I was 15. It was a little more than a month before my 16th birthday. I was half drunk. I went willingly with him to his bedroom when I knew no one else was at home.

I was a virgin. He knew that. I’d told him, repeatedly. We both knew what my virginity meant in a cultural sense; that I still had the societal worth that a female is afforded before she has sexual intercourse (or before a man rapes her); that if we were to have sex, it would be him who would “score” and me who would “be scored upon”; that he would win something and I would lose something; that sexual intercourse is what makes boys into men and girls into sluts.

We had discussed all of this repeatedly. I’d also told him, repeatedly and very clearly, that whenever we fooled around we could do pretty much anything he wanted except for fucking. I wanted to fool around but I didn’t want to get pregnant. I was 15.

He was 18. He told me he understood that I wanted to remain a virgin for some as yet still undetermined period of time. He said that was cool. He said he was satisfied with the fooling around. He said he loved me. He’d shown me pictures of his trip to Europe with his mom, the town where his family had lived before they’d come to the States, and he’d cried while he told me how horrible he’d always felt about the distance between him and his dad. He shopped with me, people. We bought matching pink polo shirts at the mall and then rode home on his motorcycle looking like one of those obnoxious Bobbsey twins couples. He practically genuflected to me at the football game that night, seemingly so proud to be there with me, to be my boyfriend.

So later on when we started making out on the bed, like we had a bunch of other times, I wasn’t worried. We’d been drinking downstairs earlier with our friends, like we had a bunch of other times. He’d had a few beers, I’d had a few wine coolers, maybe we smoked a joint, I don’t remember anymore. I do remember that when I went upstairs with him, I was kinda high, and bubbly, and turned on, and happy. I remember that I trusted him.

After we were naked, I started to feel a little sketchy. At first, I didn’t know why. I didn’t feel sick. I wasn’t too high. I wasn’t doing anything sexual that I’d not already done with either him or other boyfriends so I wasn’t uncomfortable for reasons of that nature. I don’t know. The air in the room changed. It was subtle but I guess some part of me was primed to pick up a dangerous vibe like that even before I learned how to read it.

The next thing I knew, he was pinning my arms to the sheets and holding my legs apart with his knees and I was going, “No, wait!” and he was forcing his penis into my vagina.

I promptly went into shock. And when I say ‘promptly’, I really mean that, it happened in an instant. My body stopped responding and shut down, and my brain shifted into an emergency functioning mode that didn’t include much emotional awareness of my context. I mostly just stared at the red lit numbers on the alarm clock that sat on the nightstand by the bed, watched them sit static, watched them change from one to the next to the next. Running through my mind was a chaotic series of thoughts that extended from the initial shock of the realization — Is he fucking me? Oh my god, he actually is. I am being fucked against my will. — to frantically wondering how safe I really was since he acted like he didn’t hear me and continued to look as though he were in a trance, all the way through about 15 different brands of panic about what this would mean for my identity, and ultimately, what it might turn out to mean for my future on the whole — If he gets me pregnant, I will fucking kill him.

Eventually, I began to cry. And that seemed to jolt him.

At first, all the communication was non-verbal. He realized that I was crying, and he finally stopped fucking me. He pulled out and sat back on his knees, looking at me with what first appeared to be all the sweet boyfriendly concern in the world. I didn’t say anything, I just looked back at him. And then, as he searched my face for further information, one of two things happened: either it hit him, what he had done, or he realized that it was time to put on a performance. I have never been sure which thing it was.

His face morphed from tightened concern to abject horror. “I’m so sorry,” he began to say, and he tried to lie down next to me and wrap himself around me.

“Don’t touch me,” I snapped.

I got up and reached for my clothes in the pile on the floor.

“But I love you!” he protested.

I think I might have snorted. I also think, in my haste to get dressed and get the hell outta Dodge, that I might have left my socks under his bed.

“Oh god, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t leave, I love you, I didn’t mean to do this, I didn’t even realize that I was….ohmygod I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.”

I could not bring myself to look at him again.

He punched a hole in the closet door and screamed that he loved me some more.

I didn’t even look over my shoulder while I left. I shot out of the apartment and back downstairs to the other apartment in which our friends were still partying. I did not realize that one of them — my boyfriend’s asshole best friend — had just stolen back downstairs two seconds before I did, because he had been watching the whole goddamned time upstairs through an air vent that connected the living room to the bedroom. That bastard watched while his friend raped me.

I wouldn’t find out about that for another week or so afterward, though — I’d find out about it around the same time as I found out the boyfriend who claimed to love me so much had started calling me a lying little slut all around town and started to date one of my best friends. She was a freshman, 14. And he’d rape her too, eventually, even though I’d beg her to get away from him and tell her why and she’d choose to believe his version of events over mine. I don’t know if the asshole best friend got to watch him rape that girl, too, of if the asshole best friend ever said to the other girl what he ultimately said to me, which was something kinda like, “If you ever tell, I’ll testify that I watched and that I heard you say ‘yes’.” This was said all faux-friendly-like, at another party where I unexpectedly ran into these boys later that summer.

Everyone who was at the party the night that the boy actually raped me was able to immediately connect a reasonable number of dots as soon as they saw me. I’m a person who often wears my emotions raw and fuck you if that makes you uncomfortable. Through my tears and rage and shame and fear and confusion, I asked my friend Michael to drive me home because he was the only person in the room I felt certain wouldn’t victimize me again in some way (and he didn’t). I still wasn’t thinking of this as a rape. I never said the word ‘rape’ at the party, and I never said it to Michael. But Michael could barely hold himself inside of his skin while he drove me across town. There were offers to console me, to kick my boyfriend’s ass, and even to kill him iffin he needed killin’. I appreciated that, but I didn’t say much.

When I got home, I showered a lot, cried more, and desperately tried to figure out what the fuck I was going to do if I figured out I was pregnant right as I was turning 16. I was personally against abortion at the time (always politically pro-choice). I knew I couldn’t opt for adoption; I couldn’t even give a dog away. I knew I couldn’t have a child, either. I made a concrete plan to blow up my boyfriend’s motorcycle, but remained on the fence about whether I’d do this while he was riding it or whether I was going to let him live. Then I figured maybe I’d kill myself. That was very calming, and I was working out a methodology when I realized I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t be responsible for killing an infant as well and I couldn’t yet know whether or not my boyfriend and my own biology were still in the process of betraying me by creating one. So I just sat and cried because there wasn’t anything else to do.

I was a severely abused child who was still stuck in a severely abusive house. There was no help for me at home, so I couldn’t mention this to anyone in my family. It only would have got my ass kicked.

The next morning I got up, showered some more, got dressed, and walked to school. With each step I took toward the high school, I felt sicker and sicker to my stomach. I was going to have to see him. I was going to have to see all those people from that party the night before, all of whom knew that something very sexually wrong had happened between me and my boyfriend — nobody was actually saying the word ‘rape’ yet — and all of whom, surely, had formulated their own opinions on the matter by now.

Because that is what people do. People have opinions about other people’s private lives and the way we choose to run them. I knew my friends, I knew my peers, I knew my school. I would be believed by some people and not believed by others; I would be considered a victim by some people and a dumb girl who brought it on herself by others; I would be called stupid for drinking, stupid for dating him, stupid for dating him while drinking; I would be called slutty and I would be called easy and they would say I was just like my mother; even the ones who “supported” me would whisper about how my being “way too cocky for a girl” had surely been what led to this; I would be objectified by both the girls and the boys, the believers and the non-believers, and I would hate every fucking second of it.

Enter the girl who would save my ass. I’d only just met her the night before at the football game. Somehow, we knew all the same people but we’d never met. We’d never even heard of each other before. This was impossible. We were both extremely popular at school, varsity athletes, had been for years. Everybody knew who we were, we knew each other’s friends, we’d been to many of the same parties. It was not that big of a school. I maintain to this day that it is logically impossible that we did not know each other before that night, and that perhaps the universes shifted one parallel universe to the left or something and brought us into the same dimension of each other’s lives. Whatever. Enter the girl who would save my ass.

When I passed through the gate of the parking lot at school she was seated atop the hood of her car, waiting for me to arrive.

“You cannot be in school today,” she informed me. “Wanna go to the beach? For one, we really need to talk, and for two, my prom’s tomorrow night and if you’re still planning on going with Frankie then we both need some damn color.”

I was so grateful that I don’t even remember what I said to her. I only remember agreeing and starting to cry again. We got into her car, she drove to my house, I rolled a few joints, we got on 112 and drove wordlessly to Miami Beach. Heavy on my mind were all the things I was afraid of losing, like freedom and school and soccer and my future, and worse, the things I thought I had already lost, like the most valuable thing a woman is told that she has, her sexual purity via her virginity, and thus nearly all of her self-worth and cultural value.

On the beach, we talked for hours. Among so many other things, this young woman told me about how she’d been victimized and raped, and she said the word. “Rape.” Then she said something like this to me:

“I know you feel dirty, and not in the good way. Like something’s been stolen from you and you’ll never be able to get it back. But that’s mostly just about bullshit you’ve been taught to believe that doesn’t relate much to actual fact. I mean, of course, he’s a bastard who raped you. That’s not going to change. He stole trust from you and abused it. That’s for real and he’s an asshole.

“But you’re all fucked up because you think he took something real and something valuable away from you when he took your virginity, and he didn’t. Aside from your cherry, which you probably popped yourself years ago with a tampon or playing soccer like a madwoman, so is totally inconsequential, virginity is mostly just a fiction for men that revolves around that idea they have that all we’re good for is sex, and that they own us and demean us by fucking us. Which is obviously straight up bullshit to anyone with half a brain, but that doesn’t stop so many of them from acting like total pricks.

“So, you know, if you want to kill him, I’d understand that. I might even be persuaded to help you. I’ll damn sure hide you.” She grinned. “But whatever else you choose to do, DO NOT let this asshole ruin your sense of yourself or your enjoyment of sex. Both of those things are way too good to let some cheap horny bastard steal them from you during your sophomore year in high school.

“He did not take your body. It is not his. You still own it. He did not take your pussy. It is not his. You still own it. You can do whatever you want with it. And all these lines of bullshit they’re always selling us about how women are ‘supposed to be’? Don’t buy into it, it’s a trap, and in the end it just helps men rape women. Look, just like you were already being whatever kind of girl you wanted to be, and you were fucking off convention, you can choose to be whatever kind of sexual woman that you want to be, whenever you’re ready for it, and fuck off convention. Own both your own mind and your own pussy and do whatever you want to do with them — that’s the path from where you are to healing and freedom.”

And that wasn’t the only time she saved my ass, either.