Those Kinds of Girls

Forthcoming in Anthology of the Awkward: The Virgins

“You can sit down right there, young lady,” my dad says, holding up a pile of papers. “When we were going through your room we found this.” He reads:

The full moon was shining over a calm lake. Jesse and I were laying on the beach, the cool waters touching our toes. He reaches for my…

My dad stops reading and squints at me. “Do you recognize this?”

I swallow. Of course. I worked on that story for a week straight, stuck it under my bed during the day with my diary and all the notes I’ve collected from school and everything else personal. They had always been looking for an excuse to snoop. And now they had it: Three hours earlier I had told a friend at school that I had tried to kill myself. It was a pathetic attempt, really, a bottle of aspirin that only made my stomach hurt, a few lines of poetry lifted from a Def Leppard song: “Lady Luck never smiles, so lend your heart to me awhile…” But I knew my secret was out when my name was called over the intercom during 7th period. I reported to the office, was given a slip and told to go home.

I walked, knowing whatever waited for me couldn’t be good. Maybe they’d be sad, crying that they had almost lost their precious daughter. After a night spent vomiting aspirin I had totally lost my taste for death, anyway, but I was sure they would lecture me. Ground me, probably. Make me talk to a priest.

When I got home all the shades were drawn in the living room and my parents were waiting for me, holding photocopied sheets of paper:

I feel warm as he unbuttons my blouse and slips off his shirt. He slips his hand under my bra and touches my breast, then my stomach, then slides his fingers down my panties. He takes his white t-shirt off and his chest is smooth and warm. “You’re so beautiful,” he says. “I can’t believe how lucky I am.”

My father stops reading, coughs awkwardly and shuffles the papers. Dear god, did he really have to read it outloud?

“This is very, uh, descriptive writing,” he finally says, looking away.

“Thanks,” I whisper.

“You know what happens to girls like you, don’t you? You get a bad reputation. No decent guy will want to go out with you.”

“But I made it up.”

My dad shuffles the paperwork again and settles on another passage: Jesse passes me the bottle of vodka and takes a swig, then I take a swig. When he kisses me his lips taste like vodka. “So you’re drinking now, too?”

“But it’s just a story I wrote,” I say, weaker.

Our bodies move with the waves of the lake and I’m not a virgin anymore. My dad glares at me and pushes his glasses up his nose. “Do you know what they call girls like you? They call them sluts.”

There was no point in telling my father that there was no Jesse, that I was a virgin, that putting dangerous words on paper was the only sexual catharsis I’d had. There was no point in telling him that I hated drinking, could barely choke the stuff down. That the only naked male bodies I’d seen were from the porn I found stashed behind our regular VCR movies in unmarked boxes or in the magazines in his nightstand drawer.

I knew there was no point in trying to explain to my parents how my dreams of freedom surged even greater than my hormones, painted my restricted world with swooshes of reds and golds and purples, joyriding, flying, how I imagined a day when I would not be grounded to the house in an endless military drill, a day when there would be no screaming, no fighting, no hiding in the shadows listening to the crying, a day when the woman my father was having an affair with would stop calling, coming over and pretending like she was still just our next-door neighbor, a day when my mom wouldn’t be preoccupied with her own grief long enough to pay attention to me.

“I’m ashamed of you,” my father decreed, folding my 10-page story and tucking it into a manila folder. “I never thought my daughter would end up to be one of those kinds of girls. And we’re going to lock the liquor cabinet from now on.”