This created a built-in excuse for my friends to exclude me. I specifically remember calling one friend and crying and being like, “You knew I wasn’t at my dad’s. And if you didn’t, you could still invite me.” They assured me it was oversight and not exclusion that kept me from getting party invites, and I was hopeful enough to believe them. I always thought the invite would come next weekend. Looking back, it is very obvious to all of us (me and you) that they didn’t want me around. I don’t blame any of my then friends for their reaction to my oft-atrocious behavior in large (and occasionally small) groups. We were all The Worst.
* * *
Partially because of this repeated friend-rejection and partially because I wanted to have money to buy more of Target’s affordable fashions, I got a job as soon as I legally could in Missouri at Cold Stone Creamery. I was the only one of my friends who had a job outside of babysitting, further drawing me away from that group, just as a matter of scheduling. At sixteen—the same time I got the job—I lost sixty pounds. I now had something to do on weekends (work a minimum-wage job) and I was, in my opinion, more appealing to guys. I was ready. Ready for something.VIII
Turns out that something was getting fired from Cold Stone by a woman named Karen who called me “sunshine” while firing me. She also offered to let me keep my apron and hat, even though the cost had been deducted from my first paycheck, which meant that I owned those items. I got fired for reading a magazine while I was left to run the store alone because there was bad weather and the manager couldn’t make it in. Yes, fired for not doing enough at an ice cream shop during a snowstorm. I’m still extremely bitter about this firing despite that leaving Cold Stone was a boon for me.
Because it was almost Christmas, my dad’s company—an ice hockey equipment business—needed more box makers in the warehouse. If you’re unfamiliar with warehouses, as I was, the job is literally just being told what size box to grab and then making it into a box and taping it up. This job offer from my father terrified me. I kept insisting that I could not do this job. I had never been inside a warehouse (privileged) or worked a job that wasn’t designed for young, friendly teenage girls (privileged) and the unknown scared the shit out of me. I couldn’t even imagine what the warehouse was like, who worked there, what the hierarchy was. I didn’t feel protected by my dad being the boss (even though I obviously was), because my dad made it extremely clear that I’d have to work the hardest of anyone or he’d fire me.
But as my grandfather told my mother and my mother told me, “No job is above you and no job is beneath you,” so I took the job. On the first day my dad came in and introduced me to a guy named Ben and said loudly, “If she does anything wrong, let me know; I’ll fire her.” He checked on this regularly, too. Once, he saw me eating lunch in the break room and took me aside to tell me not to because it looked lazy.
The hockey warehouse was a… magical place. Two of the first people I met were named Fudge and Nugget; most of the people working there had lost at least one tooth to hockey, and one guy simply stopped replacing his because they got knocked out too often. I was the only girl in the warehouse—I was younger than everyone else by at least five years, which, when you’re seventeen, feels like twelve years—and I was coming after school to help out at what was most people’s full-time job. I was silent for the first two weeks because I was so intimidated. Because of my dad being who he was, my coworkers tried for a few days not to cuss in front of me. They acted as if I was going back to him with tallies of who took the longest bathroom breaks and who kept falling asleep on piles of hockey bags.IX
The two weeks of nervous silence bought me time to do something I had never done before: become a chill girl. This, a hockey equipment warehouse in the middle of the Christmas rush, was my first real exposure to men. I had actually never before been in a male-dominated group.X Unlike everyone at my high school, who had known me since first grade, none of the guys in the warehouse knew I’d been fat. None of them knew me as a know-it-all, straight-A kid. I mean, they probably got that vibe because I looked like a fucking horse girl, but they didn’t have to sit with me in classes. They didn’t see my hand shoot up for every single question. I had a chance—purchased with two weeks of staying silent out of fear of messing up—to start over and talk to guys. To be someone who guys wanted to talk to—someone chill. And to me, these guys were low-stakes risks in terms of talking to. I didn’t know them outside of work, I was around them a few hours a week, they were older, we were clearly not going to date, I was leaving for college in a few months. This was my time to change everything that my last friend group had hated about me—not that I even had good insight on what that was, just various insecurities and presumptions.
I figured—and I’m not exaggerating to say that I actually thought about this—that I could try on a new personality before college and by the time I left eight months later, I would be different. I would be an approachable, kind, upbeat girl who didn’t talk too much. The kind of girl I had finally realized straight cis guys wanted.XI Step one: Stay quiet. I learned to add to the joke rather than to be the one to make it; I learned either to ask questions or leave men alone, to not talk about myself, and to be happy but not in a giddy, grating kind of way; above all, I learned to not bother anyone else and to not let anything bother me. “Oh, it’s no big deal!” was my motto. I worked almost as hard at being chill as I did at the actual job.
* * *
Within a month or so of working (and being a chill girl) in the hockey warehouse, I got asked out by a guy working there. Let’s call him, out of an abundance of creativity, Hockey Warehouse Guy. He was not missing any teeth from hockey and he was vaguely hot and was very nice to me, even if he was constantly getting in disagreements at work (red flag!) and threatening to quit to his manager and anyone else who would listen (red flag!). When he asked me out, he was also twenty-three to my very legally convenient eighteen years and twelve days.
For our first date, he took me to his family’s pizza restaurant and then a Blues game—yes, the Midwest is romantic. It was New Year’s Eve and we didn’t kiss, which was good because I’d never kissed anyone before. I couldn’t eat because I was shaking the whole time—like actually shaking with adrenaline because I was on a date—and he thought I was cold, which I also was, because it was December and a hockey arena. Everyone at his family-owned pizza place stopped by our table and told me he was the best guy and that I had to treat him well, which I apparently took to heart because I kept dating him for almost two years after that.
Dating him felt like when you’re on a road trip and you skip a rest stop because you don’t really have to go but then you find out that was the last rest stop for miles and miles and there are not any obvious exit ramps. I had very few female friends that I was close to at this point, none whom I felt were going to be low-key about me dating some old guy, something I was deeply embarrassed about, so I had no one to ask questions like, “Is this normal?” or, “Do I even like him?” or, “What do I do if I don’t like him?” I kept conflating the excitement of dating someone with excitement from dating him. I hadn’t even kissed a guy before and this was so clearly my fucking shot.
He had dropped out of college after a couple of semesters about four years back, and did not intend—and could not afford—to go back. He lived with his mother and grandmother in a part of St. Louis I’d quite literally never even driven through before we met. His family was conservative, religious, and racist. He was a little bit of all three, and wouldn’t admit to any of them. He liked country music and getting drunk at his family’s farm. Other hobbies: me watching him play video games and me watching him and his one friend play video games. I lost my virginity to him with Storage Wars on in the background, turned up extra loud so that his grandmother wouldn’t know he was having sex—despite the fact that I was spending the night in his room. Sex was another opportunity I had to be chill around him. I was the one, of the two of us, who wanted to have sex—he was mostly indifferent�
��and in that lay a lot of his power. The less he cared about having sex with me, the more I became desperate for sexual validation from him. But of course the last thing I wanted to show him was desperation.
He, naturally, was virulently anti-choice. He said once that if he ever had a girlfriend who got an abortion—not me, necessarily—he’d want to kill her. For a while, he stopped watching NHL games—one of his only pastimes—because they were sponsored by Susan G. Komen, which funded abortions, according to him.XII
I was chill about this.
Being anti-choice is one (terrible) thing. But he was also not that into protection. He refused to wear or buy condoms and I had no idea what I was doing buying them—or if he would wear them if I did. I had not even sat on a guy’s lap before! How was I supposed to know which condoms to buy? Instead, I went and got on birth control. Paid for by my mother and remembered by me. A key part of being a chill girl is letting a guy not have to take any responsibility ever for his own behavior.
If you haven’t taken birth control pills before, you have to wait a week before it starts working. During that week, he tried many times to put his dick just a little inside me. Without a condom on. Because who cares if I get pregnant? Not him. Unless I were to end said pregnancy, in which case he might want to kill me. Hypothetically.
I was chill about this.
My biggest opportunity to be chill came when his entire extended family was going up to his family’s farmhouse—a very Missouri thing to do—and he invited me to come along. I hated his extended family because they were racist and awful, but of course I went along with it because That’s What You Do, I thought. He and I had been to this farmhouse before with his friends, where I usually made food for everyone and cleaned up. When we stayed there with friends, we stayed in his grandmother’s room, which was the “best” room of the house. The thing is, though, that he refused to have sex while we were there because it was his grandmother’s room. Understandable! But also, why not pick another room so you can have sex with your girlfriend on “vacation”?XIII
This time, however, we were lower-priority guests, so we stayed in another room. I figured we still weren’t going to have sex because his whole family was in the house and if you don’t want to have sex in Grandma’s room when she’s not there, why would you want to have it in another room when she is? Regardless, I knew the drill at this point: we had sex when he wanted to because I was pretty much always up for it and he never was.
That night, we ended up in the living room watching a baseball game with his mom and someone else, whom I don’t remember; all I know is that the guy fell asleep. Hockey Warehouse Guy and I were sharing a couch and his mom was sitting on another couch right next to us. He was drunk—very drunk. And he was finally ready to have sex. Under a throw blanket. With his mother in the room. A foot away from me. Fully awake.
I remember being embarrassed more than anything. I didn’t want her to think I was the type of person to have sex in someone else’s living room in front of their mother. IN FRONT OF THEIR MOTHER! I mean, what?! I told him no, and to stop a couple of times, and tried to pretend he was just being flirty and annoying rather than actively trying to have sex with me. I hoped his mother would say something, even something jokey along the lines of, “Hey, cut it out, you two.”
But she didn’t, and my noes had no effect, and he had sex with me on a couch with his mother a foot or two away and I didn’t break up with him or even demand that we go home immediately or anything.
I was chill about this.
In some way, I felt like I had asked him to be more demonstrative of sexual interest in me and there it was! Exactly the thing I’d been asking for. It took me a decade to admit that what happened could qualify as rape. I desperately don’t want to use that word—and in fact, outside of this book, I never have—because to me, at the time, it did not feel like what I had been taught rape would feel like (as if there is a certain monolithic experience of being violated). At the time, I didn’t believe I would have stayed with someone who raped me, and since I stayed, it must not have been a big deal. I certainly didn’t feel like I could wake up the next day after something like that and just keep going on with my life like usual. And I definitely didn’t think I’d be the type of person to explain away similar things happening over and over just for the sake of feeling like he wanted me.
What I know now is that brains are extraordinarily good at normalizing mistreatment. We’re really good at explaining to ourselves that bad sex is common and harmless and that sex you didn’t want is the same as sex you simply didn’t enjoy all that much, but those things aren’t true.
I feel two ways about this situation now. On the one hand, I feel embarrassed that I didn’t realize until ten years later with a lot of messaging about sexual assault that what happened to me could qualify as rape. On the other hand, I still don’t want to call it that. I still don’t call it that. I still say I’ve never been raped and I still don’t think of myself as someone who has been. I feel like I didn’t claim it soon enough, or it wasn’t bad enough, or I can’t remember enough of the details of what I said afterward and if something that bad happened to me, surely I’d remember all the details of the whole night. I feel like I wasn’t harmed enough.
But that’s not how it works.
The depressing truth is that my story is common, that so many people I know have similar experiences and feel like there’s an excuse for why they happened, or an explanation for why it wasn’t that bad. But that doesn’t make what the other person did not assault. Or not rape. It doesn’t change what happened.
I get why I didn’t leave after that, or any of the other times we had questionable sexual encounters.XIV You don’t leave because this is so pervasive as to seem normal, and what if you misunderstood, or what if you weren’t being clear enough, and isn’t sex kind of bad for women anyway?XV I didn’t leave because it was my first time dealing with not being listened to, with a man being in control of what happened between us, and because I had no practice doing anything else other than smoothing things over for men, then making sure they didn’t feel bad when they hurt me.XVI
In addition to all this shit, which came up just rarely enough to not be a deal breaker, his life had almost nothing in common with mine other than we worked at the same place. I’m not sure what the hell I was thinking other than he had abs and wanted to date me and occasionally wanted to sleep with me, and I had no idea what the hell else a boyfriend was supposed to be, but I had some idea things weren’t right. Hockey Warehouse Guy and I didn’t say I love you for a year and a half. Me because I didn’t love him, and him probably because he was waiting to say it when he proposed or finally got me pregnant or something corny. I finally said it because my older sister Lena thought it was weird that we hadn’t professed our love and I was trying to prove to everyone that I was not an idiot for dating this guy who had nothing—NOTHING—in common with me. Looking back, I realize she was trying to make a point about how my relationship was not working, but at the time I was embarrassed and ashamed and it was easier to just be angry with her for not “getting” our relationship. Though, of course, she got it.
But I got it, too. When you’re in a bad relationship and everyone thinks you’re in denial, often you really aren’t. You aren’t obtuse or unaware of how This Is Not Working. At least I wasn’t. I would drive home from his house and park in my high school parking lot and cry a bit before getting home so no one saw (dramatic, I know). We had awful sex that I basically had to beg him to be interested in. He insisted that men in their twenties normally had low sex drives; only later did I realize that he was probably depressed. We didn’t go out on dates because he couldn’t afford it—which was totally fine with me—but he also wouldn’t let me pay for us to go out because “chivalry.” Look, he didn’t go down on me the entire two years we were dating, despite me asking. It’s not like I wasn’t privy to how bad shit was.
He very rarely listened to me, even when I was incredib
ly, unmistakably clear. I told him multiple times to never buy me jewelry as a gift. First, at the time, I didn’t wear jewelry at all, and most jewelry picked out by straight guys is ugly as sin. It’s not like I was uncommunicative or cloying about what I wanted either. I told him specifically what I’d like for my birthday—a dinner date. I got an ass-ugly heart-shaped necklace.XVII
I was chill about this.
I wore that ass-ugly heart-shaped necklace often. I would plan entire outfits around how to make it look the least bad. Sometimes, I would leave school and drive to his house (thirty-five minutes away; he never drove to my house, of course!) and then put the necklace on when I got outside. I wore it almost every single time we saw his friends because I figured he’d be all weird and prideful about that. My saving grace in getting the necklace was that he asked my sister Lena to help him pick it out and she warned me ahead of time that I was not going to like it; she was like, “I tried to steer him in a better direction; I’m sorry.” God bless Lena for that.
Here’s the thing: everyone’s first partner sucks. Sucks. (For the exactly 492 people reading this who married their first partner, just ignore me and roll your eyes at yet another Enemy of Your Love.) First loves are terrible. It’s like getting the chicken pox. You have to do it once just so you don’t have it again later, when you’re an adult and it’s worse. Unlike chicken pox, we have not figured out a vaccine or workaround. Nor do they let you out of school if you suffer from it. So, in that way, being in love or dating someone for the first time is even worse than a viral infection.
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