“We should hang,” he said.
I felt invincible.
HERE’S HOW IT WENT: ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1988, BILLY AND I made a plan for him to pick me up at my house after I went to a Warriors game to celebrate my little sister’s birthday. I still remember the score: the Warriors beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 107–100. I borrowed my friend Danielle’s light blue denim skirt, and as my parents slept upstairs and I waited for Billy to pull up in his GMC, I checked myself in the mirror roughly fifty-six times. When he finally showed, I walked out the front door and left it unlocked.
We drove to his house and he led me straight to his parents’ bedroom. Remember how it felt as a kid when you went into your friends’ parents’ bedrooms? They just felt grand. Holy shit, I remember thinking, I’m so not supposed to be in here. We’re in here and we’re going to fuck.
I lay down and the panic set in. He’d already had sex with Alice, the ball-fondling sex acrobat, so in my mind I saw Alice smirking at me, always so sure of herself in those fucking soccer warm-ups, that neon scrunchie barely able to hold the glory of her hair.
In comparison, I was so black, I was so not cool, and I was so inexperienced.
Billy started to kiss me. My mind was racing. What if my vagina looked like a fucking dragon? I had another friend who was really into trimming and shaving her pubic hair. This same girl would even sometimes shave her vagina using a mirror. She would then brag-slash-explain to all of us using very adult words: “Well, if you don’t know yourself . . .”
And I don’t know myself! At all! And now Billy’s going to see me and even I don’t know what he’s going to see. Then it occurs to me: Oh my God, he is going to have sex with black pussy.
I knew, even though I was so inexperienced, that in interracial porn there is a lot of “Give me that black pussy” talk. And I had always thought it sounded so dirty. Now I realize that in fact I have black pussy. Did he have sex with that black girlfriend back in Fremont? I hadn’t thought about my vagina in relation to other vaginas he’d seen. And I hadn’t done anything to mine in preparation. So now, I thought, he is going to see this black Teen Wolf pussy. It’s going to look different, smell different, be different. He is going to be repulsed. And if this doesn’t go well it will be because he is rejecting my black pussy.
We got under the covers and I pulled up my skirt to fumble out of my underwear, doing as inelegant a job as possible. We left our shirts on.
“I’m a virgin,” I said.
He smiled. I later found out that this was his thing. He was the Deflowerer. It’s not why he had sex with me, but he was known for being a lot of people’s first time.
He didn’t even look at my vagina. He started to put his dick in and then he looked at me, trying to gauge: “Am I killing you?” I was silent. It was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t, like, crazy painful.
And then it was. I start making this bug-eyed look that I knew could not be sexy. I flashed through every book I’d ever read that included a sex scene and landed upon the words, “Look him in the eye.” So I tried that. Weird. It’s too much to maintain eye contact with a guy when you’re sixteen years old and mortified.
He was very gentle and so determined, like he was solving a math problem. But he still hadn’t laid eyes on my vagina. I was still wearing Danielle’s skirt and I started to panic, because I realized that when I gave it back to her it was going to smell like sex. She would know. Because at first you don’t want anyone to know, but then you want the whole fucking world to know.
I waited for all the things I had read about to happen, while trying to mask the pain, horror, and humiliation.
It started to not hurt anymore. Maybe even feel good. And then, with a strange sound, it was over. Where was the magic? Where was the cuddling? The fireworks and the I-love-yous? Something. Anything?
He got up to flush the condom, and I saw his bare butt for the first time, watching that bow-legged walk across the room. He was a dude strutting around in a white Hanes tee and tube socks. I let out a contented sigh. He was just so sure of himself that it was infectious. I had just lost my virginity.
When he came back to the bed, we locked eyes, and all my newfound self-assuredness disappeared. I felt ridiculous. I felt exposed. He hadn’t seen my black pussy, but did it feel different to him? Did he like it? Did he hate it? Is that why he came so fast?
He leaned on my side of the mattress.
“We’re gonna have to wash these sheets.”
“Huh?”
“You bled all over the sheets.”
There was no sweetness. It was simply a statement of fact, like a detective at a crime scene. I got up, and I saw what he saw. It was a crime scene, there on those light gray sheets. The books never described it that way. The books never said there would be this much blood.
Inside, I wanted to die. In fact, I decided I was dying. A little of humiliation, and a little physically. I crossed some weird boundary, turned around, and found that the door had vanished behind me. I was stuck in a weird space of middle earth.
I had unleashed my black pussy on the world, and look what happened. Here’s this perfect man, and I’ve ruined the sheets of his parents’ bed. I wanted to crawl into a ball and call my best girlfriend and write it in my diary—all at once. And now I had to wait for a whole laundry cycle?
Yes, I did. We sat there in his living room, barely talking. And as we waited for the dryer to ding, I felt myself slip-sliding right back into the friend zone. I was already mourning all the flirtation, the touching, the little signals of interest.
He drove me across town, back to my house. When we finally pulled up, he jerked his head toward the car door like I didn’t understand how it worked. I sat. I waited.
“Y’all right?” he said.
The car was still running.
“Yeah, yeah.”
He nodded. I wanted him to kiss me the way Molly Ringwald got kissed. In my head I was screaming, “I want you to be Jake Ryan! Kiss me like that!”
He didn’t.
I let myself out of the car and closed the door softly.
As I walked to my house, I pretended not to watch him drive away.
BILLY GOT BACK WITH ALICE SHORTLY AFTER WE HAD SEX.
When Billy showed interest in me, I felt myself vibrating with sexual energy. I wasn’t Gregory Hines in the eunuchs’ chamber anymore. What’s more, people could see it. Everyone around me knew that I was a viable option. My confidence swelled—and promptly deflated when he moved on to someone else. For a few weeks, I remembered looking around, scanning the halls and classrooms for signs of other interested suitors. “Anybody else? Anybody? No?”
No. I was back to eunuch status. But now I’d had a taste. I knew what was on the other side.
I wanted a do-over. Later that school year, I got it. It was in February. Billy and I had sex on the ground outside an industrial park. I drank a Mickey’s big mouth. This time, I thought, it was for real.
That one didn’t do the trick either. We did have a pseudo-romance of sorts and hooked up many more times. Throughout my teens, I never dated a guy without cheating at least once with Billy. Even now, I google him. I’ll be with someone from Pleasanton and he’ll come up in conversation. The other person might say, “I wonder what he’s . . .” and immediately it’s “Hold, please,” as I start typing. Or if I’m with a mutual friend from home and they have a laptop open, I direct them: “Go to his Facebook.” I don’t want to actually connect. I just want to be a voyeur. I want to see how his kids turned out. I want to see if they’re ballsy like him.