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You.
You looked like Doogie Howser and you were the reason I stopped begging Mama to let me stay home from church. Mama needed me there as proof that she was a godly woman now. I wanted to go because you were there.
You were there because your daddy was a deacon. Always wary of Mama, he remembered what she claimed those teachers did to her back when they were school children together—held her down in the math room after school and took their turns with her. She crawled home with bruises and bloody underwear. One lying, 13-year-old daughter of a millworker is easier to rebuke than three affluent rapists, so that's how justice was decided. Mama was sent away to a girls' school. By the time she moved back home 30 years later, she had lost custody of two children, married three times, and had me.
Your daddy never left home. He married a local girl who remembered my mama, too. They owned a pawn shop, so you always had the coolest toys: video games, stereos, the acid-washed jean jacket, and eventually, a Shelby GT. I wondered if you had a computer, too and imagined you using it to write a journal. Your toys gave you stories; stories about nights out with your boys and nights in with your girls. I could stare at you for days and listen to you tell them. I did stare at you, and you saw me. Later, you'd use it as your defense. You said you didn't even like me, because I stared. You said that was weird.
But before then, you'd use my stares as your invitation. You told me to meet you in the church basement. Hidden away in an abandoned Sunday school room, you stationed me at the door and told me to watch for people. But there were no other people, except for that one time that Paul—slight and effeminate Paul—came downstairs. He quickly left when he saw me peeking at him from around a door frame. You whispered right into my ear, so close that the wind of your breath gave me goosebumps. Paul is a fag.
Your fingers were already sliding around inside my white cotton panties, and my knees could not be trusted. If your arms weren't holding me up, I would have been on the ground.
For months, we met in the forgotten, dark rooms under the church and though it was always the same, I never grew bored. It happened once on the church bus, too. That was the only time you asked me to touch yours in return. I did, as best I could, through your zippered jeans. Later that night you told me you didn't know why you bothered; I was no good.
But you changed your mind. Spring came, and the youth group went camping at Kerr Scott Dam. I sat beside you in the dark while you fished, and you decided to give me another chance. You reached into the plastic cup of fat, juicy nightcrawlers and baited your hook. You cast with both hands, then invited me to sit between your legs. I held your fishing pole while your dirty fingers penetrated me right out there on the grassy bank, night time our only cover. You nipped on my ear and blew in my hair and I came. I came so hard I thought I peed on your hand and that you would be disgusted with me.
Maybe you never noticed, because once everybody else was asleep, you came to get me from my tent and took me for a walk in the woods. I don't know how far or which direction we were from camp, but you found a clearing and you laid down that acid-washed jean jacket on the ground. Did you tell me what to do? Did I just know? I could not spread my legs very far because my pajama pants were still bunched around my ankles. And I don't even know if you ever made it inside of me. You lay on top, but there was no tingling, hot madness between my legs like there had been. Eventually you got up, zipped your pants, and told me to get off your jacket. You didn't speak to me again.
When I realized that you never would, I wrote about us in my journal. I didn't have a computer, just a notebook with a useless lock. I did not mention your dirty fingers or all the times you stuck them inside of me. I wrote nothing of your fishing pole or your jacket or the thrill I didn't feel. Jeff and I went all the way. You would not talk to me and I needed tangible proof of us. Seeing it in black and white did that for me. But writing it down did other things, too. There is power in the written word, and power in the wrong hands is devastating.
I didn't know why Mama spent all day cleaning the house, but when she was finished, she told me to get dressed up. Wear church clothes. When I came out of my room, the preacher and your mama and daddy were standing in my living room, looking serious. I was sent to the basement, where I tried to eavesdrop from a heating vent. The bass of the preacher's voice carried, but I couldn't understand the words. I went to the upright piano and played over and over the only song I knew by heart. In my low, untrained alto, I sang along. It's me, it's me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer. Not my brother or my sister, but it's me oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.
And lo, the Lord did not hear me.
When our company left and I was allowed back into my own living room, my mother told me how badly I embarrassed her. Your mama had laughed at my mama's face. Like mother, like daughter. Their 17-year-old son could not have done that thing to me, her 13-year-old daughter. You were revolted by me because I stared at you.
My mama started those rumors about you, but Goddammit, they were about me, too. We had sex, but I wasn't your victim. I was Mama's, and now I think maybe you were, too.
I don't know why my mama stayed a member of that hellfire and damnation Baptist church after she told my secret, but she never dragged me back, and I didn't ask to go. You were wrong about Paul, though. He is not a fag. I saw him again when he showed up at my mama's funeral. He volunteered when we needed another pallbearer. Did you know that preacher buried my mama and daddy right up there in that same church cemetery where he buried your daddy, overlooking the Deep Gap of our childhood?
A couple of years after I gave you my virginity—and that's what happened, you didn't take it—my mama told me that your daddy had been arrested. I didn't know what fencing was, but it delighted me that your flesh-and-blood didn't get away with something. And a few years after that, she showed me the newspaper article about you and your three buddies going to the Gulf to fight in Bush's war. I told her that I hoped you died there. She then told me what we both knew to be true—I am not a good Christian.
That was almost 30 years ago, and you've been on my mind. Long after your face and your name were gone, I still looked for you in every boy I ever dated, hoping not to find you. And I became you every single time I fucked without love.
I wrote about us in my journal. I didn't have a computer, just a notebook with a useless lock. I did not mention your dirty fingers or all the times you stuck them inside of me. I wrote nothing of your fishing pole or your jacket or the thrill I didn't feel. Jeff and I went all the way. You would not talk to me and I needed tangible proof of us. Seeing it in black and white did that for me. But writing it down did other things, too. There is power in the written word, and power in the wrong hands is devastating.
But then there was love, and all of its accouterments: marriage, children, divorce. But always more love, and no brimstone. When my own daughters approached the age I was when you happened to me, I hovered closer and taught them to love themselves first. I taught my son, too. And then I taught my children that who a person sleeps with does not define them or their worth, but that how they treat people does.
I would have gladly gone another 30 years and not thought about your stupid denim jacket or your Shelby GT, but there was a Neil Patrick Harris sighting in my friend Shawn's building this morning. The elevator opened, and Doogie Howser, looking impossibly the same but wearing a suit, smiled and said hello.
I wanted every detail of their meeting, but Shawn told me that he just stared. He couldn't think of a better thing in the world than just to gaze at his boyhood crush as they descended 27 floors together. I was 13 again, and nodding in understanding.
You wouldn't have liked Shawn very much. He's the kind of boy you would whisper ugly things about. It thrills me to think that Shawn wouldn't have liked you, either. If I'd known people like Shawn—if people like Shawn didn't have to hide who they were back in 1988—people like you would have seemed so very boring and not worth my stares. And when you called Paul that word, I would have known it meant something was wrong with you, not him.
I looked you up. I see you've done time for your role in a methamphetamine ring. Tell me, what did your cellmate whisper in your ear on those lonely, penal nights? You've also got a couple of divorces behind you. Working at a local BBQ shack, you are staring 50 in the face, and I bet you don't even have a 401k. Not that it's any measure of a man, but I do hope it stresses you out. I once wished you dead. But this life? This is better.
If I was a betting girl, I'd wager that it won't be long until you're doing hard time for something that isn't going to surprise anybody. There were rumors swirling about you when you were just a boy. The rumors were true. I was there.
But even after all this time, I need you to know it wasn't me. Except for my journal, I never told a soul. It was my mama. She told the choir, and her sisters, and after that? It's hard to say who else she told or who they did. Mama knew better than anybody how a name gets ruined.
My mama started those rumors about you, but Goddammit, they were about me, too. We had sex, but I wasn't your victim. I was Mama's, and now I think maybe you were, too.
Your mama was wrong. I'm not like mine at all. I don't need to return to that holler and prove my worth to people who won't believe it anyway. Every time I pass through, something else has stopped looking like it used to. Pastoral lands are now littered with collapsed barns. Ugly, new mansions block the wide, sweeping vistas of the Blue Ridge Parkway that used to hold the promise of something more, something beyond this little gossip-town. Once the new highway cut through, I couldn't even find my way home again. These days I don't know if I hate Deep Gap because nothing ever changes or because everything already did.
But you? It's been 30 years and except for the expected gravitational pull, you haven't changed very much at all. Now I see I was so wrong back then. You never looked like Doogie Howser.