“For the rest I waited for you!” I soothed. “I never had sex with anyone!”
“It’s not about the sex part!”
I thought, Oh, yes it is. I hadn’t even gotten to the part about blowing my fellow counselor last year at church camp. I’d have to carry that one to my grave.
“It’s about dick sucking!” he cried. “Why did you stay with him, give yourself to him, when he didn’t care about you? Take care of you?”
Take care of me? I wondered. That sounded strange. Like I was some big overgrown baby. Maybe I was. Maybe it was his job to make sure I never felt any more pain, ever again. That would be, like, totally great.
“Was he bigger than me?” Justin snapped, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse. It was like a girl asking if she was fat. You just don’t do it. I reeled for a minute in the power of Justin’s self-worth, which was now resting limply in my hands like an injured puppy.
“No,” I lied. “Of course not.”
Justin looked relieved.
It was what I would’ve wanted to hear if I was a guy. Plus, Justin wasn’t small, it was just that Alex was unnaturally endowed. Nothing could ever be that big, I was pretty sure, other than certain genetically modified cucumbers I’d noticed in the produce aisle. Not like his hugeness had ever done me any good, other than giving me the first signs of TMJ. Ugh. Maybe I was a total slut. And yet still a virgin! A virgin slut! Despite all my best efforts, I had arrived at my bridegroom with all my petals pawed and sniffed.
“I didn’t make it to you in time,” Justin moaned, hanging his head, tears falling. I’d never seen a guy cry before. Maybe it was a good sign. Or a really bad one. “Why didn’t I make it to you in time?”
When I couldn’t give him a good answer, he took to praying on his knees, right in front of the bed, begging for supernatural guidance. Sometimes Justin communed with Buddha, sometimes with his Spirit Guide, sometimes the God of Abraham. But right now, judging by the folded hands, it looked to be Jesus.
“Why wasn’t I there to save her?” he asked. “Why?”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I interrupted.
“Wasn’t that bad?” Justin retorted hoarsely, wiping away tears. “Wasn’t that BAD?” His pain redoubled. “YOU SUCKED SOME GUY’S DICK.”
“Shhh,” I hissed.
“AND HE DIDN’T EVEN CARE ABOUT YOU.”
“I’ve been weak,” I said, touching his short, coarse hair. “A weak, stupid person. If I’d known there was someone like you, I would’ve waited to do all that stuff.”
We both knew that was bull. But it was supposed to be true.
“I love doing it with you,” I offered. Justin backed away angrily.
“You don’t have to do that to be loved!” he sobbed. “God!”
To highlight the point, and vent his protective anger, he stood and began practicing his tae kwon do forms in the air, probably punching an imaginary Alex. I watched, drenched in guilt, afraid to move a muscle.
Then he stopped. He paced in a circle and sighed. Then he opened his minifridge, pulled out his box of chicken tenders to squeeze, and began reading silently from his pocket-size Tao Te Ching. Uneasy silence returned. After a moment or two, I breathed, stretched out a bit, and cautiously reached for his Men’s Health magazine. But Justin snatched it away and looked at me, his eyes suddenly brimming with a single, fiery message from God. I braced.
“That will never happen to you again!” he growled. “I promise!”
“I know,” I said, and then, because I didn’t know what else to say: “Thank you.”
To pledge his fealty, and to prevent any further unwanted blow jobs, he had to fuck my brains out. I understood. I was cool with that. It was time.
While he prayed for guidance, I checked the calendar and realized the next closest holiday that could suffice as our Special Night of First Penetration was Halloween. It wasn’t exactly holy, like a wedding. But Justin was so freakin’ pure it didn’t even matter. The wedding would come later, and it would be great. They would dance in circles to “Hava Nagila,” lifting us both up in chairs, and then I’d read aloud my favorite apostle Paul quotes from the New Testament, and all his Jewish relatives would get chills. Cats and dogs would hump each other and doves would fly out of my ass. But until then, God approved of our premarital coitus because He knew our hearts and our shared destiny. He knew we were special spiritual people with special spiritual caveats to the rules.
So on Halloween night, while boisterous crowds streamed out of the dorms toward the Costume Ball, I slipped into Justin’s room with the sound track to Basic Instinct and a brown sack of Extra Strength Trojans. Justin stood in a towel at the TV, freshly showered and ready for me. And holding up a VHS of The Little Mermaid.
“Hi, beautiful.” He flashed me a knowing smile. “Got my favorite movie.”
There were candles burning on his roommate’s desk, and we were about to have sex to Walt Disney, but whatever. I had found my soul mate! My future husband! Let the fucking commence!
We stripped down nude, equal parts hard and wet, and tumbled into the bottom bunk to go through the motions of foreplay until we were nearly delirious. As Ariel swung into the final refrain of “Part of Your World,” Justin timed-out to try on his first condom, carefully pinching the top and rolling it down per health class, checking and double-checking for tearproofness. Then, for luck, he ripped another one open and rolled it down over the first. I watched, speechless.
“Can’t be too safe,” he explained. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
He laid over me and eased his crinkly, spermicide-drenched, double-bagged member into place. I put my hand down to spot the first set.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
I looked at how hard he was and braced for the worst, chanting: relax, relax, relax. Then he was in, deep and warm and tight. Full, finally, instead of empty and aching.
“Oh,” I said, enlightened. “Oh.”
He rocked his hips just a little, intent on proving that pain and blood were for yellow-belt lovers. His breathing roared by my ear, but I could still hear all the condoms crackling loudly, like we were scrumping on a plastic tarp. Even still, the pleasure of softly giving in to his erection was unreal. When I moaned outright he pushed all the way in and began thrusting, which made the metal bunk frame tap the wall out of time with Sebastian’s stupid singing.
Justin dropped his eyes and watched my tits swinging around. I was making strange, guttural cries. He shrugged and twitched, determined to keep it together.
“Okay?” he managed, like we were taking cover in an earthquake.
“Yeah!” I yelled. “Oh, yeah!”
Not only okay but too damn much. I was speared, my knees by my ears, grinding against him in a tiny little circle. I didn’t even need to pretend I was someone else; my hips levitated beat by beat off the bed and into a full-body orgasm that spurred me to holler like a dismembered duck, loud enough for everyone in the Pit to enjoy.
Justin’s face was red and his neck veins puffed, his eyes rolled back and he roared like Satan himself, falling face-first into my neck, where he hummed and chuckled. I reached my hand down to check the shrink-wrapping and found he was already checking it. Secure.
“Thank God,” we said in unison.
After sex came more sex. Most of my memories of that freshman year were of Justin fucking me from behind, or upside down, or using the top bunk to brace himself as I screamed, “Harder… HARDER!” We were either doing that, emptying the free condom bucket at the campus health clinic, or using his mom’s credit card to eat massive amounts of food at three in the morning. Within weeks, we were sleeping in the same bed every single night. We had to constantly be stroking arms, or holding hands, or lying on each other. We were prime candidates for a conjoined toilet. I knew this, but was powerless to stop it. I needed togetherness way more than dignity.
Joe put up with us. He was in awe of Justin’s trash can, which was alw
ays overflowing with condom wrappers.
“Holy shit!” he’d holler, picking up the can to count them. He’d carry it down the hall. “Look at this.” Random guys from two floors up would make the pilgrimage downstairs just to view the spoils of our Trojan War.
I barely visited my dorm at all. I returned occasionally to do laundry or swap out my textbooks. When I did, I made it quick, hurrying past rooms of girls I’d barely gotten to know before I’d become an unknown again, the girl who is never here. Box fans were spinning in their windows, music and laughter in the air, sorority pledge thingies hanging on the walls. Someone popped their head out and said “hi” to me as I passed. I waved back weakly, embarrassed.
I opened my door and greeted my sullen, reclusive roommate and summed up my side of the room. There were cobwebs on the windowsill; a few notes by my phone saying my parents had called the week before. I rummaged through the toiletries on my dust-covered counter and gathered some clean underwear from my drawer. Then I picked up my phone and dialed into my voicemail.
“Hey it’s me,” came Mom’s recorded voice. “Listen I left you the number to the Atlanta Church of Christ, did you get it? They have an eleven o’clock service on Sunday. It looks like a really great program, and it’s not far from you at all. I think you should go.”
Sighing, I punched the keypad and moved on to the next.
“It’s me again.” Her voice was irritated. “I’m not sure why I can’t get ahold of you. It’s seven thirty. I’ve called three times.”
I shuddered and clicked the receiver, not wanting to hear the next seven messages. I already knew. I dialed her number and sat on the edge of my unfamiliar bed, my body as stiff as the mattress. My roommate flipped pages under the glow of her defiled desk lamp, not listening to my every move. I turned away to look out the window. This place didn’t smell like me at all. My clothes and my blankets had absorbed the concrete walls and stale carpeting.
I twisted the cord in my fingers, waiting through the rings.
When Mom answered, I jumped to life, trying hard to sound like myself, gushing about my new boyfriend, my classes, my clothes, anything I could think of to put her at ease. I needed to be absolved, to reassure her that things were normal, that I was utilizing my new shower tote and shoe rack as appropriate, just like if this was camp.
“Church of Christ?” I said, a little too eagerly. “Eleven o’clock? Super! I’ll have to check it out!”
I left out a few details, like the part about how I was known as “the screamer” at Justin’s dorm, and how sometimes his friends graded our performance by sliding a 7.5 under our locked door.
Mom didn’t need to know the truth. After all, I wasn’t in danger. I was still close to Jesus. I still prayed. Hell, wasn’t Justin proof that God had answered me? It’s just, without the airlock of parental supervision, things had gotten a bit scattered. A few important balloons had gone fishtailing into space. Like my virginity. And my grip on reality. And my ability to use regular verbs and adjectives. Other than that, everything was great.
“Fuckin’ A,” I said to myself one day. “Holy shit. Holy fuckin’ shit!”
“Uh-oh.” Justin laughed. “Now you’re going to hell.”
But hell was child’s play compared to the freak flag of verbal nonrestraint I was about to unfurl. It seemed I couldn’t put even the smallest sentence together in standard English anymore.
“Can you fucking believe that?” I’d say, pointing at something, anything.
It wasn’t the salt I wanted you to pass me, it was the motherfucking salt. It wasn’t an essay I had to write, it was a bitchfest of cocknobbery. It wasn’t crazy, it was shitballs, it was twat-cockin’, piss-fucking snatch-munching fucknuts!
Maybe it was Justin’s Palm Beachesque affinity for gangsta rap. Since I spent a lot of time lying around and watching Justin shadowbox in his room, I received a daily education on Pharcyde and Tupac.
He’d stop, out of breath, to look at me.
“Did you hear that lyric?” he asked, breathing hard. “Wait, listen again. The sample and the hook right there on ‘motherfuckin’ cap that nigga’—it’s brilliant.” He’d pause it and play back the phrase twice, three times. Soon, the lankiest, whitest of all white girls was riding around representin’ in the Bronco: “I ain’t got time for bitches,” I rapped into the rearview. “Gotta keep my mind on my mothafuckin’ riches.”
When I wasn’t being White Girlz in da Hood, I was studying modern misogyny with Justin for our advanced women’s studies class we were taking together. We took all the same classes. We sat side by side in the computer lab, so we could hug every five minutes and then play Doom until midnight. When we were done, we’d go to the cafeteria and he’d watch me eat frozen yogurt and try to figure out what was wrong with me.
“Why do you hate yourself?” he asked me.
“What, it’s fucking low-fat!”
“No, not the yogurt,” he said, and then with meaning: “I’m still haunted.”
Oh. The blow jobs again. I stuck my spoon in my cup and sighed. My poor, poor disappointed future husband.
He would shake his head with the sad, burdened heart of the philosopher-king. He teared up again, blamed my low self-esteem on the Church of Christ, my parents, my ex-boyfriends. But despite these comforting explanations, and me constantly stuffing his cock in my mouth as consolation, the only thing that seemed to make up for him not having been there for me in the past was never ever separating in the present. We sat on the curb in front of his dorm, trying to part for the night, yawning, hugging.
“Bye,” we’d say, and not move.
Sometimes we’d lie in the grass beside the fire hydrant, spooning, drifting in and out of sleep. We’d wake up at four a.m. as the partiers were stepping over us on their way into the dorm. Still couldn’t let go. It was nauseating to everyone but us.
“They’re jealous,” Justin pointed out, picking grass out of my hair. I knew what he meant. Our true love transcended the world’s superficial rules. “Just come sleep at my place. Why are we fighting it? It’s stupid.”
“But what if my motherfucking parents call, nigga?”
“I’ll set the alarm and you can come back here real early.”
I loved how he didn’t want to let me go. Loved it. Why should we have to be alone if we didn’t want to, homie? It was college; we could make our own rules. But at his dorm, after five hours of three new positions, with his roommate cursing his life in the top bunk, I always slept past the alarm. Morning calls from my mother went unanswered and suspicion brewed at home.
The ultimate reckoning was a weekend visit from Mom and Grandma.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know they were in town. I just couldn’t bring myself to sleep apart from Justin, not even for one night.
“It’s our right to be together,” Justin comforted me, as we made love and drifted off to sleep.
Early that Sunday morning, Mom and Grandma drove over from their hotel room to my dorm, ready to pick me up for the long awaited eleven o’clock service at the local Church of Christ. But instead of me, she found my empty bed exactly as she’d left it in September, only covered with a cryptlike layer of dust.
My roommate, the human mole, peeked out from behind her covers.
“She’s never here,” she said.
While I slept peacefully on Justin’s hairless chest, a contented smile playing on my lips, my seething mother was on the other side of the campus, pacing the halls of my dorm asking where on earth her daughter was. Someone told her, slipped her the phone number where I could be found cohabiting. Cue the worst possible introduction to my future husband.
“Justin, I don’t know who you think you are,” came the voice mail in his room, “and I don’t care to ever meet you, but I have never been so disgraced in all my life. Please tell my daughter to get her butt in gear and get ready for CHURCH.”
“Crap,” Justin said, which pretty well summed up the situation.
Blurry with a
drenaline, I raced over to my dorm in yesterday’s clothes, panicked for an excuse. Justin’s name, now in red at the top of the shit list, and he hadn’t even had time to bow cutely for her, the way he did when he met people for the first time. I wouldn’t even get to explain how he was a black belt. And a Jew who loved Jesus.
As I approached my mom, all remnants of tough gangsta sex queen evaporated, leaving only a pale little suburban girl with really bad bed head.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” Mom growled at me. Grandma waited outside my dorm door, picking lint off of her cardigan while my roommate’s hollow eyes followed along in silence. My mom hurled a dress at me, wondering aloud why it was costing her so much to pay for a dorm that I did not use because I was too busy being a complete slut.
“I swear,” I said, hanging my head, not sure what I was swearing about. “I swear.”
“This was a mistake!” she hissed, with such visceral anger I wasn’t sure if she meant her visit, the university, or my birth.
There’s a place for us, the angels sang softly, just like Barbra Streisand. Somewhere, a place for us.
I couldn’t wait to run to Justin to bemoan my mistreatment, my subjection to the more barbaric forms of Christianity, to the unfairness of my family.
Not long after that, my parents and I stopped speaking. I’d done such a good job being palatable for eighteen years that they were quite ill-prepared for the tsunami of my New Love. The day Mom discovered my stash of birth control pills and condoms was a dark day in our family history. I was pretty sure it would’ve been better if she’d caught me smoking crack with hookers. At least with that, one can rehabilitate a person. But how do you cure an addiction to Jewish cock in extra-ribbed tropical fruit flavors?
“What do you think people think of you?” came Mom’s tearful, leading question, with only one answer. They thought I was weird. Hell, I thought I was weird. But I’d been weird my whole life and was only getting weirder. My battle plan was deny, deny, deny.
“I bought the condoms just in case,” I said.
“Just in case what? The world supply runs out?”
In reality, I just wanted them to stop talking to me about sex, to stop picturing me having sex, so I could stop picturing them picturing me having sex while we actually had sex, which I couldn’t help but do since it had become such a monumentally big, bad deal.
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 19