In the weeks that followed losing my virginity at 14, I remained shackled to fear. Fear of pregnancy. I went so far as to write a note to God begging him to not let me be pregnant. I probably atoned and promised all manner of good behavior if he could secure the no-baby-on-board. I put the note on the highest surface in my room so he would have a better chance of reading it. It's okay to laugh at that. I do. It's funny! But I think it also shows the naivety and, I suppose, innocence of still being a child.
As I previously shared, I lived in a very small town in southeast Texas. It's the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone and word of any and everything, even among kids, spreads fast. I made the mistake of telling a guy friend about losing my virginity. Looking back, it was clear he told everyone, at least the guys in the locker room. This was probably a couple weeks into my freshman year. I noticed a definite shift in the days that followed. The people that always said hi to me in the halls fell silent as I walked by. At the time, I didn't fully understand why, but part of me must have known deep down. I walked the halls juxtaposed between sadness and shame. Very quickly into the school year, I found myself seeking a new crowd to hang with. Older kids. People of Color.
A small detour to explain something about myself: from a very young age, I greatly disliked being white. As an elementary student and in day care, I remember having only Mexican and black friends. When my mom and I lived in the apartment in Houston, before we moved to the small town, most of my friends were black. Through these friendships, I met their families and it seemed that everyone of color had close family relations. Moms were present. Aunties and grandmas. These families actually talked to one another and seemed to have a closeness that was desperately lacking in my own weird family. So very early on in life, I associated people of color with genuineness and family. I coveted what they had. Also, it should be noted that 100% of the men & boys who abused me in those early years were white. I have to believe that this fact left a permanent mark on my psyche and in associating white boys & men with violence.
My move to the black kids table at lunch early into freshman year wasn't entirely shocking, EXCEPT this was small town Texas -I'm talking less than 1,500 people small town where the railroad tracks literally segregated the town. It was simply NOT accepted that whites and blacks would hang out together off the football fields. And a white girl dating a black boy? Holy mother of all small town sins!!!! You became an instant social pariah. And I did. I was the only white girl in my entire school who sat at the black kids table and, if I'm honest, I felt a sense of celebrity in that. I certainly got the attention I craved. Even bad attention is attention, right? It wasn't long before I had a black boyfriend and then another. I became the white girl who had sex with black guys. They knew it. The school new it. I knew it.
My social life unraveled quickly. The fact that I had black friends was not accepted in my family. So I lied and snuck around. I hid things, or so I thought. Unfortunately, I was used and then tossed aside by these boys. To the child victim of assault remember that sex is a powerful tool: if I give them what they want, they'll like me! We know it doesn't work this way, but you can't see that when you're living it. Within four short months, I'd gone from being a virgin to having slept with 5 guys, although one of those was more closely related to rape than consensual sex. That particular situation remained blurry to me for years. I didn't consider it an assault and certainly not rape at the time, but as I got older and learned more about consent, I can look back and see that what happened was not consensual. I liked this boy. He was a football player and in band. Tall. Dark. Funny. He was a senior and I a lowly freshman. He showed some interest in me and I liked that. One day after school, he grabbed my hand and led me to a practice room in the band hall. I assumed we were going to make out and I was fine with this. However, once we were inside a practice room, he shut the door and locked it. I immediately got scared. Despite liking this boy, I wasn't ready for anything that required locked doors. He started kissing me and then trying to undo my pants. I pushed his hands away and said no. He persisted. I kept saying no, that I didn't want to, but he knew my reputation by then and my reluctance fell on deaf ears. I'd dated and slept with 2 of his friends by this point, so I must want it all the time, right? Well, I didn't. Not like that. I pulled myself away from him and tried to walk away, but he pulled me hard towards him and forced me down on the floor. In that moment, I knew. There was no use fighting it. He wanted sex and was going to take it. He towered over me and, if he wanted, could easily hurt me. Rather than deal with that, I decided to let what was going to happen happen. And it did. I didn't want to have sex with him and I sure as hell didn't enjoy it. I was simultaneously filled with shame and fear, but because I laid there and took it, I never thought of it as rape. I didn't fight. I didn't continue to say no. I shut up, laid there, and took what was happening to me as if it were par the course for my life. If I'm honest, there's still a part of me that's unsure how to categorize this event. In any case, once he'd had sex with me, he didn't show much interest in me anymore and that was the extent of our relationship.
How cliché.
In the weeks that followed, my desperation to be accepted reached all time lows. I decided to roll with my growing reputation as a slut; a bad girl. I started bragging about sex as if that gave me more control in the situations I found myself in. I started talking about drinking, which I had never done, and smoking, which I had also never done. I figured if I couldn't fit in with the wholesome crowd, I'd damn sure fit in with bad crowd. I started sneaking out to go to parties or meet up with my 3rd or 4th boyfriend of the school year. I was moving FAST. Somehow, my parents found out about this. They didn't talk to me about it, though. GADZOOKS, no! They simply nailed my bedroom windows shut. It's so strange to me how we never talked. Accusations were often made and punishments enforced, but there was never any talking. The last time I had tried to talk to my mom about my feelings sums up why I never felt safe going to her. I had a wholesome boyfriend at the time, but was developing a crush on someone else. Mind you, this was the very beginning of freshman year and I was still a virgin. My boyfriend of the time wasn't even a real boyfriend. We had started "going out" the last day of 8th grade, mostly as a dare, and didn't see each other once over summer vacation. So when we started up back at school in the fall, there wasn't much to speak of in the form of an actual relationship, but we hung out and pretended we were more than what we were. Anyway, I wanted my mom's advice on what to do with all these twitterpations I had for a different wholesome boy. Instead of giving me the motherly advice/connection I so desperately wanted, she called me a slut and repeatedly hit me as I fell onto her bed. It was literally out of nowhere and it gutted me. This wasn't the first time she hit me on a whim. This had been her routine for years. But something about the fact that I was finally reaching out to her, naively thinking I could open up, and then being called such a harsh name and repeatedly hit because of it was incredibly painful, emotionally speaking. Just a couple weeks later I'd end up losing my virginity and begin my descent into becoming the town social outcast. If my own mother thought I was a slut before I'd even lost my virginity, what hope did I have of ever being seen as a whole person by anyone?
In December of freshman year, I made one more bad decision that ended up changing my life forever. It was a Friday night, which meant football. In Texas, football is LIFE. Like everyone else around me, I loved football game nights. Being in band, this also meant traveling and performing. On this particular night, I decided to bring alcohol to the away-game. My motivation wasn't to drink, but to be seen as the ultimate bad girl. Still desperate to fit in, I thought this would bolster me into high school stardom. It didn't. Obviously. Before we'd even left the school parking lot, I showed my best friend the concealed bottles in my backpack: a couple of wine coolers and a thermos full of Southern Comfort that I stole from my mom's stash. Mind you, at this point I still had never drank any alcohol other than what had been given to me on occasion by my mom (a sip of wine cooler here and there). It was just a stupid bold move to be SEEN. And it worked for like 10 glorious minutes. For the very first time, I was popular in those moments. As word spread that I had booze, people would come up and ask for a sip, which I kindly handed over a la like me, like me, like me! Then it happened. One of the most popular girls in school came up to me. She would go on to become the valedictorian, so her high school cred was LEGIT. She asked for the thermos and I handed it over. What I didn't know at the time was that she was an alcoholic by the time time she was 17 and she downed half the thermos like a pro. The bus must have reeked of alcohol. She certainly did. Remember, this all happened VERY fast, before we'd even left the parking lot. Before I knew it, one of the band nerds ran off the bus to tell the band teacher what was going on. The cops were called. I was escorted off the bus and put into the back of the cruiser. I must have been absolutely terrified, but I can't remember at this point honestly. The funny thing was, the cops just followed the school bus to the away team stadium and I was allowed to return to sitting with the band in the bleachers. I mean, football must go on, right?! So I sat among bandmates with whispers bellowing. It was a strange feeling because I knew I'd done something really bad, but I was allowed to have fun and perform so there must have been a naive part of me that thought I'd gotten away with it. I didn't.
The cops stayed within eyesight of me until the end of the game, found my parents, and told them what happened. I can't remember anything of that weekend thereafter. On Monday morning, however, I returned to school and was called to the principal's office during first period. Several students were already lined up to talk about what had happened on the bus that previous Friday night. The popular girl was there, too. I probably thought to myself that she and I would get in trouble together, bond over it, and become insta-best friends, finally catapulting me into the it crowd!
Nope. No one who drank the alcohol I brought, including the popular girl, got into any trouble. Just me. I was put into in-school suspension for 30 days. For my parents, this was the final blow. There was no recovering from this. My mom and stepdad saw me as an absolute embarrassment to the family and to the small town. Rather than seeing my acts as a warning sign of my internal struggles or as obvious cries for help, they saw my reputation as unsalvageable and humiliating. The only way to fix the situation, therefore, was to kick me out. Over Christmas break that year, after serving 2 out of 4 weeks of my in-school suspension, I was sent to live with my dad and stepmom in the suburbs outside of north Houston. Maybe some part of them did think it'd be a clean slate for me; a chance to get my life on track. But again, no one talked. We didn't talk about the alcohol incident or the sex or the sneaking out. They just washed their hands of me and assumed I'd turn myself around being in a new city and away from my sullied reputation.
They were right. Eventually, I did turn my life around and life with my dad and stepmom did get better. Unfortunately, it would take about 10 months, several more sexual partners, and a teen pregnancy over the summer between my freshman and sophomore year before it did.