my friend Fred. He spies Barry leading me by the arm toward my apartment (apparently I’ve told him where I live), and he calls out my name. I ignore him. When that doesn’t work, he grabs me. Barry disappears for a minute, so it’s just Fred and me.
“Don’t do this,” he says.
“You don’t want to walk me home, so just leave me alone,” I slur, expressing some deep hurt I didn’t even know I had. “Just leave me alone.”
He shakes his head. What can he do?
Now Barry’s in my place.
Now we’re on my floor, doing all the things grown-ups do. I don’t know how we got here, but I refuse to believe it’s an accident.
Now he’s inside me, but he’s only sort of hard. I look onto the floor, by his pale bent knee, and see he’s taken off the condom. Did I tell him to wear a condom? The condom came from my first-aid kit. I knew where that was, he didn’t, so I must have crawled for it. A choice. Why does he think it’s okay to take it off?
I come to a little, realize this is not a dream. I tell him he has to put the condom back on. He’s not hard, and now he’s going down on me, and he’s pushing his dick in my face. It feels like a finger without bones.
I moan, as if to say, I like this, so much.
He calls me baby. Or says, “Oh baby,” which is different.
“Do you want to make me come?” I ask.
“Hunh?” he asks.
“Do you want to make me come?” I ask again, and I know that if I make these sounds and ask these questions, then it is, again, a choice.
Now we’re across the room, our bodies in a new formation. I tip my head back as far as it will go. And up, in my roommate’s tree, I see another condom. Or the same condom. A condom that isn’t on him and maybe never was.
Now I am pulling myself up messily like a just-born foal, throwing Barry and all his clothes out the sliding door into the parking lot. He’s clutching his shirt, struggling with a boot. The winter air seems to sober him up, and I shut the door and watch from behind the glass as he looks for the direction home. I wouldn’t want to run into him now. Now I am hiding in the kitchenette, waiting for him to be gone.
Now I wake up. My roommate isn’t home. Later, I will learn she heard sounds from outside the door and went upstairs to sleep with a friend rather than interrupt me.
Before sunrise, I diligently enter the encounter into the Word document I keep, titled “Intimacy Database.” Barry. Number Four. We fucked. 69’d. It was terribly aggressive. Only once. No one came.
When I was young, I read an article about a ten-year-old girl who was raped by a stranger on a dirt road. Now nearly forty, she recalled lying down in a gingham dress her mother had sewn for her and making sounds of pleasure to protect herself. It seemed terrifying and arousing and like a good escape plan. And I never forgot this story, but I didn’t remember until many days after Barry fucked me. Fucked me so hard that the next morning I had to sit in a hot bath to soothe myself. Then I remembered.
The day after Barry, Audrey and I meet up to do homework in the computer lab. We are both still in our pajamas, layers and layers to guard against the cold. In the bathroom we are washing our hands, letting them linger in the hot water, and I say, “I have to tell you something.” We crawl up onto the ledge above the radiator, and we huddle together, and I describe the events of the night before, finishing with “I’m sorry about your wrap dress.”
Audrey’s pale little face goes blank. She clutches my hand and, in a voice reserved for moms in Lifetime movies, whispers, “You were raped.”
I burst out laughing.
That night I am Gchatting with Mike. He lives in San Francisco now, works at an ad agency, and dates a girl with a pill problem and what he calls “a phat ass.” Her Myspace name is Rainbowmolly.
12:30 AM
me: fool
i called you
Mike: i know
i’ve been hung ove
r
hungover
me: me too
12:31 AM
Mike: REALLY
me: i got so drunked up
Mike: nice
i vomited on myself
me: ew
are you ok?
Mike: yes
12:32 AM
i haven’t
left my house
me: i did something so retarded
you will laugh at me
Mike: tell me
12:33 AM
TELL ME
me: i went home with you weird friend Barry
Mike: --------------------
haha
HAHAHA
me: i know
I dial Mike on my hot-pink flip phone, not sure whether I want him to pick up or not. “How weird is that?”
“Well, Barry called me today, said he woke up in the hallway of his dorm. Said he deep-dicked some girl, but he has no idea who.” He laughs, a mucusy exhausted laugh.
“Deep-dicked” will never leave me. It will stay with me long after the sting inside me, like rug burn deep within my body, is gone. After I’ve forgotten the taste of Barry’s bitter spit or the sound of him cursing through the thick glass of my sliding door. Divorced of meaning, it’s a set of sounds that mean shame.