I lost it at fifteen. To say it was a rough patch in my young life would be understating things: It was like being dragged over a bed of nails in a nylon body stocking. Why didn’t it come out earlier? At first it was because I didn’t want to blow things with my new boyfriend at the time—Brett—who just assumed that I was a virgin, too, and that we would lose our virginity together. For that reason I said nothing about my first and certainly only meaningless sexual encounter, which happened in the basement of Doug’s house, drunk. It was our first time drinking, too, a silly experiment with Jim Beam that got way out of control. (It was as horrible as you might imagine, and worse—contrary to his confident assertions, his mom was upstairs folding laundry nearly the whole three and a half minutes.) I said nothing to Brett through high school and college because I feared the news would poison our blossoming relationship, even as I comforted myself with the rationalization that it wasn’t a big deal.
