It is so easy to get into a rut. The toenail clipping, burping, morning-breath kind of rut of busy days and exhausted evenings. The no-sex rut, the no-talking rut, the not-holding-hands rut follow quickly behind. It doesn’t take long to get there—not as long as you’d like to think.
I let boys tell me I had a beautiful face and soft lips. I let them put their hands inside my shirt and up under my push-up bra in the dark, empty band room. And the auto-shop. And the coat room where they kept the anatomy skeleton. I let boys touch me in the backs of trucks parked in the desert in the middle of the night. But the one place I never let a boy touch me was in public.
