Jyvur Entropy's Blog, page 23

Part Five

So, the very end of the story. I hate this part of the story. There’s no way for me to justify the way I acted. It was one of the times in my life when I didn’t even understand why I was doing a lot of what I did. Sometimes I wonder if other people have those moments: where you’re just doing things and you don’t know what you’re gonna do next, it’s all instinct and impulse, and if anybody was to ask you why you did it, you wouldn’t have an answer. People became very frustrated with me during this period. People did ask me “Jen, what the hell did you do that for?” and I had no answer. “I don’t know why I did it.” People didn’t seem to believe me, but it was the truth. It’s still the truth. I could come up with some flimsy explanation, I guess. It’s easier just to tell you I honestly don’t know why I did a lot of this.

First comes the part where we actually broke up. There’s a third act twist here: I initiated the break up. Can you believe that? For all of five minutes in this mess I had a backbone.

He’d started telling people at school about that day in his crawlspace when he stuck his dick in my ass, even though I told him it hurt and I told him to stop, and he didn’t stop until he was good and ready to. It’s not like he used the r-word. But the way he told the story, it was clear this wasn’t consensual. I don’t know what to say; the world was a lot different back in 2007. I wasn’t there for any of the times he bragged about this, but from what Tara told me (Tara had really taken me under her wing-it wasn’t always men who wanted to save me from my own mess. Sometimes it was women. Tara was one of those women. One of the women who came at me with this energy like “Holy fuck, come here and let me help you, you absolute moron. Sit down and be calm before you hurt yourself.”) it went something like this:

“Finally got Jen to do anal.”

“How’d you talk her into it?”

“I didn’t. She’s like 80 pounds. I just fucking did it. It’s not like she could stop me.”

The school did catch wind of this. I don’t know which concerned student went to them. But there were several conversations in the office. It’s not like any of them used the r-word either. They wanted to make sure Joe and I stayed separated in school. I didn’t want to hear that Joe had done anything wrong. I didn’t like that everybody was talking about this. This is the part I usually leave out when I talk about this time. I told the school it didn’t happen. I think I usually leave this part out because it was just such an idiotic thing to do. And sometimes I tell this story like nobody tried to help me, because that’s sort of how it felt. That’s not true though. People tried to help me. I wouldn’t take anybody’s help. Sometimes I think of this time and I really feel like a victim, but the whole story is that adults got involved. Adults tried to help. I covered up. I made excuses. I did not cooperate.

Some of Joe’s friends started making fun of me for this. To this day, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why it makes any sense to make fun of someone for not being able to stop a guy from fucking you in the ass.

Some girls started making fun of me for this.

Macy’s boyfriend started making fun of me for this. He would follow me down the hallway and say the nastiest things to me. I didn’t say a word to him. I looked straight ahead and walked from one class to the other. Once Macy was with him and she hit him in the arm and yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” At lunch the next day she said, “I’m sorry he’s being a dickhead. I talked to him, but he might not listen to me and stop. I don’t agree with him saying that stuff to you. I want you to know whatever he says, he’s a different person than me.” And I told her it was fine. She wasn’t responsible for what her boyfriend did.

Tara kept pulling me into the bathroom and lecturing me. She wasn’t the sort to skip class, but she skipped class with me once. We sat in the handicapped stall and she lectured me. Stand up for yourself. Drop him. This is getting out of hand.

And I said, “Why do you care?”

She sighed and said, “Stop. Just listen to me.”

There were always women like Tara that tried to get me to listen to them and I didn’t. Women like Carly. Women who could see what made me tick and tried to point it out to me. Who kept on and kept on patiently repeating to me that I was self-destructing, making a mess of myself and sometimes other people. What complicates this further-being so much of a messy idiot that people begrudgingly stop what they’re doing to come save you from your own stupidity-is that there’s another group of people who pretend they want to save you, and really they want you for something else. There were women like this too, but I didn’t meet the first one until I was 19, and I swear that woman almost got me to join a cult. A lot of weird shit happened and she wanted to “help” me so much. But her help often ended with me sobbing and apologizing for being so sinful and talking to her “spiritual mentor” on the phone, and this person said all kinds of weird things to me about God’s plan for me. I had just enough sense to realize this woman didn’t actually care about me, and like Joe, she wanted to hurt me, but also like Joe I don’t really know why.

There was one particularly bad day. Joe said mean things to me all day. We went to Blockbuster with one of his friends. He asked me what movie I wanted to get. I said that he could pick, that I didn’t care. I mean, he was the one paying. And there wasn’t anything I really felt like seeing anyway. He snapped at me that he really wished he had a more assertive girlfriend. “I’d love it if I had a girl who knew what they wanted.” And I was so tired of him at that point. I didn’t look at him and I said, “Maybe you should go find one then.”

In the car, his friend started to say something rude to me. I don’t remember why or what exactly he said. When the guy stopped himself, Joe encouraged him to keep going. “No, go ahead and tell her.” He encouraged his friend to say all kinds of mean things to me. The guy told me I was ugly and weird and annoying and Joe encouraged him to keep going.

And something clicked on that drive. This was awful. I hated being around him. He was so mean to me all the time. Being lonely was better than this.

When Joe and I went back to my house that night, I started up one of those “we need to talk” conversations. I was doing pretty well at first. I was breaking up with him. But then, somewhere along the way, Joe took hold of the conversation. And then he was the one breaking up with me and I was begging him not to leave me, telling him I loved him.

I cried a lot after he left.

But when I was done crying, I sat on the floor of my bedroom, scribbling on one of my school binders, and in that moment I felt relieved. I was so relieved. No more Joe. No more mean-ness. And Tara and Macy would be so proud.

Tara and Macy were so proud, but the relief didn’t last long, and here is where my head really popped off.

I can’t give you all of the details, because it’s all far too grisly. I’m way too stupid. I can’t admit to how stupid I am. But the TLDR is that I went nuts and started stalking him.

First, he amped up his talking shit about me, and since we weren’t dating anymore, the kids that thought it was funny my own boyfriend had been bullying me amped up their shit, following me in the hall, making fun of me for things that had happened between us. Macy attempted to put a stop to some of it, but in the end, it just wasn’t her fight and as much of a Queen Bee as she was, there wasn’t a lot she could have done without a significant time investment. She let me keep sitting at her table. None of them talked to me at lunch. They talked to me outside of school. Told me I’d done a good job breaking up with him. Told me to hang tight, Senior year would be over soon enough, and who really gave a fuck about some homeschooled weirdo anyway?

I stopped showering. I stopped wearing the grungy Hot Topic clothes I’d bought to make him happy. I stopped styling my shoulder-length hair and just piled it up on my head in clips. It looked horrible and I didn’t care.

There was one class, Civics, I came in one day and grabbed a desk at the back of the room and turned it to face the wall, and I sat there crying silently the whole class. I put the hood of my sweatshirt up. The teacher didn’t say anything to me.

At the end of class, I was walking to the door, my hood still up so people couldn’t see my red, blotchy face. It was against dress code, but the teacher didn’t tell me to put it down. There was a boy that, looking back, I think he was trying to be nice. But he was way too awkward for me to deal with that day.

“You’ve been crying,” he said way too loudly, and a bunch of other kids looked at me. “I thought maybe you were crying back there. Hey, don’t cry, I bet everything gets better soon.”

And I was so soo angry at him for calling attention to me.

“You shut the fuck up, you piece of shit!” I yelled at him. “Why would you say that? Why are you bothering me?”

He just gaped at me, totally taken aback.

“Never talk to me again or I’ll punch you in the balls,” I shouted. I could hear how crazy I sounded. I didn’t care.

He nodded and left the classroom.

The teacher looked like he wanted to say something to me. He didn’t though.

My grandparents tried to get me back to normal. There was one day, my grandmother dragged me through the house by my arm, shoved me in the bathroom and yelled “Jennifer, if you don’t get in there and bathe yourself, I’m going to drag you outside and hose you down.”

“Fine,” I snapped. “I’ll take a bath, if-“

“This isn’t let’s make a deal, no if.”

“Okay, but can I just bring my boombox in here. I want to play music.”

She said okay and I put on No Doubt’s ‘Return of Saturn.’ I listened to track one Ex-Girlfriend again and again.

The crazier I got, the more Joe laughed at me. Kids would come to me and tell me what he was saying, even though I told them I didn’t want to know. I told them I couldn’t handle it.

My grandfather took me for a long drive one afternoon. He tried to talk some sense into me. I didn’t want to talk to him. He and I hadn’t gotten along for years, not since the first time he hit my grandmother in front of me and my sisters. Not since I learned that had always been something that happened between them, they’d just always hidden it.

He lectured and lectured and lectured. He told me Joe was no good. Joe was weird. Joe had something off in his brain.

I don’t know why I did it, but I said to my grandfather, “He had sex with me one day, even though I told him to stop and told him he was hurting me.”

My grandfather was concerned at first. He was on my side at first. He asked me to tell him exactly what happened. It was embarrassing, but I did. i told him the whole thing. After keeping it all inside and denying it had happened, I told somebody.

But then my grandfather said, “You were in his house having sex with him? And he did this?”

“Yeah.”

He sighed and said, “You don’t have to act like a slut. Stuff like that happens when women act like sluts.”

“You’re calling me a slut?”

“I’m saying you’ve been acting like one. I love you. I don’t want anyone to hurt you. You go around acting that loose, men are bound to hurt you. Scumbags like Joe are bound to hurt you.”

And then I tried to talk about with my grandmother too, but she just shook her head and said, “Jennifer, sometimes I’m so sad for you and the things you do to yourself.”

I started calling Joe all the time. Showing up to his classes. Following him and watching him at work.

But something weird happened, and he started doing the same thing back to me. He would also call and hang up, and I’ll admit I imagine things sometimes, but we had caller ID and my grandparents saw it happening too. They wanted to go to the police and press harassment charges. Remember this was 2007. I didn’t have a cell phone yet. Barely anyone did. He called the house phone. He called and called and if anyone picked up, he hung up.

I talked my grandparents out of going to the police. They didn’t know I was doing the same thing. I was calling him too. I was walking down the sidewalk in front of his apartment after school. I was trailing behind him in the school hallway, and like I said, if I knew why I did any of it, I’d tell you.

And then one day, I stopped calling him and I stopped following him and I stopped making sure he knew I was watching him. I proceeded to attempt, well, about the shittiest suicide attempt I think the folks at the ER had ever seen. I barely needed a band-aid. But I did land myself in another in-patient stay.

I hadn’t been hospitalized since I was 14. I’d had a number of psych evaluations in the ER over the years. If I could give anyone a tip, never have a meltdown on a day when it’s snowing or a drinking holiday. That’s when the ER is packed and emotionally-unstable dramatic fucks get left to wait for hours, while the real medical situations are dealt with.

They put me in the children’s psych ward. Just like they did when I was 14.

I was 18, but since I was still in high school, they decided that was the best place for me. I didn’t want to talk to the kids. I talked to the employees. I tried flirting with one guy who was probably in his 20s. He yelled at me and they took all my privileges away.

I was there for quite a while. I wanted out. I hated it in there. They kept giving me drugs that made me too tired, but then wouldn’t let me sleep.

I told them I was going to sign myself out. They told me I couldn’t. I went to the desk at the very entrance to the unit. I grabbed the sign in clipboard. One of the doctors came out to talk to me. He was very serious. He didn’t tell me what would happen if I actually signed my name on the clipboard. He just said “there will be consequences.” I glared at him, grabbed a pen, and signed my name on the sign-out sheet. I walked over to the door, which, of course, was locked.

The doctor told me to wait there.

Two police officers came. One didn’t want to handcuff me at all. “It’s a suicide attempt. She’s a kid. Let’s just bring her down to the car.”

“We got to cuff her,” the other said.

They compromised. They put the handcuffs on, but let me keep my hands in front of me. They didn’t put my arms behind my back. The one who didn’t want to cuff me at all put them on me. When I sat in the back of the car looking down at my hands, it was like I was wearing two massive dangly bracelets. He hadn’t tightened them at all. I could have slipped my wrists right out of them if I wanted to. There was another woman in the back of the car and she was cuffed. She yelled the whole ride about the bugs the doctors put in her head and at one point slammed her head into the window a few times and the cops pulled over. She stopped on her own, so nothing else happened.

They brought me to another hospital. This was an adult ward.

Eventually I was released from that one, and I went back to school, and I went back to work at Wal-Mart. There were a lot of meetings that took place. Lots of them. Joe was warned to stay away from me. I was warned to stay away from him. And mostly, I did.

Well, until I met Nicki, but that comes a little later.

Nisha and Ellie

I think I’ve mentioned I was a bully in middle and high school. I definitely was. I’m not really ready to talk about everything I did to Katie yet. Or Nicole. Or Amanda. Or Shantay. Or Layla. Maybe I could say a few things about Nisha.

The worst of those were Katie and Nisha. I was worst to both of them because Katie had other friends that she was closer to and I was jealous. So I took all of her friends. It took me months. I was never more evil and better at manipulating people than I was in 8th grade. Somehow I knew exactly what to say to get people to do what I wanted. When I met resistance, i pulled back, changed strategies. I figured out which girls in the group I could make anti-Katie the quickest. then it was a numbers game. Two girls in the group hated Katie, then three, at four, the rest fell in line. Middle school girls are like that. I guess grown people are like that too. If enough people believe something and you don’t, then you sort of have to sit and go ‘Wait, am I wrong? If I wasn’t wrong more people would agree with me.’

Then Nisha, I thought she was so cool. I wanted to be friends with her so badly. She was this very skinny goth chick. She was goth, but super hyper-active and friendly. She would get all the chains on her bondage pants tangled on chairs in school, then she’d giggle like crazy and make a bunch of jokes about it. She pretended to be a dog sometimes and she called all her friends ‘Mom.’ She wore a dog collar to school. She got made fun of a lot, but she was never in a bad mood. She didn’t hang out with the other goth kids. She hung with the theater kids. I don’t know how it is at other schools, but at my first high school in New Jersey, there wasn’t a big theater kids/goth kids overlap.

I tried to be friends with Nisha. She was always nice to me. Yet, cold. As cold as a bubbly person like her could be. She kept me at arms length. I was semi-friendly with her very best friend, a girl who lived on the same block as her since they were born. I was so jealous of their intense friendship. Nisha very clearly wanted nothing to do with me. Her best friend, Annie, she gave me the time of day. Annie was very short. She was very scrawny. She was quiet, but when you talked to her, she had this very dry, sarcastic sense of humor. More than once, I was in a lengthy conversation with her and didn’t figure out until about halfway through that she was fucking with me. “Is that so, Jen? If that’s what you had to do. No, I totally understand the urge to interrupt class for that.” And I have a problem identifying sarcasm. I always have. I still do. So, I’d think she was really agreeing with me and keep carrying on about whatever it was I was stuck on that day, all while Annie just sort of rolled her eyes and smirked at me.

My best friend at the time fucking hated both Nisha and Annie. This all went down in 9th grade. I repeated the 8th grade. So while Nisha, Annie, and my current best friend Leena had all gone to my elementary school, they’d been a grade below me back then. Leena would tell me how weird Annie and Nisha had been in elementary school. “Nisha used to bite people and Annie would say ‘good girl.’ They have this whole weird dog thing going on. They’re freaks. Who gives a fuck if Nisha doesn’t like you? Nisha has more than a couple screws loose.”

I tried to become friends with Nisha by getting friendly with Annie. Since Annie tolerated me, I thought it would work. It didn’t though. If I found Annie and Nisha at lunch, Nisha would get up and leave. The one time I came across them walking through my neighborhood with a couple other kids from my high school, I joined their group. The rest of them didn’t seem to mind me hanging out, but Nisha twisted her face up at me and said she had to go home. There were a couple of other situations like that. Annie would talk to me. The rest of their group tolerated me. Nisha avoided me, kept conversations short, and when I was around, she left.

So that was really why I decided to fuck with Nisha as much as I could. Because she didn’t like me and didn’t want to be friends with me. I never succeeded in turning any of her friends against her. I know I upset her though. I made up a bunch of stupid rumors and spread them as far as I could. Truth be told, a lot of people could see that I was clearly obsessed with Nisha. The whole thing made me look a lot worse than her. It still upset her though.

In my 20s, when I found all my victims on facebook and apologized for the way I treated them in high school, Nisha was one of the girls who didn’t reply to my message. She did accept my friend request though. Which she probably shouldn’t have done, because I had this intense burst of obsession looking back through all her photos and videos, thinking of how cool she was, wishing that we could have been friends.

I was a bully, yeah, but there are certain thresholds of indecency that nobody should cross.

I had art class the last period of the day in 9th grade. In my art class, there was a girl a lot meaner and tougher than me. Her name was Dasia and she was the type of girl I wouldn’t fuck with. She was big, she was mean, and I knew if I ever stepped to her it’d end with a fight. Whereas I talked a lot of shit to people who wouldn’t call my bluff, Dasia straight up fucked people up. She’d been in multiple fist fights. She was suspended earlier in the year for chugging vodka from a water bottle at lunch. I wouldn’t mess with her.

There was this girl in our art class who had Down Syndrome. Listen, I know I’m an asshole, but Down Syndrome? Who fucks with somebody with Down Syndrome? What sort of human do you have to be to do that? I’m not even a good human and I wouldn’t do that.

The room was shaped like an L. There were only a couple of tables around the corner of the L and nobody sat at them. The teacher wanted us all in the bigger section of the room where her desk was.

The girl with Down Syndrome was named Ellie. She was loud and liked drawing Pokemon. Ellie always sat in the same spot at the table right in front of the teacher’s desk. Dasia always sat right next to her. And Ellie got on Dasia’s nerves. Dasia started fucking with Ellie.

I didn’t do anything at first. But nobody else did either. And the room got very quiet when Dasia would start taking Ellie’s shit or mimicking the way she talked. I kept looking at the teacher, waiting for her to do something. She didn’t.

After three days of this, I didn’t stop at the soda machine on the way to class. I got there early and I took Ellie’s seat. Ellie came in after Dasia and the silly thing asked me why I was in her seat. Dasia leaned over and asked very aggressively, “Yeah, why are you in her seat?” And I’ll admit, I was scared. I was scared of Dasia. I looked at the table and muttered, “Because I feel like sitting here.”

Ellie was a real pain in the ass about it. She sat on the other side of me and whined the whole class that she wanted her seat back. She didn’t even notice that Dasia had decided I was good enough to entertain her for the class. She snatched my papers out of my hands. She made fun of everything I drew. She asked me a lot of obnoxious questions and when I tried to ignore her, she said she was gonna beat the fuck out of me if I kept disrespecting her by ignoring her.

I sat in Ellie’s seat for a few days. Every day she whined about it. Every day Dasia was a real bitch who asked me rude questions. On the off moments that Dasia would shut the fuck up, I started talking to Ellie. She decided we were friends.

And since she decided we were friends, it was easy the following week to get her to come with me and sit at one of the tables in the other portion of the L-shaped room. We went and sat at this table around the corner. The teacher came over and told us we couldn’t sit in that corner of the room and I just gave her a look like “Are you fucking serious?”

I think I said something like “Ellie and I can focus better over on this side of the room.” And she gave up and let us sit in this corner away from everybody else.

Ellie was okay. She really liked Pokemon and Digimon. She complained a lot. She was very talkative, so art class was never boring. And Dasia never came over to our corner of the room to bother us.

I sat with Ellie in that corner of the art room, off by ourselves, for the rest of Freshman Year. She was an okay person and she was sort of my friend, even though we didn’t have anything in common.

Part Four

So, Joe, let’s talk about him.

It’s like I said before, I did think about breaking up with him. Except I didn’t.

And a bunch of other things happened.

He’d collected a couple of creepy friends that were into the same kinds of demented videos as him. And this is a part that I’m too embarrassed to really tell the whole thing. I’ll tell as much of as I can.

He had one friend, Kevin, and it started with him.

We were over at Kevin’s house and we used to hang out over at Kevin’s house a lot. Kevin lived in an apartment that shared a parking lot with a pizza place. There was almost nothing you could order in rural NH except for pizza. Well, the pizza places didn’t deliver to the town I lived in, only the town the school was in.

So remember I said the high school I went to was shared by two towns? One town was slightly more built-up than the other. Joe and his friend Kevin lived in the slightly more populated town. Because the less populated town, the one that I lived in, there was not even one restaurant. There was one convenience store, a dairy farm, and two farms that grew produce. You could go there and pick apples in the fall and they had corn mazes. I’m sure they grew other things too. The apples were all I ever bought though.

I’m painting a picture because the pizza place sharing a parking lot with Kevin’s apartment is sort of important. That’s why his apartment was a gathering place. People hung out there even when they didn’t like him. The proximity to the pizza place made him popular. It doesn’t take much in rural NH.

Kevin was kind of off too. Although not quite as off as Joe. Yeah, they got along really well.

When we over at Kevin’s house, either just hanging out with him or some of the other guys who came around a lot, Joe would try to get fooling around started with me. Like in the living room, in front of everyone. He would talk a lot about sex. He would tell these guys about any of the interesting things he’d gotten me to do. Well, I’d tell you why I put up with all of this if I really knew. I don’t though.

Joe had a proposition for me one day. Kevin had never seen a girl naked. Kevin had never seen a pussy. Kevin was super horny. I should go in the bedroom with Kevin and Joe, take my pants off, and let Joe finger me in front of Kevin.

And I won’t tell you what I did next, but I think all my behavior up until this point should be a clue.

There were more propositions after that.

I wanted to make him happy. I wanted him to love me. I thought everything would be better if I did everything he wanted. That’s why I started trying to be more like his friend Jackie and that’s why I reacted the way I did to the propositions.

To be clear, I didn’t give the answer that I did right away. I had a few things to say. But then, so did he. And I was very easy to convince of anything back then. I still sort of am. I can never tell if an idea or belief I have is one I had on my own or one that somebody else put there.

There were a couple of other memorable events before we get to the end. The end of the dating anyway. There is a lot more that comes after that. But yeah, before the dating ended, there was the time he took me to the laundromat-his dad’s apartment didn’t come with a washer or dryer-and I helped him do his laundry. While we were there, a friend of his showed up with a bearskin. His friend hunted with his dad. All the boys hunted in rural NH. All the boys had guns. Don’t ask me why they killed a bear. Everybody else killed deer. It’s not like there weren’t enough bears around, but who goes out and shoots a bear? At my grandparents’ house we always had to turn the floodlights on before going outside at night, because our house was surrounded by woods and bears would trek right through the field behind the house on the regular.

So, this kid sold Joe a bearskin and Joe had a bunch of wood glue in the trunk. While I folded his laundry, he and his friend glued this bearskin to the hood of his car. Not long after this, Joe and I drove the hour and some odd distance to visit my mom and sisters.

My mom liked Joe and told him the bearskin on the hood of his car was neat.

My sister Carly pulled me aside and said, “He’s weird.”

“Okay.”

“Not okay. You gotta get rid of him. I can tell. I have a bad feeling about him.”

Carly was barely 16. I brushed her off.

“Mom likes him.”

“Yep. Mom is like you: an idiot.”

I remember I said something nasty to her, but I don’t remember what. And she didn’t get mad. Carly was like that. She was very good at letting things people said to her slide right off. She had anger issues too, but it was like she stored them all up before exploding, whereas I was like a handful of sparklers, constantly fizzing but never doing much.

So Carly just stared at me until I was done going off on her.

“You like everybody who is nice to you, Jen. Even if they’re nice like once. I always have to fix you when you go crazy. This guy is gonna make you crazy. Maybe you could do me a favor and believe me? It’s the least you could do, considering you’re super fucking annoying when you go crazy.”

“I’m not gonna go nuts! I’m fine. He’s fine. It’s none of your business.”

And she just stared at me, her face blank. Carly’s face was always blank. From the time we were kids. Her face didn’t move much. She never seemed very sad or happy. She was just there, taking it all in.

“You are gonna go nuts and when you go nuts, Mom goes nuts, and Mary gets scared, and I’m the only one who is ever just calm and I have to deal with a house full of screaming people. You all run around like chickens with their heads cut off, squawking and it’s all pointless.”

“I don’t live here anymore,” I reminded her. “It’s not your problem.”

And she sighed and patted me on the head. It was a weird thing she started doing back when I twelve and she was ten, when she had the first growth spurt that made her taller than me. She kept on getting taller than me.

She patted me on the head a few times and said, “You’re always my problem. Whether you live with me or not. You crazy idiot.”

But that didn’t turn out to be true. Not that I can blame Carly very much. I do miss her though. Her and Mary. I have tried to get them to talk to me. But I always think, I am to them what Mom is to me. They need to be away from me to be okay. It makes me really hate myself. And I don’t know how I’m supposed to get over everything when I love and miss my sisters and they won’t talk to me. They might not ever talk to me again. There was no big final blowout. They just decided they were done. The way I did with Mom.

And you’ve only heard my side. You haven’t heard Carly’s. I might have had to take care of Carly and Mary when they were little, but Carly always took care of me. We fought, yeah, but she kept me together. “Crying is stupid. Stop crying. Everything is okay now. Let’s play Barbies.”

Mom locked me in my room for four days once when I was 14. I can’t remember why she did it. She let me out once a day to use the bathroom. She brought me food. Nobody get dramatic. She didn’t starve me. Anyway, Carly slipped notes under the door. She used to draw these comics. It was this whole ongoing series that she wrote for years. She made some strips of this comic for me. She folded them up and slipped them under the door. One of the notes said, “Go to the heating vent, I want to try something.” I went to the heating vent. I heard something very faint. I put my ear to the floor. She had found my ‘Return of Saturn’ CD in a pile in the kitchen. She put it in her boombox and put it to the vent. Carly was always like that. She took care of people without feeling burdened by it and never made a big deal about it. Nothing fazed her. It was like she was born expecting the world to be awful and people to cruel and when they were she just stared at it all like, “Yep. This is what I thought life would be.”

Carly was always exasperated with me. Carly always wanted me to calm down. If I could be like anyone, I would be like Carly. Carly is tough. She always was tough. Tough but kind. Carly is calm. Expect for those rare explosive moments she had, with Carly, everything was calculated. She thought everything through. And I was another unpredictable asshole she had to keep an eye on.

Carly was a good judge of character. She could size people up within minutes. Carly could sense when people were dangerous. She told me Joe was weird, and even though she hadn’t even turned 16, she knew that Joe would make me crazy. She was always wiser than she should have been. The first time my grandfather hit my grandmother in front of us, I gasped and went to get in the middle of it. I was eleven and Carly was nine. Carly grabbed my arm. She hissed in my ear, “Jen, please don’t. He’s done. Look, he’s leaving. You’ll make it worse. You make everything worse.”

When Carly said that Joe would make me crazy, she was only half-right though. I made myself crazy. I always do. If it wasn’t Joe, it would have been somebody else. There’s something in me that makes me beeline straight for the people that aren’t good for me. The people that are good for me, that love me and want to help me and save me, I spent a long time not wanting them, or keeping them around but not really connecting to them. I have no idea why I would sabotage myself like this. If I knew, I’d admit whatever it is.

I’m just starting to get over whatever that is. Just now. In my 30s. Better late than never, I guess. I’m noticing it now when I push away the kind people who really care about me.

Well, I was still an idiot back then. I was still an idiot six months ago. (I’m probably still one and just don’t see how yet). I didn’t listen to Carly. I didn’t believe her that Joe was off. I didn’t believe Macy or Tara. I didn’t believe my grandparents who both hated him. I didn’t believe anybody. But it’s only because I didn’t want to.

Back in 2020, some of my closest online friends tried to do exactly what Carly tried to do back in 2007. I didn’t believe them either. But it’s only because I didn’t want to.

The next time that people I know are good and care about me try to tell me that something or someone is bad and that I’m going to make myself crazy, I’ll believe them. Even if I don’t want to.

Random Noise On the Internet

I almost wasn’t going to tell the rest of everything. Look, is it any surprise that I’m sensitive? Anybody as chaotic and messy as me is sensitive.

I’m not exactly sure why being told I’m self-absorbed or wallowing should bother me more than people thinking I’m mean or cruel. Probably because the former two imply weakness. I guess I should just come out with it then: I am weak. There. Now that I’ve admitted that, I can keep going. I’m going to keep telling everything that happened.

This is the internet. People are gonna be shitty.

But also, a lot of people have been awesome about me putting these essays out. Those are the people that matter. And I’m so grateful that I feel like I’m being seen and understood. There are good people in this world too.

I’m allowed to write about things that happened to me. I’m going to keep doing it even if a minority of shitheads don’t like it.

I guess this whole thing was bound to rub a few people the wrong way. People are very uncomfortable with negative emotions. You can really only express them in fiction, which is why I have for so long. You can abstract negative emotions in any artistic way you want. My sister Carly makes movies. They are the strangest, most surreal movies. I see her pain in them. You can also use paintings. That was what my mom always did. It’s also what my grandmother did. My grandmother loved to paint, although she stuck mainly to landscapes and animals.

Abstracting pain in fine. Owning it is not. That seems to be the consensus.

If you admit you are struggling, people pop up to tell you how to fix it.

This may come as a surprise, but I actually am trying to fix it. Writing it all out is part of it.

And this may be even more of a surprise, but I actually am getting somewhere. For the first time in so long, I feel comfortable bonding with people. Not people I’ve barely spoken to and watched on the internet for months on end. Not bonding in a this-will-never-be-real-never-be-reciprocated sort of way. People who actually like me and want to talk to me, and that’s online and in real life. I think, for a long time, I’ve only really noticed when people are awful. When people were kind or supportive, I didn’t give it as much meaning. I didn’t have as strong of an emotional reaction to it.

And my anger issues are something that have gotten a lot better over the years.

I also don’t binge drink.

I’m resentful of being told I’m wallowing, because I went through a horrible depression the end of 2020 through the beginning of February this year. I spent a lot of time thinking about buying a gun, putting it in my mouth, and shutting the lights off. I researched the easiest and fastest way to get a gun. I spent hours trying to talk myself into it, because yes, I’m afraid to do something so drastic and final.

To be completely honest, that’s why I finally put my face on the internet, started making youtube videos, and pouring my heart out on camera. I really thought I’d do it. I thought if I really let all the insanity out, if I really publicly self-destructed, well, then I’d have to do it. I thought “It doesn’t matter how stupid I look, because I’m so close to being ready to do this. I won’t ever have to think or feel again.”

All of that is to say, I didn’t drink anything during that whole period. Because there was still a part of me trying to get it together. I have a problem with alcohol. I love how numb and giddy it makes me feel. Well….until it doesn’t. It is a depressant. You feel really good until you feel really awful. If I started drinking during that awful period of months, I think I would have completely lost touch with that part of me trying to get it all back together.

I think the biggest issue that I have right now is that I don’t know exactly why I had this major depressive episode, or why I did any of the weird, erratic things leading up to it. You know, it’s awful being this crazy and also being aware of exactly how crazy you look to other people.

I won’t say I always know when I’m being crazy. At least, not in the moment. I usually do after though. Later, when crazy brain is off. Crazy brain feels a lot different than normal brain, although my normal is probably skewed a little crazy at the best of times. But even when I don’t know I’m in crazy brain mode, I can figure it out by how other people are reacting to me. That slow nobody-make-any-sudden-movements way people get of speaking to me. They look nervous, like if they pick the wrong selection of words they’re going to set a bomb off. The way people look at each other, exchange glances like “Holy shit, help me deal with her.” When people start doing that, then I know I’m doing something that doesn’t make sense to regular people who don’t have crazy brain moments.

Crazy brain feels like your thoughts are very fast, and you see a lot of connections, but later you can see that none of those connections made sense. You can take 2+2 and get xylophone. And it makes perfect sense, in the moment.

That was all a long-winded way of saying, I think I am making progress.

But even if I wasn’t, I think it’s shitty that people want to say you can’t write about your own life. Or maybe you can’t write about your own life unless all of your emotions are neat and tidy and perfectly processed, like you plastic-wrapped them on an assembly-line. Or maybe you’re not supposed to write about your own life until you’re completely better. Then, maybe then, you have a right to talk about everything that happened.

Or maybe you have to be a perfectly sympathetic character: one who was resilient and kind and brave.

I am not resilient or kind or brave.

I am wilted and mean and cowardly.

Maybe those of us who don’t bend under pressure have something to offer the world too.

Or if there’s nothing of value here, then fine. There’s a lot of random noise on the internet already. I can make some more. I’ve always been really noisy.

These are not Literary Essays

I’m not a literary person. I mean, okay, I have a Master’s Degree in English Lit. I’m not humble-bragging. Or not trying to anyway. I’m putting that out before anyone else does, “What do you mean you’re not literary?”

I prefer writing in a down-to-earth conversational style. I prefer writing in whatever way suits me at the moment.

I’ll address readers directly if I feel like it. Hey readers. *waves*

When I’m writing about my own life, not fiction, I’ll write about it however I want.

I don’t want your advice. I don’t want you to feel bad for me. I don’t want you to tell me to get therapy, because I already had ALL the fucking therapy.

I don’t want to talk about events that are specific to my life and deal with a tidal wave of feminism. My life is not a talking point. I don’t want to talk about events that are specific to my life and have a tidal wave of the most toxic anti-feminisim ‘women bad-none of that really happened.’

When I tried to write about my first serious boyfriend, I was paralyzed thinking of all those potential responses, so I put it in the post: please don’t say these things to me.

I don’t want to write some hoity-toity literary essay collection. I want to say everything that happened. And yes, I have feelings about the stuff that happened. Maybe it is all a little ‘poor me’ at times. I do my best to keep it in check.

Somebody just called me ‘self-absorbed’ for writing these essays. And yes, I’m deadass ranting over one comment. I just didn’t expect a comment like that on a post where I talked about being raped. I mean, look, I’m rude on the internet too, but I have my limits. I thought everybody did.

This stuff all happened to me. I have a right to write about it.

It’s also a decent distraction at the moment. Only two months ago, I was thinking about suicide every day. I was thinking of how easy it would be if I could get a gun. How it would be like turning the lights out and I wouldn’t feel anything. I started researching, poking around on different sites, trying to figure out how to acquire a firearm quickly.

That was a bad time. A friend reached out to me, sounding incredibly sad, and told me how much I meant to them, and I wanted to snap out of that right away.

So, i’m trying this now.

Writing this stuff doesn’t feel like “wallowing” to me. It feels a lot better than two months ago. It’s a distraction that is working for me. I feel like maybe a few people see and understand me.

I know you put stuff out onto the internet, you’re asking to be judged.

I really was thrown for a loop by that though.

I already tried therapy. I had many therapists. I had many hospitalizations. I had many drugs. It didn’t do anything.

I don’t know if putting it all out in blog posts will do anything. It might not, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Welcome to Post-Modernism: where people have hundreds of pictures of themselves on Instagram and it’s commonplace for people to run around the internet bragging about their IQ test results, but if you try to process your own trauma, you’re self-absorbed.

People are gross. I’m further disappointed in this world, but I’m not surprised.

I’m going to keep writing this all down. I’m going to keep addressing my readers directly whenever the fuck I feel like it. And I think, I’ll continue to be disappointed in this world.

Pathetic: Part Three

How do I explain what happened next? It doesn’t even feel real.

I thought about breaking up with him. I swear I did. I told Tara and Macy I was going to and they were so proud.

But then I didn’t. Because I’d never felt for anybody the way I felt about him. And I thought about how he came up to me in art class and told me I was pretty and asked me to go for a drive and how it was just like a movie, and how he walked over the train tracks with me and held my hand and told me not to be scared. “It’s safe. I do this all the time. Besides, you think I’d let you fall?” And I thought of how he’d wanted to take me to the movies on Valentines day, but then it snowed a lot and so we stayed at his dad’s apartment and watched TV and I helped him set up a MySpace account. I thought of how he’d let me pick the music when I lost my virginity to him and I put on Christina Aguilara “CandyMan.” I don’t know why I picked that song, but it’s the one I lost my virginity to, in a crawlspace, and he didn’t notice when the spiderweb fell and hit me in the face. I wanted to ask him to stop, so I could make sure there wasn’t a spider on me, but he was so into it. I just thought and thought of how good it all could be. If only I could be better. It was my fault. I was annoying. I talked too much. I was stupid. I was boring.

After I started thinking of breaking up with him, that’s when I did like he asked, and I started dressing more like his gothic friend Jackie. I had a big long battle with my grandmother and then she caved and drove me to Hot Topic. The closest mall was over an hour away. She sighed a lot and waited on a bench outside, while I stocked up on black pants and band t-shirts. I casually listened to all of the bands that I bought merch of. I casually listened to HIM, My Chemical Romance, and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. They were the bands I liked a couple songs here and there, but didn’t listen to consistently. My favorites at this time of my life were Nelly Furtado, Lindsay Lohan, the Black-Eyed Peas, Avril Lavigne, Ciara, Missy Elliot, and No Doubt. I decided I would start listening to these bands I only sort-of liked a LOT more. I would become the alternative chick he wanted. Jackie was objectively prettier. It couldn’t be argued. I mean, scrutinize her face and mine with some face-measuring artistic perfect ratio bullshit and you’d have to agree Jackie was prettier. But she was also way too skinny. She had no tits or ass. Okay, I have no tits either. But I’m pretty certain I’ve got a good ass. It’s the only compliment (and sometimes backhanded ones) I’ve consistently gotten from men. I decided I could do alternative better than her. I could be hotter than her. I could make Joe forget about her.

Very soon after I started coming to school in tight black pants and grungy black band t-shirts (is it not ridiculous how much in high school depends on image and what you wear? My God, I feel stupid typing this out) he decided I should come over to Jackie’s house with him.

I don’t remember why I chose this strategy, but I went into this actually trying to be nice. I really did. Not fake nice. Not nice with an agenda. My only real agenda was to make Joe happy.

She and Joe talked. She didn’t talk to me.

Her bedroom walls were covered in magazine clippings and collages. It reminded me a lot of my bedroom in New Jersey, with my green walls and tye-dye comforter (leftover from my hippie phase on 5th grade of course). It reminded me of the collage I’d covered my entire wall with in 8th grade, while I played No Doubt’s ‘Return of Saturn’ on loop and cried a lot, but wasn’t really sure why I was crying. I felt sad and had nothing tangible to pin my sadness on. So I found pictures that made me happy and distracted myself with a collage and two girls from middle school drew on it and I never felt the same about it after.

Look, it’s weird, but I liked collages as a kid. I made tons of smaller ones in 5th and 6th grade. That wall was like my fucking omnibus after years of smaller collages (portions of it even came from those smaller collages). So I liked her walls. Even if she didn’t fully commit and cover the entire wall. They were still neat.

While she and Joe talked, I walked around and looked at her pictures. One of the emo bands I was starting to get really into, HIM, she had TONS of clippings of. After I decided I needed cooler taste in music, their Razorblade Romance album really caught me. Wicked Game is the best song by far on that album. Poison Girl is a close second, followed closely by Sweet 666.

Okay, required supplementary material to accompany this post

But see, in my 18 year old head, this song was a soundtrack to a Harry Potter fanfiction that I wrote in my head. I used to make up a lot of HP fanfiction in my head. We won’t explore that cringe further at this juncture (and no, I didn’t know the song was a cover).

Anyhow, I was starting to get really into HIM and I wanted to connect with this girl Jackie and she had HIM pictures all over her walls.

I happily burst into their conversation. “HIM!” I squealed pointing at her walls. “I love their Razorblade Romance album!”

She gave Joe a look and smirked at me.

Silence fell and I became uncomfortable. I looked around at her walls. I spotted another band I liked. “Oh! Evanescence. Whisper is my absolute favorite song of theirs. Don’t you love the weird chanting at the end?”

She just kind of smirked and said. “I don’t really like HIM anymore.”

“Oh….what about Evanescence?”

“I outgrew them,” she laughed. “These are old pictures. Only little kids take time to decorate their rooms. I haven’t put any new pictures up in like years.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say to her.

She got up from her bed, a round bed-I’d never seen a bed shaped like a circle before, and she opened up her nightstand. She took a CD out of it. She walked over and placed it in my hand. It was the latest HIM album, one I didn’t have. It was still in the plastic from the store. “You can have that,” she said in a mean little voice. The kind of voice where a girl is hiding behind the facade of niceness. “My mom bought me that but doesn’t know I don’t listen to baby music anymore.”

I stared down at the HIM CD and felt about 5 years old. I knew that if Joe wasn’t part of this, I could have stood up to her. I could have held my own. But with him…

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

And I put the CD into my purse.

Because I was pathetic.

Pathetic: Part Two

Before we get into any of the rest of it, I think I really need to explain how I felt about Joe. I adored him. I was obsessed with him. Hindsight being 20/20 and all, i don’t think I conveyed that properly in part one. I was absolutely, all-consumingly in…love? I don’t know. Infatuation feels different than love sometimes. It feels stronger. But it’s a bit of a Venn Diagram, and sometimes you can’t really sort it all out.

I’ve seen guys say that women let good-looking guys abuse them. And I can’t agree OR refute that’s what was going on here. All I know is that the possibility of that being my motivation to stay in such a relationship, it makes me sick. It makes me sick that I could be that much of an un-self-aware hormone-driven retard. And if that was the reason I put up with so much, in all honesty, I think I deserved it.

It still sucked and I still want to tell it. But I don’t think I need any sympathy here.

To be honest, I sort of prefer the people who have read these essays and agreed “that was terrible behavior.” I really prefer honesty. And I’m not writing this so that people will make me feel better.

It feels like it should mean something. There should be something to this, and even though there never will be, once it’s all down, neat and tidy in an essay, well, then it’s easier to pretend to see something. A moral. A message. See it even if it isn’t there.

The truth is: this is all random chaos and I’m a self-destructive, impulsive, selfish idiot, who caused a lot of my own problems. And there’s not much to learn from any of it.

Stories can trick you into thinking there’s more to life than there is. It’s why I used to ghostwrite memoirs. And people would ask me when I was going to write my own and I always said “Never.” I didn’t judge the people did want memoirs though. I helped people write so much trauma. Trauma so so much worse than mine. You can’t carry that much trauma and know it’s senseless. You have to make some sense of it. You have to find a shred of meaning, even if it isn’t really there.

I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to explain any of it. I’ll just start listing things that happened.

We planned to go to the same college. We thought we’d be together forever.

We walked down the train tracks by his house and when we got to the part where there’s a deep drop and tracks go over a bridge, he held my hand and told me not to be scared.

His brother came to visit him. Joe decided to buy a rabbit to feed his pet snake. They went down to this farm where a woman with no teeth sold rabbits. He bought a rabbit. I was very upset that they were going to feed a rabbit to his snake. I was in the backseat and I asked if I could hold the rabbit. My plan was to release it outside the second the car stopped. Joe’s brother started to hand the box to me, but Joe stopped him. “No, don’t even let her look at it. I’m serious.”

I told them I wanted to watch Joe kill it, but really I was trying to figure out some way to pull of a last minute rescue. Joe got annoyed. “Go inside, Jen.”

Joe had picked it up by its ears and smashed its skull on a cinder block in the apartment complex parking lot.

They put the rabbit in the snake’s cage. The snake didn’t eat it.

Its foot twitched. I started screaming and sobbing. It wasn’t dead and it was slowly dying. It was suffering.

Joe was pissed off at me. He got a meat cleaver from the kitchen. I screamed and tried to stop him. I’m not sure why. At that point, putting the half-dead rabbit out of its misery was the best thing to do. His brother took me by the shoulders and pushed me into a corner. There was a crack.

The next time I saw the rabbit, it was in the trash can. Joe had covered its smashed skull with an empty Dominos box and he sternly told me not to move it.

I looked its fuzzy gray paws and tail. I knew that Joe hadn’t really done anything wrong. It was like he said: snakes had to eat too.

Anyway….I’ll keep going

Joe bought a box of gloves once and asked me if I’d put my fingers in his ass. I didn’t really want to do that with him. But I did. He really really enjoyed it. I felt weird about the whole thing.

He kept on wanting to put stuff in my ass, various objects. I said no to all of that. I wasn’t playing around with anal after the shitting situation.

He wanted to do BDSM stuff with me, which I’m not going into detail about, because those were the parts I enjoyed. It wasn’t all bad with him, and yeah, sometimes I liked fucking him. In fact, a lot of the time, I did. I don’t want it to sound too much like ‘oh poor me’ or anything. Sometimes he pushed me to do stuff I didn’t want to. Other times, the fucking was awesome.

We fucked in his car a lot. He’d just slide the seat back and he’d stay in the driver’s seat and I’d climb on top of him. In rural NH, there are plenty of dark empty places to park and fuck.

He bragged a lot about how much he could lift. He was buff from building things outside and farming his whole life. But when he moved in with his dad, the first thing he did was get a membership to his dad’s gym. He loved showing off how much he could lift.

He was bragging about how much he could lift at a party once. He said, “I could bench press her. Watch.” He grabbed me in both hands and starting lifting me, like a barbell. I was really embarrassed and I thought he was going to drop me.

I thought he was about the most handsome man I’d ever met. He had these medium-brown eyes. I love brown eyes. A guy with brown eyes almost always makes me swoon. I loved sitting on his lap and looking into his brown eyes. I would just trail my fingers up and down his face and whisper, “You don’t even know how handsome you are. You’re so handsome it kills me.”

He was the only guy who ever called me “baby.” And I didn’t like it. So the times he did it, I ignored him, and he stopped doing it pretty quickly.

He knew about my psychotic break involving the movie ‘Donnie Darko.’ He wanted to watch it with me. I let him talk me into watching it with him. I wanted to show him I was past it. I wasn’t crazy anymore. I could watch that movie. I hated everything the entire time. I felt like the world was falling apart. Joe thought it was funny. He kept looking at me to see how I was reacting.

After that day, he always tried to talk to me about that movie. He researched it and had all of these theories about the symbolism in it.

His dad was dating this woman with some kind of disability, I don’t know what it was. She used a tablet to talk. I mean…I’m not exactly sure if it was a tablet. Some type of small electronic device that she would type into and then a robotic voice spoke for her. She somehow caught wind of this situation with the movie. I remember her using her device to tell Joe to stop trying to upset me. She said she’d make sure we didn’t see each other anymore if this movie thing kept up.

I don’t know exactly when the energy started to shift. But I do know that it shifted pretty fast.

Joe was annoyed at me all the time. He talked very badly about me at school. I’d given up trying to get him to stop. The other girls I’d become friends with half-heartedly tried here and there to get me to stand up for myself. I never really did.

“Do you ever shut up?”

That was something he said a lot.

To be fair, I do talk a lot. I really don’t ever shut up.

And everything I talked about was stupid. We watched a Ciara music video and I said I thought those jackets were so awful looking. He got annoyed at and snapped “What the fuck do I care about women’s clothes? What a stupid thing to talk about. You’re an idiot.”

This next part, I almost decided to leave out. Because I already know what the response will be. Please, can this just be a thing that happened to me in my life? I don’t want any feminism. I don’t want any manosphere. I don’t want anything about the over-arching dynamics between men and women, and please please nobody say “I’m so sorry.” I know everyone wants to be nice. But I don’t want all of that. And if you think I’m making it up, I don’t care.

I just want to tell what happened.

He started shoving and grabbing me a lot of the time. Nobody be dramatic. He didn’t ever hurt me. I was never even afraid that he was going to hurt me. I knew how strong he was and he didn’t use an eighth of his strength with me. I don’t think he was trying to intimidate me. He was trying to disrespect me. For what reason, I don’t know.

He started threatening to break up with me a lot of the time. He’d made friends with this goth chick, and to be perfectly honest, I believe Joe was to her what Chris was to me. But she had a sadistic streak that I didn’t. And I’m not sure I can get into all of that. I’ll say that she influenced him and when she influenced him, he was worse to me.

I was pathetic. I begged him not to break up with me.

See? I literally did this to myself and nobody say I didn’t.

We were fooling around once and my shirt was off. He grabbed onto a hair growing out of my nipple. I get them around my nipples sometimes. Not a lot, but the ones I get are long and straggly. He ripped one of those hairs out. And of course, it hurt and I snapped at him. He laughed at me and pointed out that I had four other long hairs around my nipples. It hadn’t even occurred to me to be self-conscious of those.

He tried to get me to dress more like his goth friend. “Wear stuff like Jackie does.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d dressed in clothes from Hot Topic before moving to Blankity-Blank town. It was a point of contention by then. He wanted me to dress alternative? Fuck him. Now I loved the stupid yellow cardigans and bootcut jeans my grandmother had put me in.

I was growing more and more resentful of him.

There was this guy at school that didn’t like Joe. Well, a lot of guys didn’t like Joe. This guy set out to piss him off. He made fun of him for dating a butter-face. “I mean, I guess if you shut the lights off,” he laughed. “If we were just talking that ass….*another mean laugh* but you got to look at that creature’s face! I’d fuck her once and then go find a chick who doesn’t have hot trash for a face.”

And he said a lot of stuff like that for maybe a week. Then Joe walked over to his table at lunch, ripped him out of his chair by the front of his shirt, and punched him in the face. He went to the hospital with what everybody thought was a broken nose. It wasn’t. It was just really bloody.

Joe wanted me to be grateful that he’d done this. So I was. I fawned over him. Thanked him for defending my honor, or whatever the fuck it is he thought he did.

But after I was done praising him (which obviously I shouldn’t have done), I asked him if he did think I was ugly.

“What? No. You’re not ugly. You’re really sexy. You have a great ass. Speaking of which, I fought a guy for you. How about you let me fuck that hot little ass of yours?”

But we’re about to really get into the bad stuff, and I was going to end the post here, but I think I just want to say it and have this part done with.

His dad was out one day. I was having sex with him in his crawlspace.

He shoved his dick into my ass. I told him to stop. I told him he was hurting me. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t stop. It hurt a lot and I tried to get out from under him, but he shifted his weight and I couldn’t.

It was like the bad moments I had as a kid. And I knew I couldn’t get him off me. And it would be too humiliating to keep asking him to stop. I just waited for it to be over. Because that had been the best way to handle mom and it was the best way to handle that too. I said to myself “this is a bad moment and bad moments always end. Good moments are in the future.”

That’s not even the bad stuff. The bad stuff is how I continued to be pathetic even after this. I didn’t leave him. I didn’t tell anybody.

It may as well have never happened.

I’m not angry at Joe. I was for years. Especially considering there’s more still. He did so many more things that hurt me.

But I get it now; just like I hurt people and didn’t mean to or didn’t realize or thought I had to, it was the same with him. I don’t know what his mom did to him, but he said enough that I know she did something.

I’m way more mad at myself than I am at him. Because I was so pathetic and so desperate to make him love me.

People keep telling me I’ve grown a lot since then. I don’t think I have and that scares me. I see a lot of the same behaviors in a lot of things I’ve done over the past few years.

Pathetic

I don’t know where to start with this and I think, at times, as I tell this, I’m going to have the urge to present the facts in a way that makes me seem more sympathetic than I am. I am going to resist that urge as much as I can.

Let’s get the worst of it out of the way right now. Joe was very tall. Joe was very muscular. And I let him treat me terribly. And I was the psychotic ex-girlfriend. And if I’ve ever not presented this situation in exactly the shade of grisly nuance I should, well….I’m ashamed of this time. Right now, I’m trying to tell it exactly like it happened. It’s so hard to tell the truth when the truth makes you look like such a fucking moron.

Okay, let’s do it.

He came over my house that day after school. He met my grandparents. They didn’t like him. I could tell by the looks on their faces. He was taller than my grandfather. I noticed that when he shook his hand.

We did go for a drive, even though my grandmother didn’t want me to.

And I don’t remember everything that happened or everything he said. I know I learned he was new to the school too. He’d been homeschooled. This surprised me, because he was dressed pretty fashionably. Every homeschooled kid I ever met before this had been a complete weirdo. His mom was very religious and had raised him and his brother out in a cabin in the woods. But he’d been sick of living without electricity and he wanted to come be a part of civilization. So he tracked his dad down, who he hadn’t seen in years, and moved in with him. “It just sucks because I don’t have a bedroom. He has a one-bedroom apartment. I have a mattress in the crawlspace.”

I thought he was joking. It turned out, he really did sleep in a crawlspace. When you entered his dad’s apartment, you had to get on your knees right next to the front door, and there was a sliding panel in the kitchen wall. Joe barely fit inside of it. Remember, he was massive. Inside this dusty little nook, there was a thin mattress. Not like the kind you’d put in a real bed. Maybe more like something you’d roll up and take camping. There was a tiny tv. The cords from the tv made it so that the panel to the crawlspace could never close completely. The walls were that weird particle-board material. Like if you’ve ever seen a house that doesn’t have the drywall and stuff up yet. He’d taped a poster of Tila Tequila to that particle board.

I lost my virginity in that crawlspace.

It’s not like I was some super innocent little thing. I’d done a lot of things with a lot of boys, and even a little bit with a couple of girls. None of it was that though. Mostly making out, dry humping, sloppy hand stuff, and what-if you were going to be really generous-I guess you could call blowjobs.

I was dating Joe for two weeks when I had sex with him. I didn’t like it. He went too fast and it hurt and a spiderweb fell off the ceiling and hit me in the face.

Oh boy well….all the tame stuff is out of the way. It’s really time to next to write the next part isn’t it…..

Joe wanted to do a lot of outrageous sex acts. I think the most tame of which was anal. Which I didn’t want to do. Even a little bit.

I’ve really gotten to the part that I don’t want to write. Because I know how much of absolute dumbass all of this makes me.

Here we go then

After I told him no to anal, he kept pressuring me to do it with him. One important piece of context is that I loved him a lot. Or thought I did. You can never tell the difference between infatuation and love when you’re inside of it. I’d never been so crazy for anybody.

I was clingy, but so was he. It was definitely a weirdly codependent, not-okay sort of relationship. He wanted to know everything about me and I wanted to know everything about him. We fought all the time though. Constantly. Thinking back on it, I don’t get how I was so wild for somebody I could not for the life of me fucking get along with.

After I wouldn’t do anal, he did this thing to me he called “the shocker.” We were fooling around and he shoved his finger up my ass without telling me he was going to. I was angry and put my clothes on and made him drive me home.

The next day after school, he brought me over to his friend’s house. There were a whole bunch of people there I didn’t know. Macy was there and she said hi to me. Other than her, it was all guys and I knew none of them. As we were all hanging out in the living room, a guy I didn’t know turned to me with a smirk and asked, “So why would you let Joe put his finger in your ass?”

And the whole room was looking at me and they all cracked up laughing.

I got up and tried to storm out, but I went the wrong way, and this was probably the only time that Macy was actually mean to me. She laughed and went “Oh sweetie, no! Other way!” and as I spun and went the other direction, I heard her laughing and saying, “She got so mad she went in a circle!”

I went and sat in Joe’s car and waited for him to come out. He sure took his time.

He didn’t say anything about what had happened. I decided not to fight with him. I asked him to take me home. He did.

We kept hanging out. He started showing videos on this website called youtube.com.

This was 2006. No, I didn’t know what the fuck youtube was.

And youtube had a great deal more questionable content on it. There was a lot of porn. A lot of straight-up illegal porn.

He showed me weird BDSM videos of women being pierced. One where a woman has numerous piercings up her back and then those piercings were all laced together like a corset. I told him it grossed me out and I didn’t want to see it.

He had one of his friends over one day and they kept pulling up demented video after demented video. Laughing every time I’d get grossed out and leave the room. I walked in on one and this woman was taking a baseball bat anally. Her asshole was unnaturally gaping wide. I was sickened.

But the worst ones were the animal videos. Women fucking horses. I freaked out and yelled at him to turn it off.

Joe laughed and said, “There’s this one with a cup-“

And his friend cut him off and said, “Joe, that’s too much. Don’t show her that. Come on, dude. She’s upset.” He’d stopped laughing and he looked worried.

Joe did talk me into trying anal. It went about as well as could be expected. The whole process hurt a ton. And I didn’t know I’d taken a shit on him until he told me. Because the whole thing felt like taking a shit. He yelled at me, then made fun of me, then told me to hurry up and get cleaned up because his dad was gonna be home soon.

At school, he told everybody about it. He didn’t tell it right though. “I fucked her and she took a dump on me” doesn’t exactly give the proper context.

Macy and Tara pulled me into the bathroom one day. “What is happening with you and cat-fucker? Why are you letting a loser like him treat you like a joke?”

“Cat-fucker” was what they called him. Joe made a lot of very weird jokes. Including one about fucking cats. He had very poor social skills, probably because he’d lived isolated out in the woods for so many years. People hung out with him, but nobody really respected him.

“I’ll talk to him,” I told Macy. “He just didn’t think about how it would make me feel.”

“Are you kidding me?” Macy looked at Tara and shook her head. “He’s laughing at you. He’s making everybody think you’re some kind of freak.”

“We know,” Tara interjected. “Whatever happened, it’s not like he’s saying it. He’s been weird and awful since he first came here. Why do you think nobody else wants to date him? It’s not like he’s not hot, but he’s…”

“Off,” Macy said. “Joe is off. You were nice to give him a chance and everything, and we didn’t want to make you feel bad for liking him. But he’s being terrible to you. You can’t let him do this to you.”

But I did. I let him do whatever he wanted.

I thought if I could be nice enough, sweet enough, pretty enough, he’d be nice to me. I thought if I could make him see how much he hurt my feelings when he did stuff like that, then he’d be different.

“I don’t want to be mean,” Macy huffed on another day, walking with me in the hallway, “But it’s starting to get sort of embarrassing being your friend. You’ve got this loser guy running aorund talking shit about his own girlfriend, and you just take it! It’s…”

I waited for her to find the word.

“Pathetic. I’m sorry to say it, Jen. I am, but it’s pathetic.”

I must have looked upset, because she changed her tone then. Her words became softer. “But listen, you don’t have to be pathetic. Look at me, right. I’m fat.”

“You’re not-“

“Don’t lie. I’m fat. I have a boyfriend who respects me, because he knows I’d dump his ass if he ever pulled the shit cat-fucker is pulling with you.”

I didn’t say anything.

She patted my shoulder awkwardly. “You’re sort of pretty. You know? To be completely honest, I don’t think any other guys here would date you, but just because Joe is an asshole who made you sound like a weirdo. But you could find another boyfriend easy. Maybe one who goes to another school. You have a MySpace account. See I have this cousin-“

“I’m good, Macy. I’ll see you at lunch.”

I don’t know why I liked Joe so much or why I clung to him so hard or why I let him do any of the things he did to me.

But Macy was right, it was pathetic.

And if you can believe it, it does get even worse.

My Last High School: Part Two

He came up to my very first day at my fourth and final high school.

As far as first days at new schools went (and I was an old pro at new schools by this point), it had gone very well. I’d walked into the cafeteria with the meanest mug I could muster on my face. Projecting my best nobody-better-fuck-with-me energy. My plan was to suss out the group of girls who would be the least amount of trouble to thrust myself into.

This was what I’d done at my previous school. I preferred an established group, but one without a leader who could match my energy. A group of quiet or nerdy girls-and I hate to admit this part, but let me not leave anything out-because they were easiest to control. I’d done this at my previous school and they’d happily accepted me. I wasn’t always nice to them, but I also didn’t let anybody else fuck with them. Like Mayra. She made one off-hand comment that pissed me off and I made her go sit at another table. I also yelled at her in Health class in front of everyone. She didn’t really deserve that. She was a little snotty. I think she rolled her eyes and called me a “ninny” like some 19th century grandma or something. So bitchy 11th-grade me banished her from the group for a day-a group of friends that had been in place long before I ever showed up at that high school.

But there was another time when a boy in one of her classes was bullying her. I cornered him in the cafeteria, got right up in his face, and said something like “Oh, you were looking for someone to fuck with, huh?” He denied that he’d been doing anything. He tried to maneuver around me. I poked him in the chest hard and told him if he kept looking for a problem with Mayra, he’d find it with me. He didn’t bother her anymore after that.

(I beg you all to keep in mine what I said before: It wasn’t all and-everybody-clapped moments where I was the badass. I took a lot of L’s fighting to keep my place on the social hierarchy. And I didn’t run the school. I pushed around the people weaker than me and stepped to the people tougher than me when I thought I had to-when they seemed like a threat. You know that moment when a wild turkey loses its nerve and skitters away, looking real stupid, because why are you that loud if you’re such a pussy?-I was that turkey many times).

So nobody fucked with Mayra, except for me, and from what I could tell, Mayra had been the leader of their group before I showed up and plunked down at their lunch table. Mayra let me stick around, gladly gave up her unofficial role to me. For God knows what reason, Mayra remembers me really fondly. She found me on facebook a few years back. And I do not have any accounts with my real name on it. A person has to be very dedicated to find me. She gushed about how much she missed me and how fun it was the time we went trick-or-treating. I don’t even remember the time we went trick-or-treating. I remember telling her she was a dumbass and not using tampons correctly (after a very graphic and horrifying anecdote from her) and then pulling her into the women’s bathroom to demonstrate. I remember she slept over and I put on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I remember her as a loud and innocent sort of human being. Very sheltered. She had an annoyingly high-pitched voice and sounded sort of like a muppet. I could take her or leave her. By that point in my life, that was really how I liked my friends: entertaining enough to provide company, but not compelling enough to really bond with. I guess Mayra liked me for whatever reason and she went out of her way to track me down online, then tried to get me to call her so that we could plan to meet up. I gave some lame excuse and did a slow fade.

Anyway, barge into a group of nerds and take over was sort of my strategic social move by this point. I think it started back in 8th grade-my second year of 8th grade-with the first girl I ever bullied. She invited me into her group of friends. I spent months turning them all against her. Kicked her out of her own group of friends. I have been saying nobody should feel bad for me. I was mean and manipulative and wanted a group of people to influence, but never had the coolness, social skills, or balls to pull this move among the actual popular kids. When the actual popular kids came to fuck with me, my aggression was high. Because I intuitively understood that I couldn’t let my posse of beta bitches see that I was uncool or scared. They needed to believe I was just too alternative and avant garde to rise to the top of the social ladder. I was slumming it with them because that’s just the type of don’t-give-a-shit tough bitch I was. Or that was the idea of the image anyway. I mean, I had a tongue ring and blue-green hair. That shit was wild for a high school junior in a town with more cows than people. The piercings and punk aesthetic were enough to trick the nerdy chicks into thinking I was tough and cool. If the cheerleaders and blonde Abercrombie bitches had never bothered me, I probably would have kept my head down and stuck to bossing the other losers around. Since they didn’t, well, that was where a lot of the fighting came in. I was always the first to escalate to threats of physical violence. I would do that if there was even a hint of a problem. Let them see weakness, let them see that you’re willing to let a little passive aggressive comment slide, well, then it’s all over.

I knew I’d rather get my ass kicked in a fight I’d started then get pushed around or laughed at and be too scared to fight back. Although, I did chicken out on the handful of occasions when my “fight me, bitch” was met with a “cool, take your shot.”

But I’ve gotten off track.

Here I was in this brand new high school, with barely six months of the year left. Then I was done with high school for good.

I no longer had my cool punk aesthetic. When I moved in with my grandparents, the first thing my grandma did was throw almost all my clothes out. I think I was too tired to fight her on it. My hair was dyed back to brown. My gel was taken so I couldn’t spike it up cool. The only thing I fought her on was my piercings. So to her chagrin, I still had a barbell through my tongue and a number of cartilage piercings when I showed up for my first day at Blankity-Blank High School. Aside from that though, the woman had dressed me in a yellow button-up sweater and the nerdiest jeans I think existed in 2006. They weren’t flared, which was the current style. They weren’t skinny, which was just starting to enter the collective fashion vernacular. They just hung on me. And the shoes! God, she took my converse. Said they looked trashy because I’d written all over them. She brushed my short hair straight down and clipped it in place with barrettes. Again, I didn’t fight her too hard. But I did snarkily ask her if she planned to tape a “kick me” sign to my back, because she had me looking like I was asking to be fucked with.

“Oh, stop it, Jennifer. You look beautiful. See?” She pulled me over to the big mirror hanging in her hallway. “You look lovely. Now we’ve just got to get that skin under control.”

“You don’t know what high school girls are like, Nan. You’re basically sticking me in please-come-fuck-with-me costume. Hang a billboard over me that says ‘I’ve never thrown a punch’.”

“Don’t swear! Be a lady!”

“Well, I’m really not gonna be a lady when I’ve gotta fight a bitch, because you got me looking like a Brady Bunch extra. Seriously, I look like an absolute goober. I’m wearing a cardigan.”

“It looks beautiful. It goes nice with your green eyes.”

“Crying out loud. I look like a social retard. These farmer kids are gonna think I’ve been homeschooled.”

And then, there I was in this cafeteria. A small cafeteria.

There were a lot of eyes on me. This was another teeny-tiny rural school. It was shared by two towns. I believe there were…maybe 60? kids in my graduating class. So slightly larger than my previous school.

The first thing that happened, as I glared around at this new group of kids and tried to suss out from a single glance which group of girls I could sieze as my own, was about the weirdest coincidence of my life.

“Jen?”

I turned around to lock eyes with….well…I couldn’t place him.

“Hi?”

He was giving me the weirdest look.

“I know you?” I asked.

“I went to elementary school with you. We heard a girl from New Jersey was starting here. This is weird, right?”

“Ah…who are you?”

He told me his name, but I still didn’t remember him. He knew me though, so I smiled and pretended I recognized him.

“That’s crazy,” he laughed. “Both of our families moved to the middle of nowhere New Hampshire!”

I laughed too, because it was crazy, but I really didn’t know who he was. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t in the same grade as me. He couldn’t have been. Remember I repeated the 8th grade. By Senior year, everybody I’d been in the same grade with in elementary school would have graduated. So I really don’t know how that boy knew me. A coincidence like that seems like it should mean something. It really didn’t though. I’m fairly certain (although not entirely) that I never talked to him again after that. I’m also not sure how word got around that small school that I used to live in New Jersey. That had been two years ago at that point. Small towns are fucking weird.

The next thing that happened was a group of girls at a table not far from me all started waving.

“Hey, come here! New girl, want to sit with us?”

I almost didn’t. I didn’t like how assertive they were. This was a….popular group of girls, one that I wouldn’t be able to hold my own in. I tried to come up with some reason to tell them to fuck off. I already had my eye on a group.There was a group of girls, three of them, in all black, two of them scribbling in notebooks, hanging out at a table in the corner. That looked like my group. They all had their heads down. They all looked sad. I could vibe with that body language. This group of happy, outgoing girls though…they didn’t look like my crowd. And there were 9, count em, NINE, at this one big round table. A group that large is sure to be of higher social standing. I realize I sound like a sociopath. All I can say is I favored the big fish in a small pond approach. Easier to do that and save up all my aggression for the times the much bigger fishes came over to my pond to make waves.

I guess my curiosity got the best of me. I sat down at their table and they were all….nice? I was very confused. They were real nice. Not passive-aggressive nice. I was passive-aggressive to the two that I decided were the leaders. I did it to test them out, see what they would do. One looked uneasy, but didn’t do anything. The other didn’t even seem to notice.

Tara-a pretty red-head who was a devout Christian but kept giving her boyfriend head in the artroom closet anyway. I pegged her as the second-in-command.

Macy-a fat girl, but not the self-conscious sort. She was the queen bee of the group. Despite her not seeming to notice the underhanded dig I’d taken at her, I quickly decided I couldn’t usurp her authority. She was tougher than me. A foster kid with a chip on her shoulder, yet weirdly very sweet with her friends. Give her an adult to argue with though.

Ariana-another chunky girl. She copied everything Macy did.

Lana-a quiet blonde girl who only ever picked at her food and I never learned very much about.

Kristy-a tall girl with thick curly black hair who only wore guy’s clothes. She loved the Simpsons and Pixar movies. Two years after we graduated, she’d kiss me in her backyard and then beg me not to tell her boyfriend.

The rest I can’t remember. Not even a little. Which is weird, because I know all of them came over my house at least once. Most of them came to see me in the hospital after everything went wrong. Yet, I’ve forgotten them all. They exist in my mind as amorphous blobs, background scenery to the next few months. I’m aware they were there and they said things. I can’t recall any of it.

Many people came over to this table during lunch. Other girls. Boys. I noted the body language. The girls approaching the table, either excited or deferential. This was a group of high social standing. If I tried to make them like me and failed, there would be no coming back from that. But if I was the bitch who was too good for this crowd, who rejected them,….that could be good for me. Nobody would fuck with me for the rest of the year.

But all of these weird Machiavellian plans were gone by the end of the day. After I was asked out on a date by Joe.

My last class of the day was art. At lunch, Ariana had asked to see my schedule. She snatched it out of my hand and said gleefully, “You have art with me! This is great!”

And I just nodded and stared. I was so put off by how quickly these girls had taken to me.

“Oh good,” Macy said. “Arianna you can show her how to get there?”

“Yep. Yep. I can do that,” Arianna nodded eagerly. “Hey, my seventh-period class is right down the hall from yours. If you just wait by the door, I’ll meet you there and bring you to art.”

“Cool…”

“What’s her next class after lunch?” Macy demanded. “Who is gonna show her how to get there?”

I stared at her. What on earth was the plan here? You bring a new person into the group, you can’t just be friendly right away. A pecking order has to be established. I tried to figure out how this girl was fucking with me and really couldn’t find anything. She was either playing some 4D chess so far above me I couldn’t conceive of it or she was actually just nice. I begrudgingly accepted the latter, but told myself not to be surprised when it turned out to be the former.

“Her next class is math,” Arianna announced. “Seniors! Who has math next?”

I can’t recall who showed me how to get to math class. I thought about pointing out that their school was like the size of a large tennis court and I’d been finding my way solo all morning. But thought better of it. Since I couldn’t figure them out, I decided to actually try to relax, at least until I found a reason not to.

Arianna was a junior. She met me outside of math and she brought me to art. She chattered the whole way.

“Wait, wait! Is your tongue pierced?”

“Yep.”

“Macy has her tongue pierced too. She’s so cool.”

“She seems okay.”

By all accounts, I think Macy and I should have been great friends. We never were though. Her boyfriend was friends-sort of-with Joe, and we haven’t gotten to that part of the story yet, but you already know, it all goes wrong.

Macy never had a problem with me after all of that. And she let me keep sitting with her group. But she didn’t talk to me after it all went wrong, and since she was the Queen Bee of that group, they all followed her lead. I did try to move on and find another group. I sat down at the table with those three girls who dressed all in black and drew. But by that point, I didn’t have the energy to make a group mine. I never talked to them. I sat with them, and I put my head down too. And some days they would put all their stuff up on the bench because they didn’t want me there, and those were the days I went back to Macy’s table. She never sent me away and I don’t know why. But I’m getting really really ahead of myself.

There’s a lot we have to cover before we get to all of that, and it started when Joe came up to me in art class, told me I was pretty, and asked if he could take me for a drive.

My 21st Birthday

I met Chris working at the Wal-Mart deli. It was after everything went wrong with that tall boy I mentioned in my last post.

Everybody who feels bad for me (and I know at least a few people do from what has been said) reading these essays, you need to know that I’m leaving a lot out. There are a lot of heinous things I did that I’m not going to write about, because I’m afraid to be judged for them. Trust that they were bad. Trust that I am not a good person. Trust that I do not deserve your sympathy.

I only want to tell what happened, because it feels like it should mean something. Does it ever just make you crazy that so many hard things happen and none of it means anything?

Well, I’ll tell you about Chris and I’ll let you judge me for that.

That tall boy, Joe, he worked at Wal-Mart too. He worked in produce. After we broke up and all of the terrible things that went with it, he started dating this much older woman. Definitely what you’d call a MILF. She was in her early 30s and very alternative. She had a baby. He and she would come to the deli on their lunch break and wait until I was free. Then I would get them their food from the hot case and she’d smirk, while he kissed her cheek or nuzzled into her neck.

Chris was very quiet. He had freckles, bright red hair, and a very round face. He was only a little shorter than me. Maybe 5’4. He kept his hair shoulder-length. It was very full and frizzy. He kept it tied back in a ponytail at work. When he took his hairnet off, he had tons of frizzy flyaways. He always smelled good. He used Cherry Blossom shower gel. He knew it was for women, but he didn’t care. He liked the smell.

I’d worked with him many times and never said anything to him. After everything went wrong with that tall boy, I was withdrawn for a while. I wasn’t my chatty self at all. Not until Chris. And that’s why he didn’t deserve any of what I did to him.

I came out of the back one day and Chris was talking to Joe. Joe looked angry and Chris looked nervous. Joe left without getting anything. Later that day, another woman who worked with us, Maya, she came up to me and told me that Chris had told Joe to back off and stop coming over to bother me. She seemed to think it was cute. Said that Chris had looked like he was going to pass out the whole time.

I guess I thought it was sort of nice. But I didn’t understand why Chris would do that.

I think another important piece of context here is that Chris was ten years older than me. I didn’t view him as a peer. I viewed him as a “real grown up.” He was almost thirty. I was eighteen. I was still in high school. He paid rent. Sure, he paid rent to his mom. But still, he was responsible and grown and knew a lot more about the world than I did. It did not occur to me at first that this man had feelings for me. It isn’t as if he was the first “really grown up” man to shoot their shot. I was just always surprised when it happened. I was never into men a lot older than me.

Maybe a week after him telling Joe to stop bothering me, he started talking to me during a shift. He talked a lot and he talked very fast. He was obviously very nervous. I felt bad for him. I took over the conversation. We somehow ended up talking about movies. We found one we both liked. He was cleaning one of the slicers and he didn’t look at me and he asked, “Want to maybe hang out and watch that?”

It still had not occurred to me this “real grown up” was trying to make something happen. I was confused and didn’t know why he wanted to hang out with me. But I said okay.

We watched the movie in the basement of my house. I sat next to him, and he kept inching closer to me. It finally hit me what this was. When he tried to kiss me, I let him. He’s the only man I ever kissed that I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. I mean, there were guys that I was disgusted when they kissed me. There were guys that I was thrilled when they kissed me. With Chris it was….nothing. Not disgust. Not thrills. I didn’t exactly mind it. I didn’t want to keep doing it either.

This is why nobody should ever feel bad for me with all of the problems I had with dating around this time. Chris was a truly nice guy, and for whatever reason-God only knows, he set his sights on me.

He was responsible. He was kind. He was funny. He was smart.

He asked me to hang out a few more times after this, and every time, he tried to kiss me. I wasn’t intentionally leading him on. I was trying to convince myself I found him attractive. He wasn’t unattractive. I enjoyed spending time with him. There had to be a way to want him in that way.

I think a month into this, I told him I didn’t want to date him. I asked him if we should stop being friends.

“No, we can still be friends. It’s okay.”

I believed him that it was okay. Listen, it wasn’t okay. And to all my fellow women reading this, don’t do this to somebody. Don’t find some way to excuse it with a bunch of feminist talking points. Just be a good human being. Don’t do what I did. Don’t do this to somebody.

Chris and I became intensely close. I’d stay at his house watching anime with him and sometimes when it got to be too late, he’d tell me I could stay over. I slept in his bed cuddled up to him. His boner poked me once and he was very apologetic. I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about.

I always let him pick what we watched. He had a massive anime collection. He and his brother went to Anime Boston every year. He had so many shows he wanted to show me. He never quite managed to convert me. Anime never became my thing.

He liked politics. He was very left-leaning. He introduced me to a bunch of left-leaning pundits. The Young Turks were a favorite of his. I didn’t care about politics. But eventually he got me pretty convinced I was a Democrat. He was very happy when I started parroting a lot of his favorite talking points.

We took vacations together in the summer. And again, slept in the same bed.

I loved him. I loved him a lot. Just not in the same way he loved me.

There were a few more times that we made out. I should not have done this. It was just that sometimes he tried to kiss me and I cared about him and didn’t want him to stop spending time with me, and like I said, I didn’t mind kissing him. When he was finally done with me, years later, when he was in his mid-thirties, I was still the only person he’d ever kissed.

He told me when I was being an idiot. Which I was a lot during this time. He’d get irritated with me, but he always tried to be nice.

“You’re gonna get hurt. You need to stop just going off in the woods to screw guys you don’t know. It’s really not safe.”

“Nicki doesn’t need to tell you all that. It isn’t her business to tell you.”

Because duh, I didn’t run back to this guy and tell him about all the randos I was hooking up with. I had at least that much sense not to fuck with him like that.

But we had two other friends, the four of us were a real tight little cluster, and Nicki would go to Chris when she was worried about me. Because Chris and I were closer than I was to her. When she couldn’t persuade me to knock some real dumbassery off, she’d go to Chris.

The fourth person in our tight little group was a guy named Zach. He loved guns and weed and the Insane Clown Posse. He was black, which is only noteworthy because this was rural New Hampshire. He’s the only black guy I ever met when I lived in NH. It is a very white state.

Zach would take Chris out and try to help him pick up women. Zach was confident and assertive, and well, black. He could pick up women easily just because he stood out.

Zach would come back to me irritated. “He barely even tried. He’s holding out hope for you.”

“He knows we’re not gonna date.”

“Smith, how the fuck does he know that when you keep climbing on his lap and making out with him?”

Zach always called me by my last name. I don’t know why. I was the only person he did it to.

“Oh, shut up. It hasn’t happened that many times.”

“It’s happened enough that I can’t get him to put any effort in. You gotta set that guy loose.”

But I didn’t. Because I was selfish and I thought it was Chris’ responsibility to cut ties with me if it was so hard for him.

“He shouldn’t like me anyway,” I snapped. “He knows I keep getting hospitalized. He knows how emotional I get. He knows I’m a mess.”

“Right,” Zach scoffed. “Don’t stick your dick in crazy. I keep telling him. He sees you’re crazy and still wants to put his dick in you. What are you gonna do about that?”

“You’re being ridiculous. He’s just shy. Maybe he hasn’t found any girls he likes. Did you even ask him what kind of girl he’s into?”

And Zach glared at me and snapped, “He says he wants a talkative girl with brown hair and glasses.”

Zach was always like that. Telling Chris to stop spending so much time with me. Telling me I was a real cunt to keep up such a close friendship with a guy I knew wanted more.

I mean, he was right.

I’m a bad person. I’m selfish.

But Zach was my age. Chris was older and wiser than all of us. He said it was okay to be friends. I believed him. Maybe I only believed it because I really wanted to.

The worst thing I did was on my 21st birthday. I bought several bottles of hard liquor. I’d never really had anything to drink before. I few sips here and there, sure. Chris had shared a wine cooler with me a few times. This was the first time I ever really drank though.

I remember that things were fun until they weren’t. And then the world kept blipping out. I’d come to and not know how I got to where I was.

I’d started drinking on Nicki’s property. I doubt her parents knew exactly what was happening down at the end of the driveway. Chris showed up later, after he got off work, and I remember he was mad, and Chris was so laid-back, he barely ever got mad. Irritated sure, never mad. He raised his voice. “Who let her get like this? She’s drunk!”

Nobody had cut me off yet. Chris did. He took my drink away. I stuck my tongue out at him and fell over. And he told Nicki and Zach that they had to try and sober me up. I puked a few times.

Chris wanted to bring me home, but Zach and Nicki thought I should be a little more coherent before they did that.

I faded out and when I came to, Chris was carrying me. I thought this was really funny for some reason. I kissed him on the neck and he told me to stop.

I bit his earlobe and he swore at me, and Chris never swore. “Knock it the fuck off, Jen!”

And I did for a bit. I faded out again. I came to and I was on the ground. They walked off into Nicki’s parent’s property. In rural New Hampshire, almost everybody has a big piece of property. They tried walking down to this creek and splashing water on my face. They told me later that I took my shirt off, but I don’t remember that part.

I fell over again and Chris helped me up to a seated position. Nicki shoved my shirt back onto me. I don’t remember that part either.

I remember that when I put my head on Chris’ shoulder and looked up at sky, all the stars were spinning, and when I told him this, he snapped, “Duh, because you’re drunk.”

And this is the part where I did the worst thing. I was just thinking that he really was the nicest, most protective, funniest, smartest guy. He was being so sweet trying to take care of me.

“You shouldn’t still be a virgin,” I sighed. “Somebody should fuck you.”

“Stop talking, Jen.”

“No, really. I’ll do it. Want to take me home? I’ll fuck you.”

“Be quiet.”

“You’re so grumpy!” I laughed. And I climbed onto his lap and shoved my mouth into his. But he didn’t kiss me back. He sat still.

And I don’t remember the rest, because everything faded again. When the world came back, I was in the backseat of a car. Chris was driving. Nicki was in the backseat next to me. And Chris was saying, “Is she awake? Ask her what she wants to eat.” He didn’t sound like himself.

That evening ended with me getting my stomach pumped in the Emergency Room. They couldn’t sober me up and I kept puking, and Zach and Nicki were worried about my grandparents being upset with them and didn’t want to bring me home, but from what I’ve heard, Chris insisted. He dropped them off at their house and drove me home. He dealt with my grandfather shouting at him, because I was puking on the walkway and, for whatever reason, trying to take my shirt off again.

Zach and Nicki sat me down for a serious conversation.

“Poor Chris. He was so upset.”

“If you were a guy you’d be in fucking jail, Smith. What the hell was that?”

I was ashamed of myself. I wanted to call Chris and apologize, but I didn’t know what to say.

“I wanted to pull you off him,” Zach scoffed. “He wouldn’t let me.”

“Why?”

Zach shook his head. “He was afraid I’d hurt you. He was mad at me the whole time for how drunk you were. He kept asking you to get off him and you weren’t moving. He had to push you off him and you kept grabbing on to him. He didn’t know what the fuck to do.”

“It was so fucked up,” Nicki added. “He looked like…”

“Like what?”

“Heart-broken. It’s like you broke his heart.”

Chris and I didn’t talk for a long time after this.

But we did talk after this.

So to everybody who reads my personal posts and feels bad for me, just know that I did this.

I did all of that and more and I’m not, and never have been, a good person. That’s the truth.