5

Sex Ed

We were twelve & diddling autonomy.
Meg's big brother
John, eighteen, was in charge
of keeping an eye
on our pre-teen slumber party
while their folks stayed out late
for Friday date-night.
I'd never met him before,
but one time,
Megan giggled about snooping out
the secret Vaseline stash
& glossy pages of bare tits
sliding around his sock-drawer.

Meg guzzled housewife-vodka,
gulped till her eyes filled
with enough fumes to dissolve
a porcelain throne,
& John let us smoke
from his tin-foil pipe
till we were giddy.
An hour later she passed out
in pre-pubescent residue.

Awkwardly alone, me
& this stupefying highschool senior
forced an appropriate distance
at polar opposite ends
of the family couch
after he popped in a PG-13.
i kept my naive eyes
glued vigilantly
to the distraction of images
illuminating the TV screen,
of My Girl's mood ring being fake-
tossed into the tar pit,
as I struggled to tune-out
his stares, flickering like static
in the dark of my peripheral vision.

My teeth numbed
& the throbbing
in my virgin heart
foreshadowed future infatuations
with snow. Latent particles shifted
in me, faster than Wooly Willy's beard,
as John inched his pole in my direction,
scattering my spot-less magnets.
Each blonde hair on my body
bristled
under his cautious touch, testing
my girlish thigh, closing in,
until I swallowed the spit
of my first desperate tongue.

He remembered to tell me
I was the prettiest
little thing he'd ever seen,
as he rearranged me
into a straddle on his lap,
lifted & pressed me, pawed me
all over
my thermal shirt from JC Penny's
kid's department,
slipped a finger
beneath the hem of Daisy Dukes
my mom forbid me to wear
without opaque tights underneath.
I shivered in my work-boots.

I was too young to know
this didn't mean a thing
about him being my boyfriend,
as he politely asked
to lift my arms & remove my shirt.
I scrunched my nose, whispered no
between heavy breathing
& charming pleas to lure me
into his playboy-postered lair.
I felt myself hovering,
detached from my perplexed body,
& the strange things
suddenly happening to me.

When his folks stumbled in
jingling keys & softly slurring,
he tossed me quick as a cum-rag,
shooing me into the finished basement.
He left me
on the carpeted staircase, dizzied
with questions & childlike
expectations, wondering why
he forgot to kiss me goodbye
or look into my eyes & say,
When can I see you again?
like it always happened
in movies.
Megan stirred & sat up
seeing double as I spilled the dirt.
She laughed
when I asked if he'd call,
if she thought he wanted be with me.
She got savvy young
when her big brother's football buddy scored
her virginity.

Of course he didn't call.
Never spoke to me,
even glanced at me in passing
again. I didn't realize
I was just a kid, and he
was all kinds of pedophile-
guilty.

It wasn't until years later
I discovered the truth
behind my embarrassed dashes to the bathroom
between John's heavy kisses
that adolescent Friday night.
Frantically sopping the unexplained wetness
between my legs, I'd been clueless
about a female's physical reaction
to sexual contact, or her instinctive urges
for the kind of connection
my barely-bleeding body
wasn't ready
to know.

Years after that,
until I understood my skin
isn't a fucking petting zoo.

by Amelie Florence

Amelie grew up on a peninsula
named after cod, of all things. for the past few months
she has been living out of a fairly large duffel bag while
bopping around the country compiling awkward moments,
writing about them, & imbibing copious amounts of pbr,
the blue ribbon of beers. she is currently attempting the
problematic art of not giving a fuck.