Chapter 7

With Deanna ripped from my life, I grew quiet at school. At home I consciously tried to become a dutiful if not perfect daughter for my parents. Washed the dishes without complaint and even studied for the SAT and participated in the chess club. Boys asked me out, lesbian rumors notwithstanding, but it wasn’t until the end of the semester that I ever found it in myself to go out on a serious date.

I suppose you could say this was the time when I took a real dark turn. Stayed quiet and solemn in public, like a girl who was too serious and brooding, like maybe considering a chess move or tough math problem, but inside I really did go dark.

Got into some manga, my favorite being Elfen Lied. Dark. Stuff I could never even share with my sister. I’d spend any extra money on an old torn copy at a used comic shop near school, and of course sit in a corner of the shop and read and watch and imagine for free until some jerk of a boy tried to get to know me. It was better at home, alone, sometimes even in the closet with a flashlight. I smiled and nodded on the outside, but internally it was a dark time.

Met Alice then. I did a report on a book I’d read titled Hollow World and how I was able to connect with the protagonist. My English teacher and most of the class were all stunned and clueless but this cute little white girl, Alice, came up after class and said she felt the same. She came back a week later and pulled me into a corner and gushed over how much she liked the story.

It wasn’t immediate, but over time we started to share things. First time at lunch, then at the comic shop, then a sleepover. It took some time for me to open up to her, to share secrets, but she soon became my next best friend. Didn’t tell her some stuff, like everything about Deanna or me doing the occasional cutting inside my arms or thighs. Maybe I was worried about her freaking out and rejecting me. I did stop the cutting after a while, and I think that was because of Alice.

Maybe. Hard to say. I sensed a connection between us, but I also never tried to do anything intimate with her. Nothing sexual, like I’d opened myself up to with Deanna. Kind of weird. I sort of hated guys and felt close to Alice, but I also had a weird thing for guys. Kind of like with the cutting. I began dating again and let the guys do things with me that I couldn’t imagine doing with Alice, not just then anyway. It was all so contradictory and I couldn’t explain why I did what I did. Elven and goth and loud bass music and the occasional knife to the thigh were enough to hold me onto my place in the world.

With Alice I relaxed a bit, opened my eyes, and my connection with her was redirected into trying to re-try connecting with guys. The pretty stuff Deanna had me wearing over the summer had been thrown out in the fall, but at least Alice got me to stop with the baggy and dark and somber look I was into. No makeup, but I did start wearing some more form-fitting clothing. She gushed over the idea of me dating someone, her ideas of romance and boys being so Disneyesque as to be nauseating. But I tried to break out, tried to be normal, and so tried to date. Went about as well as my most cynical self could expect.

Boys asked, I rolled my eyes, went out, did stuff, got sick of it all, and went back into my shell. Did that a few times, but then an older student asked me out. I liked him, so when he took me to a movie for our second date, he felt up my thigh and I pushed back, telling him I didn’t do stuff like that. There was some arguing over my reputation and rumors and stuff, but he finally pretended to accept my new more conventional self.

I found it all stifling and weird but it also made everything easy. The low expectations of being with the guy seemed to ease the pressure. It was like being able to breathe underwater. I didn’t get much out of the relationship, but it did make life at school easier to deal with. I began allowing him to hold my hand in public, me considering the whole relationship a kind of experiment in how normal girls dated boys.

Dresses weren’t my thing, but he liked them, so I allowed my mother to buy something for our dates even Alice would approve of. Never wore them at school, though. And no heels. A girl’s got to have boundaries. I also didn’t like kissing him, or any guy for that matter, but once a week at the end of a date I’d let him feel up my tits while I gave him oral blessings other girls seemed disgusted by. What can I say? It was all weird, but Alice thought it was romantic.

Outwardly, in the eyes of other students, I was trying to reconstruct my image into that of a normal girl, but of course there rose up another side of me. Apart from my nice boyfriend I somehow got involved with two other guys.

What you might call the normal one was a guy who’d graduated the year before and lived just down the street. He had a girlfriend but had been friendly with me. Bumped into him at a store and we talked. A ride on his motorcycle and an afternoon coffee somehow turned into regular sessions in standard sex.

Over that coffee something in his eyes, maybe the overt sense of lust that exuded from his body, made me ask to see what kind of espresso machine he had at home. Never saw the thing, the young man’s hands pulling me into his bedroom before we ever made it to the kitchen. His confidence and physical desire for me went beyond the standard fuck of most high school boys.

A lot of foreplay, the man lingering over and talking out parts of my body, loving me with his tongue in all the many ways a tongue can be used by a man. Then the fuck, a hard fuck, a standard fuck most girls know all too well. Longer than some, a few minutes of physical violence before his groan of completion. The groan, the feeling of his cock pouring his lust within my loins, and then a few minutes of labored breathing, the man obviously happy at the knowledge that he’d just left liquid evidence of his ownership of me. Standard stuff. My pussy was full of everything a man’s balls could pour into a girl, my lust raging, my physical need screaming out at how unfair it was for a guy to just fuck and cum and walk away from a girl still in need.

He whispered of what a good fuck I was, which I’d heard before, but instead of rolling off the bed and walking away with one of my pussy hairs on a trophy chain, he made love to me with his mouth and fingers and all the rest of his body. Even with my twat still oozing his manly goodness, I felt his lips and tongue and teeth latch onto my clit and bring me to my desired end, and all without him every shoving his crotch into my face with a demand for me to suck him off. That unselfish gesture alone made him special.

Then he rose above my prone body, kneeling above me, his cock rising up from his crotch, long and hard and throbbing with need, and he told me of how beautiful I was and how much he wanted me. My memory retains that vision of the guy’s cock, long and curving up toward his belly, the fat rounded hood oozing liquid evidence of his lust for me. All that after he had already creamed my twat.

I responded by widening my knees. With a pinch of my nipples and bite to my neck, he rolled me over and fucked me for another half hour like a wolf humping a bitch in heat. He seriously nailed me to his bed and we made so much noise I don’t know how the neighbors didn’t call the police. The man knew how to fuck and suck and bite and diddle a clit well enough for me to wet his bed twice over. Then he made me a simple one-egg spinach omelette and we talked for a while.

Once or twice a week I’d walk by his place and never make it back home until nightfall. Just sex, like getting naked and rolling around together until we got off on and inside of and with each other. Good sex, standard sex, secret sex, and nobody needed to know. Like his girlfriend or anybody at all in my life. This filled a gap in my life and yet allowed me to keep up the pretense of having a nice normal boyfriend on the outside. So weird, and I knew it was kind of wrong, like I was cheating on my nice boyfriend, but it also seemed so necessary.

Alice never found about this secret lover until much later. She couldn’t understand why the relationship didn’t become lifelong and permanent. The thought, really the fantasy, of this secret sexual liaison becoming the heart and soul of my life had passed before my eyes, but I knew it could never be. It was perfect as it was, good for the both of us just as we were living it out on his bed and couch, and nothing more. Good basic sex, my twat filled with cock and cum like a weekly dose of vitamins, and then on to the real and boring world Alice and my parents lived in. Did my best to give off the public impression that my one nice public boyfriend was enough for any girl. And of course I never told anybody about the dark knight, the much older man who saw all the darkness in my soul.

The dark knight. No, not the secret lover from down the street. The name ‘dark knight’ was fitting in more ways than one. Not a student and much older. Met him just outside the comic shop. He’d bought a DVD of some anime and I made the mistake of saying something. We talked for all of thirty seconds when he asked if I’d like to go home with him and see his black light posters.

“What?” said clueless me. “How can there be a black light to see posters?”