Chapter 10

Within a week, almost everyone was calling me Vanilla Slut - or just Vanilla when teachers were around. Then a little later, boys started wearing white buttons with custard yellow text that read, “I’ve tasted vanilla!” The stoner boys had had them printed up, and were selling them, but only to boys who had a plausible claim to having slept with me. We found this out when a junior boy approached me and said, “Hey Vanilla, are you busy after class? I was hoping you and me could go somewhere and I could earn my button.”

The fat stoner boy actually had the gall to ask me to verify who I had slept with. He came up to us at lunch with some timid freshman and said, “Hey, Kaitlyn! Can you validate that Vince here is ‘in the club’? Can’t give these to just anyone, you know.” Stacy kicked him in the balls, many times.

All of the boys that I had slept with so far under the influence of vanilla had just been lucky - right place, right time. None of them had taken advantage of me - at least as far they knew at the time. But now I faced the real possibility that someone might deliberately abuse my condition.

Fortunately, my friends were proactive. One time, three boys approached us, one of them holding a cooking extract bottle. “Hey Vanilla,” one called as they approached. “Look what I’ve got! What do you say to a party?” Trace walked right up and punched the guy, square in the chest, so hard that it knocked him on his ass and he couldn’t breath for fifteen seconds. The other guys backed away, and they all left when their friend could walk again.

The most hurtful incident was near the end of the semester. Coach Turney sent me a note asking me to stop by after class, to talk about when I’d be able to rejoin the gymnastics team, or whether there were other duties I’d consider taking on to help out the team. The conversation seemed pretty normal to me, at first. Yes, I was done with physical therapy, but my doctor didn’t want me doing gymnastics yet. Sure, maybe I could be his assistant and travel with the team when when they went on the road. As luck would have it, I had a cold that week, and I was sniffling throughout the whole conversation. Out of nowhere, Coach asked, “That’s quite a cold. So you can’t smell anything right now?” I looked at him with suspicion, and his face betrayed guilt. He glanced at the wall; there was one of those scented oil heaters plugged in to the outlet.

I ran out into the hall and pressed the vanilla emergency button on my phone. I waited for the urge to overtake me, but it didn’t come. Like the Coach had guessed, I couldn’t smell anything. I called my dad, and sent follow-up messages to everyone else.

I didn’t understand it. He had touched me and all the other girls countless times, and it had never been the least bit pervy. Why would he pick now to try to rape me, and what made him think he could get away with it, even if I did fuck him? Maybe I was misinterpreting the situation, I thought; maybe it wasn’t vanilla scented, or maybe he didn’t know about my condition, somehow. But I kept coming back to the look of guilt on his face, and I knew the truth. I felt so betrayed.