If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

around to test the flavor.
    “Do you want a cherry?” she asks, setting the mug back on the nightstand.
    I nod and she drops a scrunchy into my cup. I feel my cheeks getting warmer and I start to get squirmy. I know what comes next. Her bookshelves are filled with troll dolls with wild hair and I can’t stand the way they’re looking at me. Sometimes, if she’s not paying attention, I’ll shove one under her bed.
    I will remember this game years later when I am having sex for the first time, thirteen and skinny and sprawled naked on a slick basement floor. I’m at my friend Katie’s house, a dirty, dilapidated row home tucked between Third and Arch. Her parents are never home so Katie and I eat bags of sunflower seeds that we steal from the 7-Eleven and toss the trash on the floor. We smoke pot out of crooked tinfoil bowls and cajole neighborhood boys to buy us pizzas. We blast hip-hop from the one remaining speaker on her stepfather’s stereo, stare at the ceiling, paint our toenails purple, and compare the bruises on our knobby, boyish legs. Katie is already having sex with Darren, her boyfriend of three weeks, and he has a friend who wants to fuck me—she is sure of it.
    Katie is small and pretty with delicate features. Her left nostril is pierced with a tiny silver stud that looks like a waywardbooger. While Katie has a full C-cup, disproportionate for her frame, I haven’t even had my period yet.
    “Perfect,” she says. “You don’t gotta worry about getting preggos or nothing.”
    Eventually, and for no good reason, I give in. I am thirteen and scared and bored and insecure and lonely and I let myself get banged on the floor of Katie O’Connor’s basement, my tailbone pounding against concrete. The bruise is there for weeks. I don’t even know his name, but I watch his black eyes widen when he grabs my hand and curls it around his penis, the first one I’ve seen in real life, and I know then I’ve made a mistake. It feels soft and hard at the same time and something inside me falls into a small hole just large enough to keep me steady. He groans with a voice like gravel and I hear Katie calling from the top of the stairs.
    “Ooh girl, you havin’ fun yet?” Katie giggles as Darren pulls her away by the waist, the door shutting and the last of the light slipping away. I hold on to the thought that this will be worth it in the end, that some part of this man-boy will never leave, even while I know I’ll never see him again. When I can’t hear Katie’s voice anymore I think, If I could just hear her voice, this will end . I try to imagine my mother floating down the stairs. If I could just hold her hand, crawl into her lap, burrow back inside of her and hide. If I could claw my way beneath the soft earth, eat worms, and curl up against tree roots and wait, I would. If this would just not be real .
    The dark boy bites hard on my small new breasts. I am buried and gone.
    When it’s over he holds me. I feel everything but safe, everything but what I need to feel. I remember Charlene, her warm arms and the cool quiet in her house, so different from mine. When she held me, we were the same girl with the same life and the same future. We lived on an island and we were pirates.
    “SO,” SAYS CHARLENE, “my shift is over.”
    She punches numbers into her calculator and pulls off her shirt. “Holy crapoli! It is so hot.” She wipes at her flat, bare chest with her shirt and leans over the nightstand. “Do you want to come over to my place?”
    “Sure!” I say too loudly. She shoots me a look that means shut up, so I do. I am a kid who likes to please and this will rarely serve me well.
    “It’s over here,” she says, pulling me behind the curtains and pushing me down until I am lying flat on the floor.
    She pulls up my shirt and hovers above me. I feel the heat from her belly and her hair tickles my neck. She has a round face and blue eyes that I wish were mine. We are both chubby and have big