Virginity Stories: The First Time by Linda Rand
“wearing red underwear from Retail Slut, with snaps that came apart very easily”
Virginity Stories," a series within NAILED's “Sex Stories” in which all kinds of people write about losing their virginity. To submit to this column, email Shenyah at shenyah@nailedmagazine.com.
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I was fourteen. I used to think people were abnormally old when they’d confess 18 or 19. Really? Didn’t they hunger for life, ravenous, so aware of all that had been done before, the teeming chorus of wasted lives, the feverish throb of spent potential of all who had come before and now were dust? It only made sense that death was cavorting behind the scenes. I thought my life would span my teens and it was convenient that way. I wouldn’t have much to lose, acting on impulse and cruel instinct, a blazing flame only brilliant enough to scorch a few people on the way, to leave some sort of mark before being extinguished. I’d leave behind my notebooks too, filled with my insistent scrawls, sketches, and pent up anguish.
We loved each other. He was 16. He called me Kitty Kat because of my green eyes made huge with liquid liner in the perfect feline shape, the vintage rhinestone chokers like collars, the sleek leather thigh highs. He was Lion Heart with his crimped mane, buckle boots, black asexual sheaths like Daniel Ash in Bauhaus. The older girls were after him and some guys too. He had a universal appeal, a way of diffusing tension with humor, and an English mother who had imparted some charm to the way he spoke. Despite him being courted by others, he was devoted to me and so sweet I sometimes bristled, feeling my oxygen grow thin, seeing repetitive days ahead of me. I didn’t understand the necessity of stability, that only when upheaval stopped tearing me apart, would I stop confusing death with peace.
Anything I heard about virginity infuriated and also horrified me. The bloody proof seemed humiliating, biblical. I hated that anyone would know I was a virgin. I couldn’t stand being a domestic sacred cow. I had to get rid of it and my boyfriend was the way to do it. We were both painfully thin and a cultivated pale, but even with my ribs and hips jutting, I couldn’t get rid of my c cups, hourglass shape or curvy lips. Siouxsie was my goddess and I tried to line my lips thin and pointy and longed for a boyish shape and bigger nose. Unwanted attention brought out my anger and haughtiness because it was too obvious that no one cared about what was on the inside.
With our friends we drank and smoked whatever we could get our hands on, called it “pimping” when we got older people to buy for us. This time I didn’t want to be with the group. We hung out alone in my bedroom. I had a vintage parlor lamp from the thrift store that cast a beautiful amber glow over everything. I was secretly wearing red underwear from Retail Slut, with snaps that came apart very easily, and we kissed and rubbed and I told him I wanted him and he told me he wanted me, and our bones sheathed in velvety skin rubbed hot against each other and our wet mouths sought deeper and deeper, but then he said he wanted to wait ‘til we were married. The dread of marriage made it so I could never picture such a thing. I couldn’t imagine life without him yet, but I knew there’d be more. There was the world and art…the world of the mind. I had tried to teach him negative numbers, the easiest step towards abstract math I could think of. I drew a number line, coaxed him, but his mother did everything for her only child, including his homework, and he was content as a weekend drummer, had a baby shark in an austere tank with muted colors and no vegetation, was always even-keeled and pleasant. We would never be married, and I showed him my body and begged him, and he made a strangled cry and then was ecstatic, and it felt like burning, like a sunburn, like a soul burn, hardly bad, since I’d already tortured myself in little ways like cutting with razors or making tiny burns on my skin, and then I worried about the blood, and that didn’t seem so bad either, and then it was over and I was free.
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Header image courtesy of Rob MacNeil. To view more of his work, go here.
Linda Rand has been published in the anthologies City of Weird, edited by Gigi Little , recently released by Forest Avenue Press, as well as The People’s Apocalypse, edited by Ariel Gore and Jenny Forrester, with non-fiction journal excerpts in Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness, by Ariel Gore. Her artwork has been included in PDX Magazine and the book Oneira: I Dream the Self, curated by Peggy Nichols of Studio C Gallery in the Santa Fe Arts Colony in L.A.