LITMIR.BIZ

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age that, as a woman, your sexuality was a dangerous and powerful tool, which had to be used extremely carefully. It must have been complicated, because she and her sisters were, and are, unbelievably gorgeous women with incredible figures. Growing up, they were dirt-poor but were known as the local hotties, and each of them reacted very differently to the power that comes with being unbelievably attractive. And I’m not saying this just because she’s my mom. She’s really a knockout. I have these beautiful pictures of her framed in my kitchen, one taken when she was nineteen and the other when she was twenty-seven. At a far glance it looks like me, but when you get closer you see that she had everything that I don’t: a seventies’ Playboy Bunny look—soft hair, high cheekbones, full lips. She must have really struggled with the complicated power of feeling beautiful and the desire to be desired and the guilt she felt toward anything sexual at all.

      “Anna, you just don’t know your own value,” my mother said after she read my diary. I didn’t get it. I was supposed to be an independent woman, but at the same time I wasn’t supposed to do what I wanted with my body? It didn’t make sense.

      Needless to say, when my mom read about my night with Kyle, she was pissed—and I was, too. I was devastated that she would look at my private journal, and it was clear she didn’t even understand what she had read. I didn’t have sex that night, obviously, and it hurt me that my mom couldn’t tell that I was really quite protective of my body—something I thought she should understand just by knowing me. Let’s be honest, I could have had sex anytime I wanted, because I was a sixteen-year-old girl surrounded by sixteen-year-old boys, and sixteen-year-old boys just want to bone.

      So I did what any teenager angry at her mother would do and threatened to move out. To Stephanie’s house, of course.

      A word about Stephanie: We became friends through drama class. I was a D+ on the social level, but she was a solid B. Not superglamorous but very well-liked; she was in drama, though, and that hurt her A. Where I went to high school, doing drama was sort of social suicide. Stephanie had an International Harvester Scout, an old car that was, once upon a time, an alternative to a Jeep. Hers was white and blue, and we used to drive around Edmonds in that truck listening to New Order and it was awesome. She also had a lot of independence—her parents were kind of hands-off—so I thought it made perfect sense for me to take a break from my parents and move in with her after the diary fiasco. My mother said no (of course she did, she was a rational parent), but at the time I was completely horrified that she wouldn’t support the move in light of her betrayal.

      Nothing else came of that kiss with Kyle. It was fun, and kind of gross, and we never hooked up again.

      But that was okay, because Chad Burke came along soon after that.

      On November 19, 1993, I told my parents I was headed to—surprise!—Stephanie’s house. It was my senior year, and I was about a month into dating Chad. He was friends with some guys who were in a fraternity at UW, so we drove to the campus to crash one of their parties. We were in the frat house, deep into our red Solo cups of jungle juice, and suddenly Chad grabbed my hands, looked into my eyes, and said: “Anna, I want you to lose your virginity to me.”

      “Okay, Chad,” I said solemnly. “Me too.”

      Chad couldn’t say he wanted us to lose our virginity together, because it was going to be his second time. He slept with another girl in our high school before he and I got together (I can’t remember her name, only that she looked like Ani DiFranco), but they were never in a relationship. I found his honesty about this romantic—my standards were always exceedingly high.

      I told Chad I wanted to wait until after I turned seventeen. I don’t know why that age marker was important to me, but my birthday was ten days later, so I figured we wouldn’t have to wait much longer. After that, I told him, I wanted to do it.

      The plan didn’t quite pan out. I turned seventeen on November 29, and a few days later, before Chad and I had the chance to have sex, I started hemorrhaging out of my vagina.

      It started out as what my mom told me was my “first very heavy period.” I had to change my pad every thirty minutes and it seemed more intense than a period, but what did I know? I was only seventeen. As an early Christmas present, Chad took me to see Phantom of the Opera and I had to keep running to the bathroom and begging people for tampons because I’d used up all of mine. Eventually I bled through my dress and Chad took me home. My mom told me to take a bath and we watched as the tub filled up with blood. Later that night we went to the hospital, and I passed out in the waiting room.

      It turned out I was having some crazy hemorrhaging where I lost about 50 percent of my blood in three days. I had a cyst on my right ovary—the particularly gnarly kind that has hair and teeth and is just incredibly gross. So I ended up staying in the hospital for about a week, which is, oddly enough, an incredibly happy memory for me, because I really hated high school.

      The doctor I saw during that ordeal became my gynecologist, and at some point I had the opportunity to tell her that I really wanted to have sex with my boyfriend and that (1) my mom couldn’t know and (2) I could not get pregnant. So she put me on birth control, which she told my mother was to better regulate my cycle.

      By January, I was a new, healthy woman—and a woman on birth control, no less.

      Senior year we were allowed to leave school during lunchtime, and Chad’s parents both worked, so on January 7 I told him I wanted to lose my virginity during lunch. So that’s what we did. And it was horrible.

      No, it wasn’t really horrible. It was a solid C. I certainly didn’t come, but nobody comes their first time. At that point in my life, I had never masturbated. I had never even explored, so I had no help to offer Chad in terms of getting me off. But I wasn’t really in it for the sexual pleasure. I was just head over heels for this guy, and at the time I thought if I was going to keep a man I had to give him my pussy over lunchtime at his parents’ house. In retrospect, his mother must have known. We were totally inconsiderate and never even thought about changing the sheets. Poor Mrs. Burke.

      After we had sex, Chad and I went back to school and I felt the weird illogical pride of having lost my virginity. That afternoon I went to my neighbor Kate’s house—she went to a rival high school and was incredibly hot and popular and was the head of the dance team and had a great laugh and stunning smile and was funny and charming and had lost her virginity long before me—and her mom looked at me and said, “Something looks different about you. You lost your virginity.” I know that sounds like something Amy Poehler said in Mean Girls but she really did say that, and I loved the confirmation that I suddenly seemed more adult.

      Of course, it took me many more years of sex before I felt any confidence or comfort when it came to doing it. If it hadn’t been for my massive insecurity about my body, I probably would have been incredibly promiscuous. I was totally intoxicated with the idea of feeling like a sexual being, and I wanted men to want me. But I was also completely ashamed of my body, especially my boobs (or lack thereof), and insecure about my abilities as a lover. I never felt like the hot girl, even though I so badly wanted to. I felt like I wasn’t good enough, and that I didn’t know what I was doing when it came to sex or going down on a guy. And when I did get intimate, I was so busy thinking about my own performance that I couldn’t appreciate the guy’s, and it’s really hard to have an orgasm when you can’t let that part of your brain go.

      I’ve grown out of that, thank God, but it took me a long time to get there. Today, I love being intimate with a partner, but I have a lot of trouble being intimate with myself. For a while in my late teens, on the other hand, I was just the opposite. Freshman year of college, I went through a crazy masturbation phase. We had this college newspaper with an advice column and one time a reader wrote in and said, “My roommate masturbates all the time, what am I supposed to do about it?” I read it and thought, Oh man, she’s talking about me. To this day, I’m pretty sure I’m right about that, and that the letter was indeed about me. My roommate, Melissa, had a boyfriend who would call our room while she was at work and ask me about masturbating, so I’m convinced she said to him: “Oh God, I’m rooming with this gross girl, Anna, and she gets herself off all the time.”

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