Disclaimer: RENT is Jonathan Larson's.

I got dumped for the first time when I was fourteen. I had never before dated. I fell in reckless teenage love.

After a rough couple of years in middle school, getting picked on almost nonstop for being fat, I made a friend. I was insanely happy. Friend. I, Maureen Annie Johnson, had a friend. Maybe I didn't have friends, but I had friend. Her name was Bonita and we sat together in Spanish class. Bonita's parents barely spoke English: she was fluent in Spanish. I had a gift for it. Neither of us paid any attention.

I would always wonder... would Bonita have even looked at me if she hadn't been fat herself? Or would I have been a spot of gum on the pavement?

She would come over to my house after school and listen to tapes. We would read the same books and talk about them and do crossword puzzles together. Often she borrowed my tapes. "I can't stand Wham!," she told me once. Within a week she was singing "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go".

"My little sister loves it," she said. "I've gotten used to it."

How anyone could dislike Wham! was beyond my reckoning.

Bonita borrowed my books and my tapes and kept them ages before returning them. I didn't mind. She told me about her summer fling and all I could think about as she wrote the kissing scenes in our boy-on-boy romance stories was how I wished she would kiss me.

I wrote the sex scenes because I was the one who had tried anal masturbation. (I hadn't been able to get my fingers up very far, and although I knew I didn't have a prostate I did enjoy it.)

Bonita started coming over to my house every day. She came out to me. She told me she couldn't tell her staunchly Catholic parents, who practically had an exorcism when they caught her masturbating. I thought about her vagina and what it would taste like. I was chubby, but Bonita was obese. She wore skintight clothes even so, just this side of camel toeing it.

I never told her these thoughts. Too embarrassed, I proposed it as "experimentation."

I kissed her. She kissed me. For two weeks we were a couple—at least in my eyes. We were in love—at least in my eyes. The truth is, nothing changed. We kissed once, and nothing more. I thought it more. I was always baking for her and not telling my parents about her, even though I think they knew.

And then one day she stopped returning my phone calls. She stopped talking to me at school. She stopped being nice to me. She stopped looking at me. And I stopped eating.

--

When I was fifteen I went to my father's boss's Christmas party wearing a white dress with blue piping at the neck and waist and shoulders. My mother liked it because it made a point. I took my Star of David and strung it on a red-and-green striped shoelace which I tied around my neck, and I slipped on my lacy black panties under the nice white-and-blue dress.

The Christmas party was at my father's boss's house. Why not just paint the word "Braggart" on the front door? Seriously, it's not subtle. It makes you seem like you need to seem likeable, which makes you seem not. It was a big enough house. The boss had his kids lined up to say hello to guests. The cutest was a little blonde girl in a pink and black dress who stuck her finger up her nose. The boys looked uncomfortable in their miniature penguin suits.

Amber and Joseph Archer were there with their brood, as well as the Pendletons, the Clarkes, the Morgans, the Lowneys, the Bells, the Stones, the Hacketts, the Barlows, the Fieldses, the Russells, the Normans, the Harrises, the Sullivans… You get the idea. A bunch of people we knew by their fathers, a bunch of people we didn't begin to know.

I remember that Evelyn Davis was there (the only divorcee) with her daughters, Naomi "Nomi", who screamed dyke but somehow wasn't one and Rebecca who was studious and quiet and nice if a bit boring. Nomi was teaching judo holds to the younger boys.

I ended up spending most of the evening with Brian Morgan and an endless glass of red wine which I drank through a yellow Crazy Straw. I was too drunk to remember whether or not I told him no. Maybe he didn't ask. I just know he was kissing me and then we were in the kids' bedroom and my dress was up around my hips and he was sweating and grunting and I couldn't stop laughing.

I hurt, after.

I saw him at another company event later that year, and he blushed and turned away. If I could change anything in my life I would go back and not bleed for Brian Morgan. But changing that one thing would change everything. We can't shoot dinosaurs, alter election results, or unfuck.

--

I fucked a lot after that.

I fucked a football player. I fucked a nerd who couldn't look me in the eyes but gazed with reverence on my pussy. I fucked an undocumented twenty-one-year-old and my tennis coach and an "actor" with a minor roll in a school play. I was the high school slut, though I dressed like any other geek in jeans and sweaters.

I still didn't eat and every time I fucked I called it rape. I thought I wanted it. I didn't. When a guy's on top of you he only thinks of his dick. You don't matter.

I made it as far as college. I managed decent grades. I went to play auditions. I fucked like a dog in heat. And I went on doing this and not eating. Sometimes I would eat breakfast and feel nauseous and puke it up.

Then the unthinkable happened: I was caught.

During my junior year, when I was feeling old and ugly and sagging, when I was feeling tired and hurting all the time, I all but forgot about my elective course. Six weeks until final grades I had a D. I couldn't have a D. As long as I did I couldn't eat. I got cramps, nothing would fit down my throat, and I couldn't sleep.

I did the logical thing and fucked the T.A., and that was when I got caught.

Jason—that was his name—immediately went limp when he realized. I remember his name because the professor said, "Jason," and Jason screamed and pulled out. He zipped up his fly and I buttoned mine. The professor, who had been pointedly looking at the floor, looked up when Jason tried to leave. "Wait," he told him, and Jason did. To me, he said, "Did you consent?"

I nodded.

"You're absolutely sure?"

"Professor, I wouldn't—" Jason began, but the professor said, "You're fucking a student in my classroom, forgive my complete lack of faith in your common sense." I backed away from his voice. He wasn't one of those professors. If you showed up too late, he would mock you, he wouldn't snap at you. When he talked to Jason, his voice went cold and sharp. I hit the wall. "Maureen?"

"I consented," I whispered. Tears began to roll down my cheeks, freezing cold.

"Jason, out," the professor said. When the door shut, I started sobbing. The professor asked, "Do you want me to call the nurse?"

"No," I whimpered. Jesus, God in heaven, no. The last thing I needed was a series of clinic questions concerning whether or not I had a sexually transmitted disease. The last thing I needed was to feel like some bugged whore.

"Do you want your R.A.?"

A completely overeager stranger? "No."

"Is there anyone, a friend or a family member, someone you can stay with while you're upset?"

I shook my head. "No." Even if I was anywhere near my mother, she wouldn't care. My father certainly wouldn't, plus he was probably away on business.

The professor sat on a desk. Literally on it. "Do you want to talk?" he asked.

I nodded. "Okay," and then I said nothing.

"Tell me why someone as smart as you has a D in my class."

That made me cry harder. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to, Professor, I just…" I wailed.

"No, you don't," he agreed. "Maureen… would it be all right if I hugged you?"

I nodded, surprised that I wanted that. When he did I clung to him and pressed my face into his chest and probably stained his shirt with tears and snot and spit, but he didn't say anything about that. He let me cry until I was finished, then I told him—everything—and I started crying again a few times. I told him about Bonita, which no one knew, and about Brian, which also no one knew, and then I didn't know who else up to Jason.

I tried to admit an honest number, but in all truth I had lost count. "I'm a slut," I murmured.

"By definition," the professor agreed, much to my surprise. His tone held no offense. "But there's more to it than that. You've been misused. You've been hurt. Maureen, you're looking for something, but whatever it is you won't find it like this. I know."

He knew? Did that mean he had... like me...?

"I must look horrible," I said, the last time I cried.

"No," he said. "Coming from the gayest man in New York, I think you're beautiful." We both laughed at that. Later, when he had become friends and he had stopped being 'Professor' and was just 'Collins', he never mentioned this. I appreciated his confidence.

--

When he invited me out drinking with his friends, I accepted. "You have to call me 'Collins', though," he said. "I'm asking you as a friend." By that time I was a senior. I said yes.

His friends were two blond boys, one darker one lighter but both undeniably blond. They were "Roger, a musician, and Mark, a filmmaker," and I was "Maureen, student, kindred spirit, going to be an actress". I liked that he said "going to be", not "wants to be" like my mother in her quiet, apologetic tone.

"You can use me in one of your movies, Mark," I said.

"Yeah," Mark said. He glanced at Roger. I could see why. Roger was handsome. No, he was beautiful. His hair was long and curly and fell over his eyes. He was slow to smile and seemed to see everything and he didn't talk unless he had to.

"Roger, what are you drinking?"

"Coke."

"Why?"

"It's good."

"Oh." I paused to regroup. By this point I had had two glasses of wine and a beer, enough to intoxicate me. Roger was nursing his Coke. I placed my hand over his. "So where did you grow up?" I asked.

Roger said, " New York," and he pulled his hand away. To Collins and Mark he said, "I think I'm gonna head home. Catch you guys later."

"Well, hey, I'll go too. It's a… not a great neighborhood. You know," Mark babbled.

I don't know what my excuse was for joining them. I just know that I did. I put myself in their charge. In his bed. Only when I awoke it was the wrong 'him'.

Mark stared at me, wide-eyed. He was staring when I awoke and I had the impression he had been staring for some time. "Um," he said. "Good morning!"

That was how I started dating Mark Cohen. We both made mistakes and he wanted to do right. It was never love. It was never 'making love', it was making sweaty-nervous-babbling-breathless-mantraesque fumbling.

It was chivalry.

to be continued!

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