I remember his freckled skin and pale stomach and how his nose started bleeding when he was on top of me. “It’s the Accutane,” he said, blood dripping onto my collarbone. His blood was so red it looked fake, as if it came from a bottle of ketchup. The texture was as thick as syrup. He wasn’t embarrassed. I remember the way that red looked against his bright blue eyes. I remember his long blond eyelashes as they blinked, elegant and in slow motion as he held his hands to his nose.
When Owen got my number and texted me to hang out over the weekend initially, I’d lied to him.
“My mom’s family is in town, so I’ll be spending time with them. Sorry!” I reread the text silently before I hit send. A perfectly reasonable excuse, I thought, closing the screen and hoping he’d go away.
“Ha ha,” he responded immediately. “Who hangs out with their family all weekend? We can go out after ur done with them. There will b a cool party on Saturday we can go to. I’ll drive.” I was embarrassed. How could I be such a child as to think that hanging out with family was a valid excuse to miss parties? I was in high school now; I needed to act like it. Besides, I didn’t want to be with my parents on the weekends anyway.
“Okay,” I wrote back. I didn’t know how to say no.
I never felt safe with Owen and always wanted to go home when I was with him. But I suppose home didn’t feel right either. This, he, seemed like the real world. This was high school, this was being an adult: scary and out of control just the way everyone said it would be. I wanted to rise to the occasion, prove I was ready to handle it.
One night, Owen drove to an empty parking lot and started to kiss me. I thought I had to kiss him back since he’d taken me to a few parties, so I let him fumble in my pants with his hand. I wish someone had explained to me that I owed him nothing. I wish someone had instructed me not to get into his red truck at all. I wish that when the cops pulled up, I’d told them that a part of me was relieved to see them. I wish they hadn’t said I was on the wrong path, that I could end up doing drugs, that I was bad, and had instead said, “We’re worried about you; you’re still a kid. Let us take you home; this isn’t your fault.”
I wish that a couple of years later when, breathless and sobbing, I’d revealed to my mom that I wasn’t a virgin, she’d hugged me instead of looking disappointed. I didn’t give her the details—Owen, the carpet, the blood—I only said that I’d had sex. We were in her car, pulled over a few blocks from her sister’s house. I was in the passenger seat, still not old enough to drive. The fabric of the seat was hot against my back. “We wondered, but we were sure: not Emily,” she said, her eyes fixed on the windshield. I could see her already thinking about how she’d share this news with my father. I winced. She exhaled. “We’re late to see my family.” Her tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth. She started the car back up.
I took deep breaths and slowly managed to calm down. I tasted my snot and bit my upper lip. I felt gutted, as if my insides had been hollowed out. My body was light and fragile, like a shell doomed to shatter, as I walked through my aunt’s front door, a bell jingling as it swung open. I greeted my extended family, feeling my uncle’s cool skin against my cheek when I hugged him, knowing that they’d be even more disapproving of me than my mother had been. I felt bad for her; sorry to have confessed something about myself that was so shameful she now had to hide it. I wanted to curl up and fall asleep forever, but instead I sat in the shadows of my aunt’s yard and pretended to smile.
Owen came over to my parents’ house once, unexpectedly. I remember how animated and sloppy he seemed as I opened our front door and he stepped into the living room. An air of drama surrounded him. His skin was red and his eyes glassy.
“My dad and I were fighting,” he announced, gasping, his face contorting.
I was awkward as we sat on a wooden bench on the back deck. Owen laid his head in my lap, and thick tears streamed down his nose. I looked at his profile, his large features and the red pockmarks on his face. Everything about him seemed fresh and raw, like a wound that had just broken open. His eyelids were practically translucent. I shifted uncomfortably beneath the weight of his head. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands.
I could sense my mother’s eyes on us, watching through the glass of her bedroom door. The house was quiet. My parents stayed inside and out of sight. It seemed as if everyone understood the role I was supposed to play. I inhaled and drew up a memory of how I thought a woman behaved when she comforted a man. Maybe it was a moment from a movie? I wasn’t sure. My mother had told me about her high school boyfriend Jim, that he came from an unhappy home and had often slept on her family’s couch. What did she do when Jim came over? I tried to embody that version of my mother, her love for Jim. I pushed away my tangle of confusion and slowly, very slowly, touched the curls in Owen’s hair.