The V-Word

by Amber J. Keyser

  With her feet on the floor and her knees bent over my shoulders, I loop my arms around her legs and hold on tight. My hands grab onto that soft area between the top of her thighs and the insides of them. It’s so very grab-able. I’m in love with it already. I squeeze my arms around her legs like they’re a harness slapped down on me for a roller coaster ride. Yes. I hold on for life.

  My tongue separates the lips of her vagina and I find her clit with the tip of my tongue. At least I think it’s her clit. It’s this hard little ball thing. I press on it, and Courtney’s legs start to quiver. I’m not quite sure what to do with my chin, so I push it closer to her, dig my chin a bit further past the fringe of her lips. She likes this. She moves her hips, riding my face like the horses she loves. Her hips are bucking.

  Like I said, I’m a natural.

  I explore. I unwrap my right arm from her thigh and stick two fingers inside of her. Wet, warm—could be called swamp-like—but only a swamp found in heaven! So welcoming. Mesmerizing. Lush. My fingers have found their place in the world. They were always supposed to be right there. My mouth, too. It’s like I’m whispering a hidden language into her body, a language I’m finally letting myself speak.

  I push my fingers further in, add a third, pump away. From her increasingly loud moans and heaving breathing, I know she feels good. The further in I go, the more it feels like I’m touching a part of myself, my identity revealed. Every second in her vagina, I am more and more a lesbian. I am myself.

  And this is fun—a lot of fun!

  A slightly-salty wet seeps out of her as she grabs onto my hair and squeezes my head with her legs like I’m one of Suzanne Sommers’s ThighMasters. I’m having a harder time hearing her moans now. The sound is all muffled because now, with her legs squishing my ears into her inner-thigh flesh, I feel like I have ear muffs on for this muff-diving adventure. But even with muffled hearing, I can still hear some epic moans. And then she pushes her wet vag further into my face, gyrating. Well, this is the best activity, ever, though my jaw’s starting to get a little sore and I’m losing some tongue strength. She’s wearing me out.

  But with my tongue on her clit and her body squirming about, all I can think of now is I’m a lesbian! I’m a lesbian! This realization is on a solid rotation in my head. It’s all I can think about. Yes, now I’m an official lesbian. Hell yeah.

  There’s another big moan and some more hard hip thrashing and more of that thigh-squeezing and then soon her hands let go of my hair and my mouth lets go of her sex as she breathes heavily, her breath heaving her chest up and down. Up and down.

  I sit up and wipe her salty liquid taste from my chin. A hair tickles the back of my throat. I pull it out and stare at—it’s proof that I’m a lesbian. I kinda want to keep it.

  Courtney smiles at me. “Mmm. Dessert.” I imagine my chin is glistening like the fingers that were inside of her are glistening. Sparkling, even. I exhale, smile. Yes, lesbian.

  Yes, that’s me.

  Two people can choose to have sex for no other reason than that it feels good. It doesn’t have to be the next step in a committed relationship. It doesn’t have to be about love. But if you tell me that it means nothing, I’ll lift an eyebrow in disbelief. The essays in this book are proof enough. No matter how many years have passed, the writers remember vivid details about how it felt, what they thought, why they did it, and what it meant.

  Sex can be about power or intimacy or relationship or rebellion or babies but we are a long way from a time in human evolutionary history where sex is for reproduction alone. That’s why people have been writing books and telling jokes about sex for centuries.

  It’s also why, in the next story, Erica’s first time is intricately connected to a much more complicated narrative about friendship and faith and finding our way.

  13

  It Would Not Be an Overstatement to Say I Knew Nothing

  Erica Lorraine Scheidt

  Verse one

  The first boy I ever slept with just tried to friend me on Facebook, but I didn’t friend him back. I’m not saying this will happen to you. I’m not saying that the first boy you have sex with will grow up and have a sketchy profile picture and try to friend you in that way that people who Google their ex-girlfriends do when they’re bored or horny. I’m not even saying that just because he’s posing in front of a window covered with a makeshift curtain it necessarily means that he’s a lonely guy living in a dingy apartment googling his ex-girlfriends. But it does make you wonder.

  verse two

  I’m one of the nobodies at my school. The girl who cries a lot. The girl with a big nose and a weird best friend. The girl who might be easy but who cares? I don’t care. It’s summer. School’s out. Mel’s doing my makeup. We’re going downtown to the underage nightclub. We’ve been planning it for weeks. We have no idea what goes on there.

  I have these stories about that time in my life. I tell them when I talk about dropping out of high school or my parents’ divorce or why my teenage years unfolded the way they did. I think adolescence is this unbearable waiting until one day you go to a party or kiss another kid or take a drink of alcohol, and then—all of a sudden—it’s like you’re on a roller coaster. You want to remember every minute of that first kiss or that first party but then there’s another and then another. Things happen, all kinds of things, and when it spits you out again you’re twenty or twenty-two or twenty-six, and you can’t remember actually choosing to get on that ride.

  I have these stories about Mel and me, dreaming in the basements of our parents’ homes, as though we would be these in-between people—these fourteen-year-old explosions waiting to happen—forever.

  Mel’s really good with makeup. She wears all the colors: silver-purple, purple, mauve, purply silver. Her own eyes have plum-colored eyeliner and purple mascara. Her glasses are superthick and have a pinkish-purple tinge. Her eyes are startlingly beautiful beneath, strangely large and brown and intelligent, full of all these bottomless things, unspoken. I have no patience for makeup, all the little brushes. I use my middle finger to apply plain brown eyeshadow to my lid. Mel takes over. She makes me sit still. She’s “highlighting my brow bone,” she says.

  I have a new outfit. The skirt is a black cotton miniskirt, really straight with zippers all over it, and I have a yellow tank top and a red shirt made out of netting over that. The whole outfit is brand new, bought today at the Galleria by my mom. It’s weird. She never does that. But I tried it on and she bought the whole outfit, right off the rack, not even on sale.

  If you unzip the zippers, there’s nothing underneath but skin.

  The thing about downtown, the thing about living in the suburbs, is that nobody from our school will be there. Nobody at our school has even heard of the club. Mel and I could be anyone. And it’s night and we’re downtown and nobody knows that her mom dropped us off or my mom is picking us up or that I’ve never had an outfit like this and most of my clothes don’t look anything like the girl I want to be.

  It’s strange, right? How well I remember that skirt, how I came out of the dressing room looking like a totally different girl and how, even now, the thing I remember the most is that pulsing longing to be seen, really seen, by my mom or my friends or by strangers, anyone. And while everything else has changed, this feeling has not.

  verse three

  It’s a hot weekend night and the line outside the club winds around the corner. We feel good. Me in my zippered skirt. Mel all peaceful and smiling. I have three earrings in one ear and one in the other. Mel has even more.

  And—Mel!

  Shy Mel, starts talking to the boys behind us in line.

  Zoom in.

  They’re smoking clove cigarettes. Mel’s teasing them.

  Now I’m the quiet one. I take the cigarette out of one of the boy’s fingers and hold it in between my own. This will become my signature move. I will smoke this clove cigarette and then another. I will smoke cloves and then cigarettes. This is the
inhale and exhale that foreshadow a decade of smoking and then a decade of quitting.

  His name is Aaron and he has a big nose too. Not sharp like mine but flat and wide. We have the same haircut, short in the front and longer in the back.

  I fill with the sweet, spicy smoke. A kind of recognition happens. We are two girls, and they are two boys, and we don’t know anyone they know, and they don’t know anyone we know. There’s nothing to lose. It’s the moment that separates everything that came before from everything that came after.

  It’s the summer night that I stepped, unknowing, onto the roller coaster. When I went from being the weird, big-nosed, oversensitive, bookworm girl with my weird, fuzzy-haired friend in weird, ill-fitting clothes—

  —to the zippered miniskirt girl, dancing with this boy: his hips against mine, his hands seeking mine, his fingers brushing that part of my neck. This is exactly the way it was supposed to happen.

  At the end of the night I lick my lips and the clove cigarettes leave a salty stain. Then he kisses me and I’ve been kissed before, but this is his mouth and my mouth and Duran Duran and Thompson Twins and Prince, and his fingers wrap around mine, and Mel is waiting with his friend until we are done. That night and the next morning when I close my eyes it’s like a chill in my belly and along my skin, and I replay everything he said and everything I said, over and over, and how his breath felt on my neck when we were dancing.

  The next day I ask my mom if I can go to the mall with Mel and when we do, he’s there. Just like he said he would be.

  I wish you could picture us. The mall. How nervous I was that he wouldn’t show.

  Fifteen-year-old Aaron is a Christian. His family is Christian. I’ve just joined a Christian youth group, but I haven’t yet been born again. I write a lot in my spiritual journal. I worry about sin and temptation. I worry about scattering instead of gathering. I worry that I’m too clothes conscious, that I lie too easily, that I use suggestive language. I’m jealous, I note in my journal, of non-Christians and their parties. I’ve never been to a party.

  And then this: suddenly I have a boyfriend. He comes to my church, and I go to his. My mom likes him. His parents like me. It’s summer. There are movies and groping on the couch under the afghan. There’s going to the mall and dancing and clove cigarettes. I take his jacket as a joke and he lets me keep it. He has a bottle of Jim Beam under his bed and porn magazines he stole from his father. I wear the jacket everywhere. At night he calls me on the phone, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  Aaron feels deeply. Love drives him crazy. He loves me so much he can’t stand it. Often he does not sleep. He writes me letters in the middle of the night. They’re about love and sex and God and boredom and drinking and the crushing weight of life. They’re written on thin pieces of green paper. He carries around my picture.

  He has pointy elbows, sparse black hairs on his chest. The soles of his feet are a different color. The chalky dryness of the skin on top of his knees. The bone above the arch of his foot. The place where his hair stops and there’s just skin until his ear connects, the nape of his neck, even the word, nape. The long sweep of his body from his shoulders, down his back, down the back of his legs. The space between the cheeks of his ass and that pinching piece of skin under his balls and his balls, moving under all that wrinkly purple gray skin that changes from loose to taut.

  And the laughing.

  I’m fourteen, with my new body, and never have I been this aware, this intimate, with another person’s body. Never have I felt before—startling, this!—some other person’s folds.

  His secret body. We are touching and kissing and laughing, and his hips and penis are pushing against my stomach, and we are laughing again.

  It was all good, this. Touching the part of his fingertips where the nail met the skin. Feeling the swollen pads of his fingers.

  I am the star of this story. Me as an object of desire. Me with a boyfriend. Me with a best friend. Me, me, me, me.

  verse four

  We’re together anytime we can be, and there’s everything between Aaron and me except penetration because we’re Christian and fornicators will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

  This makes it simple. Oral sex. Kissing. Aaron coming in his pants. Coming in my hand. Coming in my mouth. That’s all okay. My mom and stepdad are gone a lot. His parents are gone a lot. There are marathon hours of I want to but we can’t and all the things that feel good. His hands on me, my hands on him. Dizzying hours on his bed, the couch in his living room, my bed, other people’s houses, parks. Before that night at the club, time stood still—everything breathing, waiting. Now everything balloons into a fever of letters and phone calls and his hand in mine.

  When my mom and stepdad go away for the weekend and I’m supposed to be sleeping over at Mel’s house, Aaron spends the night at my house, and we spend hours fooling around. Then we’re in bed and the Bible is out and open on the bed, and we are reading and rereading passages and trying to find a work-around because we do want to inherit the Kingdom of God. We’re talking and talking and talking, and then we have the dictionary out, and we’re looking up unrighteous and fornication.

  It’s three in the morning.

  I say, “Fuck it.”

  He says, “Literally?”

  I say, “Yes.”

  And we have sex and two minutes later it’s over and I can’t believe it. It’s not possible that this is fornication but Aaron says, “Let’s do it again.”

  And we do.

  After that, school starts. Aaron is moody and drinking and I don’t get to see him very often. We only have sex every once in a while because it’s getting harder to find time alone. I use the sponge as birth control, and it seems very modern because it’s advertised in magazines, but it’s sticky and difficult to take out. I’m never sure if I’m doing it right but I must be because I don’t get pregnant, not until years later when I try the pullout method, which, it turns out, is not really a method of birth control at all.

  verse five

  Aaron says he’s drunk when he sends me the letter: I love you, Erica. I love you, Erica. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. Hundreds of times in back-slanted scrawl on both sides of the green unlined paper, he writes I love you, darker in places where his pencil presses too hard.

  verse six

  Aaron and I stay together for a few more months, and I spend a lot of time talking about Aaron with his best friend Noah, and then Noah and I kiss, and I break up with Aaron. It’s Christmas. Aaron sends me roses and a card that says, “It was just the two of us in one world, and now it’s each of us in our own separate worlds.” A few weeks later I break up with Noah and get back together with Aaron, but it’s different now and doesn’t last.

  There’s another boy after that, and I know I don’t want to have sex with him but I don’t know how to stop it once it starts. And it’s hard to know what else to do when you have big empty swaths of time and you don’t have anything you’re moving toward. For me it’s going to be writing, but I haven’t figured that out yet.

  Time speeds up. I stop going to church. Mel gets mono and misses almost a whole year of school and suddenly we’re not friends anymore. I get a job at Sunshine Pizza and drop out of high school and start writing and start to feel like I’m good at something. I smoke a million cigarettes and read a million books and sleep with a million boys and I sleep with a girl and then another. I careen through depression and apartments and roommates and colleges and short stories. It’s dizzying. I discover my own body and the pleasure it contains. I fall in love over and over in new ways.

  Before, when I told the story of my first time, I always said that I dated this lovely boy and ours was a sweet, sweet love. But now when I reread Aaron’s letters, I think that he was drinking far more than I understood. His was a different story, but I was so blinded by myself, by my hunger to be seen, I couldn’t know him. And when he friended me last month, even though I didn’t
friend him back, I clicked around. He’s still Christian, sober now, and I’m a lesbian with my own family, and I wish the story wrapped up in some neater way.

  Aaron and I had all that. I’m talking about the joy. And then I kept looking for it again in a crush of bodies and emotions and urgency. But it wasn’t until much later, with a woman, that I found that joy again. But maybe that’s the way it works. Maybe I needed the crush and tangle of limbs and years to get here.

  The first time.

  We peel off clothes.

  We slide toward naked, entering sex as if it were just us, just two people’s bodies. Simple and uncomplicated. But we are rarely bare and unburdened. These bodies of ours—magnificent, strong, ripe—are often so deeply buried under outside and inside judgments that it can be hard to hear ourselves. It’s easy to disconnect from the body and push its wants and needs below the surface.

  For Kate, it took many years to unbraid her body from a complicated tangle of shame and silence.

  14

  How to Make a Braid

  Kate Gray

  Divide what you have into three equal sections. Grab the right section with your right hand and the left section with your left hand, letting the middle section hang free (for now).

  Shame is hard to hold in one hand, its gristle sharp and slimy at the same time. My mother is telling me not to walk that way, not to talk so loud. She’s researching hormone treatments to stunt my growth because I’m five-feet-nine-inches tall in sixth grade and she’s afraid I’ll be a giant. My wrists stick beyond shirt-sleeves. My ankles stick below the legs of my pants. I know I don’t fit the family. I’m different. I’m not right.

  These are the messages I hold in one hand.

  Hold tight.

  What happens when breasts grow early is that other people notice, especially men. At parties, at the grocery store, at the post office in our small town, men touch my arm, crowd me in lines, carry my groceries. The town pediatrician squeezes my breasts for lumps when I am nine years old.