First Morning After
trigger warning: r*pe
I notice the blue-eyed boy, his wide, freckled, sloping face, nearly black hair. The church is only windows, chill in summer. I hope he’ll be at the party after.
Then, there I am in my aunt’s office chair, half-sunroom. The clammy cold of the leather against my thin t-shirt racing nerves: the blue-eyed boy, whose name I learn is JD, flicks and flips a whisking, iridescent, double-bladed knife he calls a butterfly. The other boys tower around me, laughing. He’s a child with a shiny toy. He doesn’t look at me. I fear him. Want him.
It’s the first time in memory I’ve been in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, the second-furthest east I’ve ever traveled. I’m fifteen. My father’s big brother’s big house halfway down a swooping, emerald-lawned hill. The party is crowded and cool in my aunt Susan’s flawless garden.
The ceremony which brought us to church earlier was the conferral of my cousin David’s Eagle Scout badge, and the party now is a joint celebration: David is also graduating high school this weekend. JD is another Eagle Scout, or he will be. I’m pretty sure he’s seventeen, I’ve listened carefully and asked casually and have at least gleaned that he’s a junior. He seems ancient, unfathomable. I cannot help believing he’s too coiffed to be friends with my cousin, who is a bit of a misfit. A nerd. JD doesn’t seem like a nerd, stark contrasting features, thick black hair, lacrosse body; I decide he won’t like me. I also decide I’d like us to kiss.
As dusk drops, my uncle and David rig up a projector screen in the backyard and set out lawn chairs. When we’re sat side by side in the back row, when the Rocky Horror Picture Show is playing and the boys are heckling the actors, when JD has his hands down my jean shorts and his fingers are jammed inside me, I decide I wish I hadn’t let him kiss me.
•
We shuffle inside when Rocky Horror is over. David takes over for his mother as host, acquiring snacks from the kitchen off the TV room, making sure I have space, too, on the sofa stuffed with boys. All the lights are off and I have no idea what movie now casts a too-bright glow which flickers anxious over my spinning head. I already don’t want to be stuffed onto this sofa anymore. I say I’m going upstairs to get my phone and no one seems to hear.
Safely alone in the upstairs dark, I text my first love, my ex-boyfriend Ian. I tell him about the blue-eyed boy, how hollow I am. We haven’t talked in a long time, though we lost our virginities to each other in January. We are probably in leftover love. This has soured. Still, he’s who I want to tell, think I can tell. I sit on my guest bed on the landing of the third story and don’t feel tired. Don’t feel anything.
JD comes upstairs. He sits on the bed beside me. He kisses me. I know we speak, but I don’t know about what. The lights all off. My father, my aunt and uncle one floor down, David and the remains of the party two floors down. His sister, Kate, asleep behind her door, twenty feet from us when JD kisses me again. A smattering of freckles across his sloping nose in the almost dark.
Nearly ten years later I only remember this:
He lies down, he pulls me on top of him.
I say, and I mean it, “I don’t want to have sex.”
He says, and might mean it, “Okay.”
Clothes must come off here. Zippers must unzip. I can’t recall what his face looked like in the window glow, what his body smelled like; I can still feel his penis, semi-hard, his hands fumbling to line it up right. I can still feel him sliding inside me. Then: an arrhythmic shifting, I’m giving way to him, my hips screamed open, a hush.
In five or six thrusts, my body must unfreeze. There is my hand on his chest. There is my “stop,” fragile, shaky, used up. I will miss it the next three times this happens.
•
When JD is gone, I run the third-floor shower as hot as I can stand it. Hotter. I sit hunched in my aunt’s pristine clawfoot tub and rock, scratching at my skin flaring red as it scalds. A leaden balloon swells in my gut, full and empty at once. My body is cavernous. My bones are hollow. I slink into the bed where he was an hour ago.
My ex-boyfriend has texted back. I call him. I whisper.
“I mean, it sounds like you wanted it to happen,” he says just before we hang up.
I cave in and in and in until sleep.
It takes too long in the morning to get ready. The mint green blouse with cap sleeves and a pattern of tiny black hearts from the skate shop. Skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors, my uniform. I put on makeup to go ride roller coasters. Perhaps this will hide the change.
My uncle Mike tells us on the way there that Kennywood Park was the inspiration and setting for Adventureland, which has been out for a little more than a month. Says he thought of me and my ever-worsening trouble with motion sickness, because they have so many old wooden coasters, which I can stomach. David and my dad pick up the conversation, roll us back to a five-years-ago family trip to Oahu, when Kate and Susan both spent a night throwing up after body surfing in too-high tide; Mike, David, my dad, and I found the most decadent ice cream parlor we could and piled toppings onto our mountainous sundaes with abandon and bragged over them at breakfast the next day. I almost laugh at the memory. Surrounded by these men who love me.
With time I’ll cope by hoarding: I’ll collect snippets from novels and songs, drawn irresistibly to accounts of abuse and assault. I’ll worry in secret as I seek specific details of these strangers’ worst days. I’ll crave the graphic. I’ll never be satisfied by any depiction of horror. I’ll taste the word for what happened for the first time at eighteen, after it has happened again, and even with its cragged edges, it won’t be sharp enough.
But here and now, at fifteen, on coaster after coaster, all I can think about is how lucky it is that I’m spending the morning after unprotected sex getting jostled. I think of it as my first morning after. I think of it as unprotected sex, short-lived and horrible. There is no language with which to articulate what feels stolen. I am leaden, shocked, working to perform a self I did not recognize this morning in the mirror.
The only not-wooden coaster without loops or spins is called The Phantom’s Revenge. Perched half on and half off a cliff, instead of an initial up and drop, the tracks leave the station flat before they plummet out of sight. We ride it over and over, front car and back car and who sits by whom, chugging along toward nothingness. Searching for the thrill of that first drop.
Carly Madison Taylor is a poet, songwriter, and essayist living in Buffalo, NY. She earned her BA in Creative Writing and Dance Studies from Knox College in 2016. More of her work can be found at Memoir Mixtapes, Blanket Sea Magazine, Vamp Cat Magazine, and Rag Queen Periodical. She’s on Twitter @carma_t and Instagram @car_ma_t.