Two nights before the end of Christmas break, I ran into Bonnie McCorkle, my high school girlfriend, at the Black Cat. We bought each other beers, played a clumsy game of darts, and somewhere into her third beer, Bonnie got weepy. College was a bummer, she said. It was senior year, and she had yet to find her people. The only Christians there were nice, she told me, but Korean and Filipino, and mostly majoring in STEM subjects. That surprised me. If you subscribed to Bonnie\u2019s brand of Christianity, it seemed like you should pick a different major. But it was hard to imagine what, exactly. I could understand why college might be challenging for Bonnie, in a way that high school wasn\u2019t. She\u2019d cheered and sang in chorus and been in student government. Her piety hadn\u2019t been a problem then, not a social problem anyway, not a problem for anyone besides me.<\/p>\n
Because of Bonnie, I hadn\u2019t had sex until I got to college.<\/p>\n
It felt awkward and vindicating both, to see Bonnie McCorkle wipe away tears and wax nostalgic about us. She hadn\u2019t met anyone she connected with, she said, and over the next hour, that \u201canyone\u201d got more pointed and male-specific. I gathered her virginity, such a fetishized thing when I had known her, something proudly and literally brandished (she\u2019d worn one of those obnoxious saving herself rings) had now become how so many others, including myself, had regarded our virginity: cumbersome, something to divest.<\/p>\n
So I went home with Bonnie. Over winter break, she was staying at the in-law apartment over her parents\u2019 garage. Which of course was more private, but there was a part of me that regretted not having sex with her on that princess bed of hers, painted sky blue, in her childhood room, now converted to a sewing and Pilates room. That bed had been the site of so much teenage angst.<\/p>\n
Afterwards, I took off. I didn\u2019t want to cuddle, to pretend something significant had taken place.<\/p>\n
In the morning Bonnie texted me. \u201cThat was so fun seeing you Danny! J Can we hang out today?\u201d I texted back: \u201cSrry busy.\u201d Of course I could have said something else, something that was even true\u2014it was my last day home, I had promised my mother I\u2019d go shopping with her for an eight-foot ladder. I could have been kinder, I mean, but I chose not to be.<\/p>\n
Initially, that felt good. I\u2019d achieved what I hadn\u2019t gotten to experience last night, once diverted to the garage apartment\u2014setting the past right, correcting a power imbalance that had been frustrating, though tolerable, at the time, but had rankled afterwards, a bottled sauce gone sour.<\/p>\n
But in short order, I started feeling shitty. Bonnie\u2019s text kind of broke my heart\u2014that chipper smiley face, that careful adjective \u201cfun.\u201d I could picture Bonnie taking her time composing it, shooting for a jaunty, cavalier tone. Shooting for and missing it, like the prior night\u2019s wayward game of darts.<\/p>\n
When I got my wisdom teeth out senior year, Bonnie had made me toffee pudding from scratch, some complicated Joy of Cooking<\/em> recipe. She sat on my bed and spoon-fed me. I would never let my current girlfriend Emma see me looking like that, my face all fucked up, my cheeks swollen and bruised.<\/p>\n I\u2019d met Emma in my Modern Art class. She had money and knew a lot of things I was trying to catch up on, not just about art but alternative music, Middle Eastern cuisine, French New Wave, backpacking through Europe. Being with her involved a different kind of pressure.<\/p>\n I felt sad, suddenly, not for Bonnie McCorkle but for myself, the seventeen-year-old me who had loved her, maybe with questionable judgment. It seemed to me that I\u2019d been more ridiculous then, but also a better person; that aging was not, as I\u2019d anticipated, a steady climb to prettier views; and that I\u2019d betrayed not Bonnie McCorkle or even Emma, so much as my own formerly resilient self.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Her virginity, such a fetishized thing when I had known her, something proudly and literally brandished had now become how so many others, including myself, had regarded our virginity: cumbersome, something to divest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2976],"class_list":["post-18206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-kimmagowan","writer-kim-magowan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18206"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18983,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18206\/revisions\/18983"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}