New Year’s Eve, 2010
Grace Labeille is turning twenty on top of a man who does not love her and will not date her. It is happening on the second floor of an off-campus house with sticky floors and a limited supply of toilet paper. It is happening while she is sick. So sick that she hasn’t eaten all day. So sick that her body feels like lead. So sick that, on any other night, she would have stayed in her dorm room. But she’s here, on this sagging mattress, because of a single, incontrovertible fact: the only thing worse than turning twenty on top of this man who won’t date her is turning twenty while he’s on top of someone else.
Of all these concerns (that he doesn’t love her, that there won’t be any toilet paper to clean herself with when he is finished, that her stomach is cramping), the most pressing is the fact that she’s on top. It’s a position that’s supposed to feel good to women, and it has never, not once, felt good to Grace. It makes her thighs cramp and her kneecaps sweaty. But more than that, and worse than that, is the feeling of total and complete inadequacy.
She doesn’t know whether it’s better to move forward and backward or to bounce up and down. It doesn’t feel like she can move much at all. Not comfortably. There’s probably some alluring, swiveling combination of all directions that other women know about. She’s aware that she’s supposed to follow her pleasure in this (and all) positions. But that feels like a useless directive. Pleasure is not something Grace feels during sex. There’s sensation, and not all of it is unpleasant. But the screaming abandon that fills other women in movies, television shows, and pornography has never, not once, visited her own body.
And then there are the earrings on his nightstand. A twin pair of scorpions with golden claws and swirling tails. Earrings that are both beautiful and menacing, that mixture of polarities that comprises edge. Edge is something that Grace, a product of private schools and lily-white suburbs in Kansas City, deeply envies. The woman who wore these scorpion earrings probably has a sleeve of tattoos, a nose ring, and long, shivering orgasms. And she’d had them in this bed sometime in the past two weeks, while Grace was back home making Christmas cookies with her mother.
But Grace can’t say a thing about the earrings.
There’d been another night, a drunker night, when she’d seen a necklace hanging from the hook behind his bathroom door. A small letter M on a silver chain. She’d mentioned it, made a small face about it, and he’d been ready. He’d patted the bed beside him and told her how much he liked her, but that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. And not just with her, but with anyone. And if that was going to cause her pain, they should stop sleeping together.
And Grace had stayed.
And Grace had even apologized for making a small face.
So she will not mention the earrings, even though they cause her a deeper level of discomfort than the monogrammed necklace. A girl who plucks her personality from a tiny carousel on top of a department store jewelry counter, who knows nothing about herself but her own initials, is an indistinct girl who will leave an indistinct impression. But a girl with edge is something entirely different.
She moves her eyes from the earrings to the clock on his nightstand.
11:57.
She decides she’ll fake her orgasm right at midnight, when the year turns over and the world explodes with noise. The exact moment that she begins her twenties.
During this first part of faking her orgasm, this performance of the build, she always thinks of a statue she saw once in a museum. A marble Persephone carved mid-abduction, hair and eyes wild. Grace tries to channel that exhilarated terror. She arches, she moans, she squeezes. She keeps her jaw slack. She will begin, as the minutes tick closer to midnight, to move her hips faster and faster. And once she’s done that for a plausible amount of time, she’ll transition into the pantomime of explosion. Maybe tonight she’ll curse, or gasp out his name, or pretend that she has been transported to a place outside of language altogether. Then she’ll relax her body into a posture of gratitude, of relief. She’ll appear breathless and delivered. And inside, she’ll feel nothing but the fatigue of the exertion. But she’ll be released from this position onto her back, and her only remaining job will be to clamp tight and encourage.
11:58.
She should start to act it out now. The pretense that some internal current is pulling her away. She should start to grind faster, to make more noise. But the pain in her stomach is intensifying.
She looks down at him, wondering if he’s enjoying himself. But no, of course he is. It seems to her that men, whatever their state of mind, always enjoy themselves during sex. They can connect to a body, any body, and it takes them somewhere. And when the act is over, it’s truly over. They can go about their lives. When they talk to their friends, it’s not about women. At least not in the sense that women are people, or worthy of any real consideration.
It seems to her that men live in these kingdoms of peace and pleasure, while she and the other girls she knows lose their minds when they want someone. They buy new clothes. They watch their portions. They launch elaborate campaigns with full-scale offenses and tactical retreats. And all of it for what? For scraps of time. For confusion and inconsistency. For anguish that feels like dying.
Madness, she thinks. A failure of discipline.
“What?” he asks, his eyes opening.
Had she spoken out loud?
“Nothing,” she says.
11:59.
She’s feeling feverish and lightheaded now. Her thoughts have grown claws, and each one makes her angrier. For it seems to her that the disparities between men and women are not just a matter of pain and pleasure during sex, or chaos and peace during its pursuit and aftermath. There’s also the issue of scarcity and abundance.
How many girls from the party downstairs would he have been happy to pull into his room that night? The one in red he’d been talking to in the kitchen, surely. Or that bouncy freshman from Delta Gamma with a rear end like a shelf. Any of them, really.
And how many of the boys would she have wanted? There was so little beauty in the boys. Their faces red with alcohol, most of them sweating through their shirts, some of them drunk enough to not be wearing shirts at all. Would it be a lifetime of struggling to find someone to want, while the men around her could frame their minds to practically anyone?
Consider the pleasure your body has given compared to the pleasure it has received, she thinks to herself.
“What?” he asks again.
Had she spoken out loud?
“Shut up,” she says.
The pain in her gut twists so hard that she hunches over, dropping her forearms on either side of his body. It’s something she’s never done in this position. Normally, she wouldn’t want her belly to crease in on itself, or for her body to slope like a dolphin, all spine, no breasts. But it’s the only way to relieve the pressure in her stomach and still be able to move. And Grace wants to keep moving. She’s feeling, for once, a determination to enjoy herself.
She can’t say why, really. She’s aware, distantly, that something is wrong with her. She feels heavy and slick with sweat. But she finds she doesn’t care about that, or about how she might appear to him. In fact, she wishes he wasn’t there at all. To be accompanied at all in this moment feels like a violation.
Because it’s starting now. A build. A real one.
Grace finds that, compared to her writhing, performative acrobatics, it takes barely any movement at all. It’s a precision operation, grinding back and forth over a narrow edge of pleasure. Nursing it almost, until it grows into its own strength. And it flares so quickly, once caught, that there’s nothing at all for her to do.
Grace is aware, distantly, that the music from the party downstairs has cut off. That everyone has started to count backwards from ten. But then it all begins to dissolve.
In the final, shuddering moments before she loses consciousness, something begins to slide out of her body. A particular odor (something like brine, rot, spoiled fish) thickens the air.
There is pressure, pressure, pressure, and then darkness.
Darkness at the moment she turns twenty.
Darkness on the first night she inks.
