One afternoon after a few weeks of this, Maya caught me by the wrist and pulled me into the choir room music closet. She was the instrument monitor for the orchestra—she played violin and always had this mark on her neck from it that boys would tease her about, like it was a hickey—so she had keys. She pushed me up against the inside of the door and told me that she’d seen the way I was always staring at her and she was into it. Then she kissed me and grabbed my dick through my jeans.
A few hours before, I’d gotten hard sitting behind Jake, the new kid in my English class who transferred from somewhere in California. He had longish dark blond hair and blue eyes so light they were almost silver. He’d turned around to ask if he could share my book, and those eyes had made my stomach tremble. When I nodded my assent and he leaned closer, the smell of him—something blue and fresh, oceanic—got me hard in five seconds flat, and I’d been on edge ever since.
When Maya grabbed me, I think she felt the effects of Jake, because she grinned that devious grin and started stripping off both of our clothes. She was pretty tall and I hadn’t grown my last few inches yet, so we managed to do it standing up, against the door. At one point I knocked into some triangles that were on a hook against the wall and the sound of tinny percussion nearly gave me a heart attack. The whole thing was incredibly awkward. It felt good the way getting enough sleep feels good, or eating a burger when you’re really, really hungry—the fulfillment of a physical need that doesn’t touch anything deeper—but the second it was over, I felt a rush of hot shame so intense I squatted down on the floor of the music closet, the smell of all those dusty instrument cases and resin making me feel sick. When Maya asked if I was okay, I said I dropped my lighter and pulled my pants up quickly.
That night I dreamt of a smothering blackness that wrapped around me like a midnight ocean, seeping into every pore and plugging up my nostrils, my mouth, my eyes, until it consumed me.
I never went back to the library during sixth period. I ignored Maya when she tried to talk to me, cutting her as hard as I’d cut all those other girls. I wandered the halls like a poltergeist, invisible in my misery until someone set me off, then the very picture of fury.
About two months later, I got home to find Maya and a man who must’ve been her father at the kitchen table with Pop. Maya was crying and wouldn’t meet my eyes, and her father looked at me like I was a turd he’d just stepped in. She was pregnant, and like a scene from one of those awful books we read in English class where the girl is going to be cast out of society unless she can find someone to make an honest woman of her, Maya’s father was there to demand that I do the right thing: marry Maya and help her raise the baby.
Pop agreed. And in that moment, I looked at the life ahead of me and saw only the smothering blackness from my dream rushing to drown me.
I don’t remember a lot of what happened in the month that followed. Pop tried to talk to me, and I think I nodded but never heard anything he said. At school, the voices blended together into a kind of aural static that set my nerves on buzzing edge and gave me a near-constant stomachache. I felt the way I imagined people feel in a war zone: aware that every step could trigger the explosion or signal the shot that would end them but too exhausted by that reality to watch where they walked.
At football practice I ran until I puked and set blocks I knew would get me steamrolled. At home, I put so much hot sauce on my food that my lips burned for hours after dinner. I turned the shower painfully hot and cut myself when shaving.
Maya lost the baby. I felt such a wash of relief when she called to tell me that I had to sit down, my legs unsteady and my feet numb. For a few days, I felt alive again, like the sword that had been hanging over my head had finally disappeared. But the relief quickly faded back to neutrality again, and I found that my panic over Maya and the baby had only temporarily overshadowed the other thing. The bigger, scarier, more permanent thing. The thing that had made me go along with Maya’s seduction in the first place. Now that I wasn’t going to be married with a baby to take care of, the problem that was me returned with a vengeance.