When I was 16, my 21-year-old boyfriend bought me booze and bucked on me in the front seat of his Bronco. There, in the kicked-back passenger seat, where windshield dirt obscured my view, I went along for the ride. Later, I scratched at dried spots flaking from my high school volleyball jacket, trying to remember if I’d worn it while eating a glazed doughnut. It would be years before I realized I’d been wearing a cum-spattered jacket in my first-period class, on the game bus, in front of my mother. There were a lot of things I didn’t know back then.
I had a crush on him long before we dated. Once, a group of us piled into someone’s car. The radio played UB40’s “Red Red Wine” so loud we could barely hear one another talking, and I watched him from the back seat thinking, I bet you could make me feel so fine, though at the time I didn’t know what that meant. While we cruised Main, everyone showed their scars. They rolled up pant legs, regaling us with the time they crashed their bike, or swung an elbow around, describing the play where someone took a cleat in the arm. I have an abdominal scar from the time a man cut me open to fix what’s inside me. It sits below my waist, like a smile or, from my perspective, a frown. Turning to look back at me for the first time, he asked if he could see it. Not today, I told him, maybe later. When later came, he didn’t seem to notice how it slices across me, staple marks puckering along the line of it.
While we were dating, I played in a coed softball tournament with him and his friends. I’m sure he didn’t expect me to be a contributing player. I think he asked me to join only because they were short one girl to fill out the roster. He was surprised and delighted when I turned two to close out a tough inning. I was proud, but didn’t he know I’d been playing second base since long before he got there with me? He must have known. It was a small town. No one had anything to do but hang around the softball field on steamy summer nights. With the bat crack, electric zing in my veins, I was in motion: pivot and crossover, snag that grounder off a bounce, three steps to the bag, pop ball leather-to-palm, spin and fire away to first. At the time, I focused on that flashing moment of pride. Now, I’m stuck on the fact that he was surprised to see I was capable.
When we were together, he drove. I remember once The Proclaimers strummed through the speakers while we sped down the highway. I would walk 500 miles. I stretched my arm across the front seat, reaching out to hold his hand. Not feeling brave enough to sing, I silently bobbed my head. He sang aloud, and I failed to realize he definitely would not walk any number of miles for me. He lifted my finger to his mouth and bit my acrylic nail. The one part of me he actually tried to take in wasn’t even real.
My first time, not just with him but ever, my parents were away and he parked his vehicle in their garage so no one would know. I lay on my back thinking, Is this it? Am I having sex? I concentrated on the pressure between my legs. Still, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like, and to be honest it felt mostly like confusion.
I heard he told his friends I lay there like a log. And I can’t refute that. I have no idea what my body did or rather did not do. I only know I wanted to feel close to him, and I did not.
During the months we were together, I never told him, and he never guessed, how sometimes I was afraid I might be pregnant with his baby, a potential someone I never imagined clearly, though I’m sure their onesie would have smelled of cigarette smoke and Busch Light beer.
At the time, I thought I was rebelling with him, like when the principal made a group of us girls take that extra anti-drug class for having alcohol on the pep club bus and we dashed out of school after the last regular bell to circle town and smoke a quick Marlboro Light or Virginia Slim before heading back to serve our time. Hanging out with this guy felt like flipping the bird to the rules and their makers. But the truth is, all I did was fit the mold.
It was a cool, festive evening when I heard my boyfriend had been with a girl who had an STD. We were all at a Quonset party, the big doors rolled wide open, people mingling inside, others spilling out into the night. Our mutual friends must have drawn straws or played rock-paper-scissors to decide who would tell me. I’ve never forgotten the way it feels when time stops inside your body while music blares through crackling speakers and the rest of the world dances to Hal Ketchum singing “Small Town Saturday Night.” In many ways, it was just another Saturday night. I sat in my car, watching them laugh and clink aluminum cans, wondering if he would tell me himself. He never did.
I didn’t know the details, only that chlamydia was one of many words used in my limited sex education to scare me. Though the house was quiet and I was alone, I felt ashamed and feared being overheard when I made that call to the clinic. Hesitating, I stood in the kitchen next to the phone, where the spiral cord hung, dangling, not quite touching the floor.
I didn’t think to wonder back then, when he told people I lay there like a log, if he was protecting himself from what I might say. That he didn’t even turn me on? It took years, but when I lived enough life to look back through the eyes of a new me, I finally knew to shed my shame and blame him. I’m through wishing I knew what to do or how to be better.
There was another boy back then. He was not the kind of boy you think about rebelling with. He held my hand and kissed me shyly. This boy didn’t dare me to shotgun beers or drink too much peach schnapps. He didn’t coax me into the back seat or pin me down with his body weight. He reminded me at 12:14—what he called Jen o’clock—that it was time to head home so I wouldn’t miss my 12:30 curfew. He didn’t work hard at being cool. He turned in his homework on time and earned a nearly perfect score on the ACT. He taught me the correct spelling of separate, an act I caused us to perform repeatedly, until eventually he moved on for good. Only now do I realize that dating him, too, could have been a form of rebellion. Back then, I didn’t know enough to realize the rules he broke were the ones I should get excited about.
Instead, my friends and I would wait outside the liquor store for my older boyfriend. I would slip him our collected dollar bills, warm from our pockets, folded into a small, tight bundle—compressed, the way my chest felt when I saw him across the parking lot, laughing at something I hadn’t heard; small, the way I felt when he left with others his own age, when he stopped at a stop sign or in the middle of Main and set a case of Busch Light in the nearly deserted street and drove away. Trailing behind, my friends and I would slow our car to a crawl, crack the door, and grab the case. In a celebratory moment, someone would tear it open and pass drinks around while I watched his taillights pulling away, turning down a dim side street or heading out of town. He might circle back later. He might pick me up in the late hours of the night and drive out to some minimum-maintenance road. I might try and fail to see out the window to what lay beyond. I wouldn’t admit it back then, but all this, it left a bad taste in my mouth. And what did I do? I washed it down with lukewarm beer and tossed the can in the footwell to clink against the accumulated empties.

Jen Ippensen Jen Ippensen lives and writes Nebraska. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. You can find her at jenippensen.com or on Twitter @jippensen