a bad situtation

Back when we were at the vulnerable age of merging into sexuality but still not sure about Santa, my first kiss with Paul proved not all it’s cracked up to be. He had older brothers, and while not the incessant peer pressure I had from a gaggle of girlfriends, okay, really just one, but my one girlfriend had six older sisters, so a wealth of information not available to me, the oldest girl with no one to emulate.

When Jilly asked me what I thought about French kissing, long before the Phantom Tollbooth, I hadn’t a clue what that even was. “It’s when the boy puts his tongue in your mouth” – and ewwwww -- I aptly swore then and there, I’d never do that.

Apparently, Paul didn’t have the same reaction, and I was poorly baptized at that dreadful movie.

But it got better.

Much better.

I made out with Stephen the first time during intermission of a boys basketball game. We snuck outside the gym, walked around back to the field behind the school, then layed down and looking up at the stars, it happened. Like in the movies. For real.

Now that boy could kiss -- a good counterbalance to the oral invasion at the theater a year earlier. I was in 9^th grade, and years later, I discovered many, many girls had a kiss or ten with Stephen, some out behind the gym under the starry skies, some elsewhere in our tiny town.

At sleepover parties, in the cafeteria, and in tiny notes folded and passed through study hall, the verdict was in: we all agreed he was truly a phenomenal kisser.

Low and behold, many decades later, an additional consensus: a date raper.

This was loooonnnnng, long before date rape was actually a term, and consent didn’t exist. You were just a stupid girl who changed her mind and got herself into a bad situation.

It was a year or so after the basketball game, when finally somewhat oozing into the peripheral, sort of, kind of, with the popular kids, I was invited to a cool kid party at a vacant camp near his house.

When I arrived, there was no party, just me and him, and I ain’t gonna lie: I was both a little nervous and abundantly flattered and excited.

And when making out turned too much, too soon, I opted out – he was one of my very good friends and all – but quickly discovered opting out wasn’t an option. I was immediately in fear of something, but didn’t know exactly what, like smelling snow in the winter sky not yet hitting the ground. All the warning signs were there: a vast pit in my stomach, sweat in my pits, goosebumps up my arms, and any spit completely evaporated from my mouth.

This was trouble. My body knew what my brain did not.

Date rape wasn’t a thing back then. Either was consent.

A great negotiator, even at 15, I managed to sexually tap dance my way out of a bad situation, feeding his ego, berating and humiliating mine, and left more or less unscathed, but not undamaged.

Decades later, at a funeral in my hometown and seeing long-ago friends from way back when, it wasn’t surprising his name came up. Older and wiser and far bolder, I didn’t hesitate: “He almost raped me once, back in school. But I got out of it.”

“Me too,” said not one, or two, of the now grown ass women, but several.

Then, surprisingly, someone’s younger sister chimed in: “His brother tried with me.” The one her age; she didn’t even hesitate to share.

She said it so nonchalantly. Small talk, like do you still live in Connecticut? Or, how ‘bout those Yankees? As if we were checking in on remember whens and not bearing witness to the fractured scales of justice.

It was apparently a family affair, this ownership over bodies not theirs.

So the me too discovered ad hoc is something that likely makes Paul from The Phantom Tollbooth a far better man now, and definitely a far better boy then, and a caring, kind human forever and ever, than the good kisser ever was, or ever will be.

*

The grown-up me, the mom-me, often has empathy for those boys, and boys like them. Now.

Not then.

Then, only disgust, rage, and fear.

When I was a young mom, and bitching about one horrible, rude, manipulative little gremlin in playgroup after she left, one of the dads was offended and let me know. I remember it every day since:

I’ve thought about this a lot, as an adult, especially regarding these boys and the parents who raised them in a home that condoned and likely encouraged such abhorrent, dangerous behavior.

I can’t help but feel empathy for what could have been, for both the little boys they once were, before they grew to monsters, and for the girls on the receiving end of such neglect and abuse.