The next week my vagina still hurts. When I walk, when I sit. I thought a hot bath the morning after would cure it, but it’s just getting worse. I’m home on winter break, freezing except for this hot place where nothing will settle down, so I go to my mother’s doctor, the one who delivered my sister. Gently, she examines me and explains it is getting better slowly. It’s like a scrape on your knee, a scab rubbing against jeans.
“It must have been pretty rough,” she says without judgment.
The next semester, after Barry is gone, my friend Melody tells me that once her friend Julia woke up the morning after sex with Barry, and the wall was spattered with blood. Spattered, she said, “like a crime scene.” But he was nice, and he took her for the morning-after pill and named the baby they weren’t having. Julia wasn’t mad. “But you should know,” she says, “that he lost his virginity to a hooker in New Orleans.”
What will I do with this retroactive warning? Just sit on it, what else can I do.
I make a vow not to have sex again until it’s with someone I love. I wait six months, and the next person I do it with becomes my first serious boyfriend, and though he is sexually confused and extremely antisocial he treats me like the eighth wonder of the world and we are best friends.
One afternoon, lying in bed in a way that is only acceptable during college or a deep seasonal depression, I tell him about Barry. I cry, partially from remembering it and partially because I hate the way I’m expressing myself. He’s really hung up on trying to remember whether he ever saw Barry around campus. I’m just angry that I don’t have better words.
Even in the nicest television writers’ room, people say all kinds of terrible things. Confessions of the way we really feel toward our significant others. Stories from our childhoods that our parents wish we had forgotten. Judgments of other people’s bodies. It’s all fodder for A and B stories, motivations, throwaway jokes. I wonder how many loved ones watch TV looking for signs of their own destruction.
We laugh a lot, at things that shouldn’t rightfully be funny—breakups, overdoses, parents explaining their impending divorce to a little kid with chicken pox. That’s the joy of it. One afternoon, I pitch a version of the Barry story. A sexual encounter that no one can classify properly. A condom winding up in a potted plant against the will of the girl being fucked. An Audrey-esque “ambulance chaser” response.
Murray shakes his head. “I just don’t see rape being funny in any situation.”
“Yeah,” Bruce agrees. “It’s a tough one.”
“But that’s the thing,” I say. “No one knows if it’s a rape. It’s, like, a confusing situation that …” I trail off.
“But I’m sorry that happened to you,” Jenni says. “I hate that.”
I tell Jack by accident. We’re talking on the phone about unprotected sex, how it isn’t good for people with our particular temperament, our anxiety like an incorrigible weed. He asks if I’ve had any sex that was “really stressful,” and out the story comes, before I can even consider how to share it. Jack is upset. Angry, though not at me.
I’m crying, even though I don’t want to. It’s not cathartic, or helping me prove my point. I still make joke after joke, but my tears are betraying me, making me appear clear about my pain when I’m not. Jack is in Belgium. It’s late there, he’s so tired, and I’d rather not be having this conversation this way.
“It isn’t your fault,” he tells me, thinking it’s what I need to hear. “There’s no version of this where it’s your fault.”
I feel like there are fifty ways it’s my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little bit easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us. I never gave him permission. In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking.
I curl up against the wall, wishing I hadn’t told him. “I love you so much,” he says. “I’m so sorry that happened.”
Then his voice changes, from pity to something sharper.
“I have to tell you something, and I hope you’ll understand.”
“Yes?” I squeak.
“I can’t wait to fuck you. I hope you know why I’m saying that. Because nothing’s changed. I’m planning how I’m going to do it.”
“You’re going to do it?”
“All different ways.”