Duplicity

On hooking up in a car behind strip malls in high school

When you’re a 16 year old girl, you know what you want but you don’t know how to get it, so you do all of the wrong things and get something much worse than what you bargained for.

You fall in love and all that your poor, pale, shriveled and skinny brain realizes is that you want the love you feel for the object of your affections to be reciprocated. You want to be the most special girl in the world to this absurdly mediocre individual at all levels who you’ve convinced yourself is the most handsome boy you’ve ever seen. Sure, he’s an Italian-American with dark hair and lots of potential to grow into an actually handsome young man but he’s 5’6”, his dad is fat and balding, and is extremely insecure. When you’re 16 and act on all of the things that you think will earn you that love you’re giving and seeking, especially “love” from a 16 year old boy, all you get is sour-smelling jizz on the floor of your backseat and head pushing and UTIs and smeared mascara and coming home with your shirt on inside out and angry calls from your parents because you were about an hour’s drive away from home past 8 p.m. on a school night. Ultimately what you get is red-hot blood rushing to your cheeks with shame and self-hatred whenever you think about your actions during that time of your life for more than 2 seconds. As autonomous as a young 16 year old woman with a car and a job and decent grades can be, I felt like a puppet to that boy. I felt my autonomy was stripped from me even if it really wasn’t. Of course, I’m responsible for everything I let him do to me. Sure, sometimes he asked more than once after I would say no to some hormonal requests such as finding a bathroom stall to hookup in at the 4th street market a few blocks from school, but I do have to admit and sit with the fact that at some point I said ok. I had a spine of glass and a mission to make that boy fall in love with me harder than he could ever fathom with anyone else, so I have to take responsibility for my actions. I even was enthusiastic to do things I didn’t truly want to at times — in fact, the occurrence I regret the most was an idea I acted enthusiastic about, thinking it would make him crazy for me; public oral behind some bushes lining the sidewalk on a walk to my house from breakfast. That’s what desire for human connection will do to you. What begging to be loved for your heart and mind will do to you. It took me a year of that relationship to realize how wrong it was. I broke up with him and 3 months later I begged that we got back together because I couldn’t take seeing him around school knowing how much I had given up for him. I doubled down. We spent another year in a relationship that never fucking changed. His semen seemingly never depleted enough for him to want to stop. He loved my ass and my mouth and I monopolized on this thinking he would love me.

He never did. After 2 years and 5 months, many fights, lots of control, lots of sex, lots of love letters and texts on both our parts, he never truly did. It seemed like it a lot at times, and if you ask him he would claim he did love me. But he didn't.

I think when something is wrong with the union between a girl and a boy, the girl’s body physically rejects him despite the girl’s heart and mind’s yearning. But that’s a fact of existence that I’m going to save writing about for another day. I don’t have enough field study yet. All I know is I’m in love now and I feel loved and I haven’t gotten a single UTI from sex since. I don’t even have to pee after. Maybe the first boy was dirty, but I always doubted that being the reason for the UTIs as he was extremely hygienic. Pristine hygiene. Anyways though, maybe the body really does know when you’re mistreating it and tries to let you know by making you piss blood and almost throw up in the middle of a 5-hour shift at work. It tries to hint something to you by being weak and susceptible to whatever energy is attached to the foreign bacteria is in your body, making your uterus ache like it’s been pierced. The first UTI he gave me lasted weeks.

Before that though, when we were technically still virgins and intercourse was still a mystery to us, over and over we had this routine where we would eat fast food and park behind a grocery store that was in the same strip mall as a Yogurtland. Rarely were we ever actual patrons. Because my parents had my location, every time we went to hookup in the car behind the grocery store, I would tell them we were on a Yogurtland date. We would climb into the backseat over the center console from the front or just get out and back in through the doors if no one was around. The anxiety of being seen through the window killed me but he always assured me over and over that nothing bad would happen. That it would be fine. In reality, we were fine in that respect. I don’t think that out of the countless times we did that routine that someone saw us too graphically, even if it was still light out. At most what could be seen were two silhouetted figures, writhing in the backseat of a white Prius through decently tinted windows. Who cares, really, in this day and age. The world is ugly, it’s nothing we all haven’t seen before is what I would tell myself. Regardless, the idea that I even was in those situations at all was and still is humiliating. It was my car, my shitty Prius that I didn't even want to have oral sex in yet did anyway. He didn't drive or have a job. It’s funny, he said nothing bad would happen, and even if I believed him, that no one would see us, I knew that something bad would happen. Something in my gut knew it would, I just didn't know what.

I know what it is, now though. Something bad did happen. Something so awful and disgusting. Every single time. The bad thing that happened that I should have been more aware of was the death of my self-respect before it was even born. I had never been in a relationship before at 16, so I didn’t really know what self-respect should look like. I didn't have any that was meaningful or effective. I just thought mental self-respect was enough and that I could excuse my actions for having nothing to do with what I thought about myself. But I was wrong. I shouldn’t have let myself endure it all. It led to so much regret and having to deal with the reality of my life; that for about a year I would do anything for this guy no matter how embarrassing I thought it truly was if anyone else knew. I rarely came when he did stuff to me and he used to get incredibly insecure about it, even angry at me for not being able to. I think it bruised his ego. I tried really hard, tried telling him to do different things, but it rarely worked. I can’t believe I never faked it with him. Part of me hoped he really would make me come at some point so I just would let him keep trying, minutes upon minutes upon minutes. Maybe once out of ten times I actually would after a while. Mostly though, he always got too tired and didn't push himself to try harder. Part of me resented him for this, especially with how much of myself I sacrificed just for him to finish deep in my throat, face buzzing with warmth and discomfort. Augusten Burroughs once described the feeling of being harshly face fucked like being stung by dozens of swarming bees around the bottom half of your face. I found a lot of solace in reading about his relationship with the older gay in Running with Scissors, I found a lot of parallels between that relationship and my own.

When you’re 17, you’ve been together long enough to the point where it’s not just your mouth you forfeit ownership of to him — it’s instead the pinnacle of creation, the sacred part of you that only you fully understand — your vagina. So after all of what happened while you were 16, you both were now 17 with an insatiable desire for sex. You know you chose to do all the things you did when you were 16, and at some point I really did start to hallucinate the sensation of real love between us. So you manned up, you tell yourself nothing bad happened, and you continue doing exactly what you were before. The only difference is that now your entire body is involved. I liked this stage because I didn’t have to put in as much effort — there was still a lot of effort to put in, he still expected head a lot, but with sex now in the equation I could(n’t) get off easy by just lying there every now and then. I didn't have to suck him off to completion. I could switch gears occasionally enough for him not to notice that I actually hated giving him head. I just wanted to make him finish by any means necessary. 3 years later I don’t play that game of earning love through misery anymore. When we split that’s all I knew I wanted to promise myself — to never play that game again. I know the score.

That little girl had so much to learn, not just about sex but about everything. She knew nothing. Nothing. She just knew how to be sexually duplicitous with a boy thinking it would gain her permanent romantic salvation.