#east!

I was pretty sure I had already broken my hymen in high school, crawling over a fence in Brooklyn in hot pursuit of a cat that clearly didn’t want to be rescued. So the event would only be psychologically painful.

I met Jonah* in the cafeteria. He was roommates with an emo kid who worked at the video store and had a crush on my best friend, Audrey. Jonah didn’t have a very specific style beyond dressing vaguely like a middle-aged lesbian. He was small but strong, with floppy hair and warm eyes. He reminded me a little bit of that Air Force kid, who had rejected me in a saga too long to recount here. Something primal kicked in, like an Alfred Hitchcock character hell-bent on replacing his dead wife with a lookalike, and I resolved to make him mine.

The best way was obviously to throw a wine-and-cheese party, which I did, in my 8×10-foot room on the quiet floor of East Hall. Procuring wine entailed a sub-zero bike ride, so it ended up being beer and cheese and a big box of Carr’s assorted party crackers. Jonah was “casually” invited in a group email that made me sound a lot more relaxed than I actually was. And he came, and he stayed, even after the entire gang had packed up and gone. We talked, at first animatedly and then in the nervous generalizations that substitute for kissing when everyone is too shy. Finally, I told him that my dad painted huge pictures of penises for a job. When he asked if we could see them online, I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and just went for it. I removed my shirt almost immediately, and he seemed fairly impressed. Wearing just a too-tight slip-skirt from the local Goodwill, I hopped up to get the condom from the “freshman survival pack” we had been given (even though I was a sophomore).

Meanwhile, across campus, Audrey was in a private hell of her own. She had been waging a cold war with her roommate all semester: the busty, ren-faire loving Philadelphian was the lust object of every LARPer and black-metal aficionado on campus. Audrey just wanted some quiet time to read political texts and iChat with her boyfriend in Virginia. Audrey’s roommate was now dating a kid who had tried to bake meth in the dorm kitchen, warranting an emergency visit from men in what looked to be space suits. Before going out for the night, Audrey had left her roommate a note: “If you could please have quieter sex as we approach our midterms, I’d really appreciate it.” Her roommate’s response was to burn Audrey’s note, scatter the ashes across the bed and floor, and leave her own note: “U R a frigid bitch. Get the sand out of UR vagina.”

Justifiably distressed, Audrey headed back to my room hopeful for a sleepover. She was sobbing, and disoriented, and also pretty sure I was alone finishing the cheese, so she flung my door open without knocking. There she found Jonah on top of me doing what grownups do. She understood the magnitude of the occasion and through her tears shouted, “Mazel tov!”

I didn’t tell him I was a virgin, just that I hadn’t done it “that much.” It hurt a little more than I’d expected but in a different way, and he was nervous too and he never came. Afterwards we lay there and talked, and I could tell he was a really nice person. I commended myself for making a healthy, albeit hasty, partner choice. I really couldn’t wait to tell my mom.

Jonah wanted to date, and I figured out pretty quickly that I did not. I went over to his dorm and broke up with him in the laundry room, sitting on top of a running washer. He seemed genuinely hurt and perplexed, and I told him I’d been a virgin because I thought it made me seem like less of a she-devil. Later that year, Audrey saw him in the student post office picking up a package with a pair of used Merrills to replace his really used Tevas, and we laughed about it like mean girls.

Jonah and I only had sex once, but it was enough to convince me that it wasn’t that hard to make it happen. I had, for the past few years, set my sights quite purposefully on boys who weren’t interested, because I simply wasn’t ready (despite all the movies about wayward prep-school girls I liked to watch). I had been waiting because I wanted to, and then suddenly I was ready for the change in identity I was sure would come with no longer being a virgin. But afterwards I still felt very much like myself. Although it’s amazing how permanent virginity feels, and then how suddenly inconsequential. I barely remembered the sensation, the embarrassment, and the urgency. I passed the riot grrrl arm-in-arm with her boyfriend senior year and we didn’t even exchange a nod of understanding.

Later, I wrote that virginity-loss scene almost word for word in my first feature film, Creative Nonfiction, minus the part where Audrey busted the door down. When I performed that sex scene, my first, I felt more changed than I had by the actual experience of having sex with Jonah. Like, that was just sex, but this was my work.