By Melissa Petro

When I sit down to write, I sometimes imagine that I’m writing about someone else, a character named “Melissa.” The older the material, the easier it is to imagine that this person is not me. Maybe this person, this younger version of myself, was never me. Maybe she is someone else, someone who still exists somewhere, or someone who never existed at all. Maybe this is all a work of fiction.

I am fourteen again. I like the taste of what tastes like the mouth of an older man. Cigarettes and metal and Listerine. Just that afternoon Charlie had gotten his tongue pierced. He wasn’t supposed to be making out but we do anyway, in his car in the parking lot. It feels sexy and exciting to be liked by an older boy. He must really like me, I remember thinking, to be using his new tongue ring before it’s properly healed. It’s just like I’d always fantasized. He puts his hand up my shirt and fondles my breast. My nipple responds. He says, “We can’t do this here.”

We hadn’t gone to the movies. I guess neither of us had wanted to. Instead we just drove around. We drove around until we ended up in the Glens. Charlie puts the car in park and tells me to get out. We start walking towards the woods. In the trees we start kissing again, this time harder, insistent. He pulls off my shirt and pushes up my bra, exposing my breasts. My bare back pushes up against rough bark of a tree. It is all moving too fast. I push him firmly on the chest and he steps back, twigs snapping beneath his sneakers.

“What’s wrong?” his voice cracks.

“Nothing.”

“You scared?”

“A little.”

“Don’t be scared,” he whispers. “I want to go down on you. Do you know what that means?”

I nod yeah.

He takes my hands and gently lays me down in the dirt. For a second, he is gone. Then, I feel him kissing me through my cotton underwear. His mouth feels warm, humid. “Charlie,” I say. “You can’t.” He stops.

“I have my period,” I say.

“You’re lying,” he says softly. “Relax.”

I lean back as he starts again. I look up into the canopy formed by the trees above me. The atmosphere is heavy, electric. I look down at my stomach, white-blue, and the top of Charlie’s head. The sky behind him brightens with a flash of lightening. “It’s going to rain!” I squeal.

“That’s only heat lightning,” Charlie says. “Relax.” He tugs off my underwear. The cool night air tickles. Then, everything feels hot again, and wet.

It starts to rain as we walk back to the car. Fat raindrops pock the dusty gravel. The parking lot is still empty, except for Charlie’s car. We hold hands as he drives me home. It storms all night that night. Lying in my bed, I listen to the rain.
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After our first date, Charlie started picking me up in the afternoons and bringing me back to his house. While his grandparents were away, most likely at work, Charlie and I would make out on the couch. I’d get naked and we’d kiss. Sometimes I’d touch him through his clothes. When I did, he felt enormous, engorged and insistent and I’d become terribly afraid— dick shy, the boys my age would call it.

Charlie wasn’t like boys my age. He was sixteen, two years older than me and so I trusted him. He kissed me everywhere, expecting nothing in return. More and more, I became comfortable lying next to him naked. We barely talked, always getting right to business. He touched me, gently at first. I was surprised to learn my body’s responses. It was like he knew just what to do. Slow or fast, he pushed his fingers inside of me, gently, then harder.

One afternoon, as he is doing this, the living room begins to spin. The ordinary day crumples into itself and, in one perfect moment, everything centers on the center of my body. Charlie tells me as it’s happening that I’m having an orgasm.

It was true. Afterwards, I’m giddy. I don’t want to get dressed, maybe never. He says, “You got to. We got to go.” He throws me my shirt. He says, “My grandpa’s coming home!”

In the car on the way back to my place I asked Charlie if I could have his necklace. It was made of hemp and shells and he was always wearing it. He asked, “Why you want my necklace?”

“I want a piece of you.”

“No offense,” he said, “but that sounds kind of weird.”

I brought Charlie’s hand to my mouth and I kissed it. It smelled of sex. I loved the smell of it and the feeling I was still feeling shooting all through my body. I cozied into his shoulder and thought, maybe this is love. This feeling like everything’s spinning.

As he pulled into my driveway and I asked Charlie again if I could have the necklace. Again, he said no.
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When I was a little girl I told myself stories that made everything perfect. As I grew up, the noise from the outside got in, and the cold got in, and it became too much to bear, knowing dogs could bite because I’d gotten bitten. It was one day at my cousin’s house, they told me to go pet the dog—they said don’t be afraid, he’s nice and he won’t bite—but he did, and he had bitten my brother, too. I knew because where I stood crying I could see my brother crying, too, and holding his one hand in the other, and then I understood. I became the kind of girl that got off on taking the kind of risks taken only by an individual not taught the value of life. Today I comprehend the value of my life but until then, I only feared pain.

She steps onstage and the show begins. She sits down to write. She imagines her reader. A professor. An ex-lover. Her father. A stranger. His opinion means everything to her. She is so afraid that she is fearless. She seeks so badly to be revealed while fearing such disclosure. She is aware of what he likes. Dialogue. Description. Detail. Perhaps he wants sex, she thinks. She will write a sexy scene. Always the people-pleaser, she’s become aware this is a problem.

She takes a break and goes to the window. She lights up a smoke. She does this ten, fifteen times a day. One after another, she feels she could smoke a thousand cigarettes. The nature of desire, she muses, is that that which is desired can never be fulfilled. She thinks she aught to write that down. She’s begun to think of herself in the third person, not just in her writing but in her daily activities. She spends inordinate amounts of time imagining herself as an imaginary reader might imagine her. The reader, she recognizes, is always male. She butts out her fourth cigarette of the day and it is only seven a.m. She thinks this might just be becoming a problem.
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My senior year of high school, I came home from school one day and my mother told me that my father was gone. Just like that, he’d moved out for good and I haven’t seen him since. No matter how hard I try, still today I cannot remember the last time I saw my father. I remember, instead, the evening I told my parents I’d begun thinking of going to college. My parents are sitting together on the couch in the living room in front of the TV. I remember the sound of canned laughter and my parent’s faces illuminated by the screen. I’d been awarded a $200 scholarship by the local chapter of the Veterans for Foreign Wars for second place in an essay contest, the theme: What Freedom Means to Me. I don’t remember what I wrote. I only remember it was important to win.

This is about winning, about writing, about love. This is my best attempt at the truth. This is about beauty and what that word means. What does it mean to be beautiful? For nearly a decade I searched for a definition. Beauty. For sale, as in beauty in a bottle. American beauty. A product of Photoshop. A pageant. I found: To please or satisfy others. Madonna. Mother-whore. Make yourself beautiful in just six easy steps! Beauty is skin deep. In the eye of the beholder. Beauty is unbearable, driving us to despair.

My first semester of college, my best friend Jenny called me long distance to let me know that she’d started working at the Crazy Horse, a strip joint in a row of strip joints in a part of town known only for its strip joints. That semester I was enrolled in my first women’s studies course. Everything I was being taught about sex work contradicted entirely with what I knew to be true about Jenny. I pictured my best friend Jenny, exploited, working in the kind of place decent women picket to shut down. When I told her as much, she told me to fuck off. What the hell do you know, she said, and she was right: I had never so much as been in a strip club. There I sat, in the common room of my dorm, while Jenny was somewhere back in Bedford—at her mom’s house still, I think, or at her apartment, if this was during the time that she is living with her boyfriend.

I remember I hung up the phone and I cried. I pictured Jenny. Haloed in blonde hair, eyes blue and enormous, Jenny was sexy. Even as a child, grown men had wanted Jenny. As an adolescent I was jealous of Jenny. At the same time, I felt sorry, at least I had a father I thought. At least I hadn’t been totally abandoned, the way Jenny’s dad had her.
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As a stripper, I felt beautiful. I was nineteen years old, lonely, restless, curious. Onstage in the spotlight, I felt beautiful. When the show was over, I didn’t.

At some point, days or weeks or maybe years later, you wake up. The solution, you discover, has become a problem of its own. I woke up one day and I thought: I am not normal. I will never fit in. I will never be happy. You ask yourself why. Is it your fault—was it something you did? Or was it was something that happened to you? Long before you had any choice, did something happen to make you capable of making the choices that you did? You wonder, did something happen to you that made you turn out this way— so very different, so very wrong? You wonder what made you capable of doing all the unspeakable things that you did. You think of everything. Maybe I’m a sex addict, you think. Maybe I was abused as a child. You try to remember something happening to you at some point in your childhood that might’ve made you turn out so wrong. The answer eludes you and you grow more and more afraid because sooner or later, you know that you will have to explain.

What, I would wonder every day of my life until the day arrived— would I have to say in my defense?

I have an early memory as a child of being in my father’s car in the summer, and we are driving through the suburbs. The houses are all the same with the same little porches and patches of lawn in the front. There’s a man in front of one of them, a man probably my father’s age, out watering his lawn. As we drive by this man makes eye contact with me, and he blows me a kiss. Picture this moment: the blue-green grass, the pointed roof of the house in the background and this man, the gesture he’s just made, the water pouring from the hose. I was maybe ten years old. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times when I picture this moment, I remember feeling angry, violated. The thousandth time, I feel ashamed, feeling that a part of me, however small, enjoyed it.