how to get a reputation

By E.C. Birdsall

BY THE TIME MY LIBIDO revs into gear at fifteen, I’ve seen exactly four penises. The first is a total accident. I’m a toddler who pushes open a bathroom door to find her dad toweling off, and there the thing is, hanging from a hairy nest. I squeak and stare. Dad blanches, covers himself, swings the door shut. The second is not an accident, but still, I’m unprepared. I’m maybe four, and my neighbor, a kid my age, summons me to his garden shed, steps onto an overturned bucket, and drops his shorts. The pale thing dangles. His is hairless, but no prettier for it. I scream and beat a retreat back across the street, climb a tree, and yell that no, I will not show him mine. Thus learned, the bare facts of male anatomy aren’t new to me when, at nine, I discover The Joy of Sex on our library shelf. The organ’s two-dimensional representation allows me to consider the bearded model’s penis more calmly. But careful inspection just confirms: penises are totally gross.

My aversion hasn’t changed when, in my first year at boarding school, I see the fourth. This one belongs to my boyfriend, Ryan, seventeen to my fourteen. Ryan is my first boyfriend, and he coaches me in canoodling: Nibble my ear, like this, and he nibbles my ear and I feel a nice little tug in my groin; then I nibble his and he laughs and says Ouch, no. Like I did it to you. So I try again, and he groans a little and tells me how much of my tongue he’d like in his mouth. We go on like this for weeks before he finally unzips his jeans and unleashes the thing. This is the first real one I’ve seen erect, and I really like Ryan, so I’m bummed to realize that the look of the thing, while improved by being hard and thus not wrinkly, still totally freaks me out.

I know what Ryan wants (a handjob), and I consider giving him one. Perhaps I can overcome the offensive aesthetics by averting my eyes. But what I know I can’t overcome is the fear that I’ll be bad at it, because I know that, when it comes to handjobs, boys are the experts. Boys give themselves handjobs all the time. No way can I compete with that. I ask Ryan to put it away.

He’s not the type to push, and we remain a going-steady couple even after we head home for summer break. But about ten days before returning for sophomore year, I get a letter saying that, now eighteen, Ryan’s a man, and a man needs a real woman. He has found one, and she’s deflowered him in a pool locker room. He’s so sorry but hopes we can still be friends.

I’m hurt but not heartbroken, even though, over the weeks we’ve been apart, my slow-to-manifest libido has burst into something unignorable, and while I’m definitely not ready for deflowering, or even for penises, I am ready to up the ante on canoodling. But that’s ok, because I’ve got my sights set on someone else. I’ve liked Jack from my first week of freshman year but doubted, even once my boobs started coming in, that I had a chance with him. By the time I wonder if I might have a shot with Jack, Ryan and I are already a thing.

Jack, also a junior, isn’t your typical teenage heartthrob. On the surface, he’s actually kind of average. He plays varsity sports (football, ice hockey, lacrosse) and preppy recreational ones, too (sailing), but he’s not a standout star. He does well in school but is in no way looking at any Ivies. He isn’t bad-looking (in fact, he’s quite fit from all those sports), but he isn’t markedly good-looking, either (big nose, small mouth, hairline already receding). But, oh, the confidence and curiosity and charm! Jack looks right at you; he asks questions; what’s more, he answers them, gives you paragraphs; like, he really wants to know you, and, even better, he really wants you to know him. Jack is interested in books and music and the whole wide world, and he wants to talk about all of it. Plus, he’s funny but never slapstick and only crude when it counts.

Jack has a ground-floor room in the school’s smallest boys’ dorm, just a little cottage, really, that’s been carved into an apartment for dorm parents on one side and a few student bedrooms on the other. Jack shares his room with his best friend, Drew, and they’ve got a killer stereo, a big record collection, walls covered with thin cotton tapestries and the expected posters: St Paulie’s Girl spills boobs out of her lederhosen in one, Bob Marley spills smoke out of a blunt in another. Girls aren’t ever allowed inside boys’ dorms, and vice versa, but there are no restrictions on a hard-crushing girl standing outside a boy’s window, learning her first Dylan lyrics and taking the occasional, tiny puff off a one-hitter discreetly passed over the windowsill.

By the time I get a sense that I’ve maybe got a chance with Jack, I’m smitten with Ryan. Plus, even the thought of being sneaky—much less outright lying—gives me a stomachache. So I’m all innocence when, a few weeks before the end of my freshman year, Jack catches up to me one Sunday morning, asks what’s up, do I want to hang out. I agree, sure, homework can wait, and we stroll away from the blustery waterfront and amble aimlessly, eventually finding ourselves outside the big, low building that students call The Ackey and teachers call The Academic Center. The Ackey should be locked on a Sunday, but someone’s propped a door open with a rock.

The halls are unlit, dim and quiet. There’s the mild thrill of trespass as we settle onto a wide upholstered bench. We face each other, legs pulled up, still-shod feet on pleather, and keep talking. I’m wearing a mid-80’s mashup of prep and pop: pegged acid-wash jeans, a loose men’s oxford, flat ankle boots, and a short string of pearls. I’m yammering on (yeah, Dylan’s definitely a poet, but his voice is kind of annoying), and Jack is, too (but you’ve got to appreciate that his voice is poignant . . . his songs make more sense with a whining wail), when he veers off topic and asks if the pearls are real. I’m saying yeah, they were a birthday gift, when he leans in with his perfect, too-small mouth, teeth bared. He scrapes his incisors against a pearl, finds the gritty texture that proves their authenticity. There’s a spark in my belly. I inhale once, sharp. Jack pulls back, grins, says yup, they’re real, then, we should get going, and we leave the Ackey and have just said see ya and turned away when I realize he’s stopped and is watching my walk. I don’t look back but hear him anyway: you’re developing nicely, Giz. You’ve already got a great ass. I still don’t turn around, don’t reveal my vicious, full-body blush. I’m shocked by the word “ass” but not insulted. His mouth at my clavicle is a promise that his crude comment seals, and I file it away like an IOU.

Which is why, months later, further developed and definitively unattached, I’m not anticipating much difficulty getting something going with Jack. I believe my biggest problem is that I still don’t want to see, much less touch, a penis. As it turns out, though, my antipathies aren’t even in play. There are several new girls at our school, many of whom notice Jack’s appeal. He takes their measure and quickly settles on a brunette named Michelle. Michelle isn’t just nicely developed; she’s fully developed, one of those teenagers who looks, unlike me, more woman than girl. Worse, she’s a day student who drives an actual Porsche (a Carrera 9-11) to and from school. Jack’s happy to see me, too, greets me with hey, Giz, you look great, come by my window soon so we can catch up. Nevertheless, Jack and Michelle are an item before the second week’s out.

I nurse my disappointment and distract myself with a more age-appropriate choice, another sophomore with nicely angular features, Clark Kent glasses, and a Jack-like interest in intense conversation, but this guy ultimately goes for a day student, too, a blond girl who gets better grades than me, has bigger boobs, and pilots a Boston Whaler—at least on good weather days—from a big house across the small bay and ties up at the floating dock that I can see through the dining hall’s big windows, my breakfast lookout.

I don’t actually stop trying for Jack, though, and he doesn’t discourage me, not yet. I’m late-blooming physically but have been a precocious conversationalist from the get-go, which helps. I don’t always or even usually understand what I’m talking about, but I’m great at noticing what interesting-seeming people take seriously. I really want to be taken seriously. I’ve been developing this skill since my first major success, at age three, when, hoping to delay bedtime, I parrot something I’ve overheard and ask a group of adults assembled for cocktails with my parents, what should we do about the OPEC crisis? The guffaws and attention this earns me are addictive, and I double down. From then on, this precocious skill is a free pass to places I imagine I want to be, ready or not (like, maybe first grade at age four is ok, but ninth grade at a boy-dominated boarding school at thirteen? Maybe that’s less ok). Plus, the hyperverbal curiosity isn’t a put-on. I’ve got an early, genuine, unstoppable impulse to hurtle a conversation down the fastest path to the most interesting (some would say the least comfortable) place, unimpeded by any wish—much less ability—to fake an interest in this thing called small talk.

While I’ll tolerate and even perform well in situations that demand socially-coded niceties, I won’t dwell very long on the surface of anything. I go deep, fast. A lot of guys aren’t into it, especially if they’re my age. The ones who are into it, like Ryan and Jack, are always a few years older than me, and while these guys are increasingly willing to let on that something beyond my conversational skills interests them, they’re cautiously embarrassed by their attraction, especially since I look even younger than my already-too-young age.

Still, even once he starts up with Michelle, Jack’s usually happy to see me at his window. So there I am one evening, early in my sophomore year, flirty and available, the talk flowing nicely, when Jack asks what I’m doing for Fall Break. I tell him I’ll be spending the upcoming late-October long weekend on campus, and he says that won’t do. I should come to his dad’s for the weekend, they’d be happy to have me. Michelle lodges a complaint when she hears this plan, but he convinces her. He’s just being nice, yeah, he knows I have a crush, but really, she’s seen me: I’m cute—freckled and pert—and I might even be pretty one day, but I’m not there yet. She’s got nothing to worry about.

I don’t agree. I’ve felt Jack’s mouth at my clavicle, after all, and I’m beside myself excited when, the following week, I travel with the team to their Saturday afternoon football game. Jack’s dad meets us there. I see his surprise when Jack introduces us. I’m not what he imagined when his son asked to bring a girl home. But, as established, Jack’s dad is not the first adult I’ve charmed. The man perks right up when I start in with my WASP-y manners. These include a firm handshake (I hate a limp one, eww), and careful, more hard-won (look me in the eye when I’m speaking to you, young lady), almost too-intense eye-contact, but the real key is my effusive, entitled, code-baiting gratitude for the invitation (yeah, my parents are in Palm Beach this month… too far to go for a three-day weekend. By the time I got there, I’d just have to head back to the airport). Soon, Jack’s dad’s slinging my quilted weekend bag into his trunk and opening the car door for me (no, Jack’ll be fine in the back, he is a gentleman, after all). Traffic’s not bad, but the sun’s long gone when we pull up to a big, cedar-shingled house in some tony Boston suburb. I’m shown to a tiny guestroom with a brass-railed double bed. Later, there’s some kind of simple dinner off the grill, after which we’re all wiped out and head to bed.

Next morning, I’m up hours before Jack. I read in bed and poke around the house, and by the time Jack’s up and about in early afternoon, he says we gotta get moving. His sister will be by to pick us up in an hour, we’re headed to his grandparents’ for an early dinner, and I can tell Jack’s a little nervous about introducing me to his sister because he tells me to not dress too preppy, she’s not into that. But I don’t realize he’s also nervous for me to meet the cousins and aunts and uncles who’ll also be there. His sister’s at college somewhere in Boston. She’s bringing her boyfriend and we’re also picking up a cousin, and this is how I find myself sandwiched between Jack and the cousin in the backseat of some sporty little car, his sister at the wheel, the boyfriend lighting a joint, taking a big hit before passing it back, me taking a littler hit before passing it on. I’ve been a sometime pot smoker for over a year now and find it calms my own considerable nerves, which in this case helps conceal my glee at being squished in the back seat next to Jack and included amongst these grown-up-seeming new people, driving rather too fast along a sea-cliff road and into the waning light, so very ready for all I hope’s coming my way.

Jack’s grandparents’ place is a grand old place with a wrap-around porch and a super view—we make it just in time to see the last bright-pink strip on the ocean’s horizon—and filled with nice people. I take a seat on a chintz-upholstered chair and settle in next to an older woman—an aunt, I think—and fall directly into a long conversation about Impressionist painting. (What’s a better representation of how we feel when we see a beautiful scene? The Impressionist’s edge-less colors or the Realist’s firm outlines?) I have opinions and I express them. I’m famished, and someone, maybe Jack, brings me a plate. Later, dessert is passed. Conversation is going on and on in this vein until the aunt almost inelegantly switches topics and asks me how Jack and I came to be friends—surely, I’m not in his class—and finally, just out with it, she asks my age, then hesitates and takes the final step: is Jack my boyfriend? No, but— and here I drop my sophistication, the one I’m surprising myself with my ability to keep up, given how stoned I am. All at once I’m just the barely fifteen-year-old, newly pubescent, eager-to-please girl that I am, and I babble that no, I’m not, he’s dating this girl Michelle, but I like him so, so much. The aunt sighs with relief, pats my hand, and says Oh, but he really is too old for you. Don’t worry, dear, you have plenty of time. Just you wait. Boys your age will catch up eventually.

This is dispiriting but not crushing, and once I’m back at Jack’s in the brass-railed bed, I practice kissing the inside of my elbow, as if kisses are handshakes, as if I might learn the right amount of pressure and tongue by feeling what feels good to me. I’m almost asleep when my dreams come true. The door opens quietly, and Jack whispers: hey, Giz, you still awake? I scooch over, glad for my practicing, because from the very start, Jack’s kisses are a whole new world of kissing. He pushes up the T-shirt I’m sleeping in and touches my finally-there breasts and pushes my underpants down and feels the wet, and his erection is hard on my thigh, and I almost want to actually touch it, and maybe penises aren’t really the problem I’ve made them out to be, and then Jack lifts himself off me and says, oh, Giz, this is a mistake, I shouldn’t be here, and I don’t protest. I’m ok, the smallest part of me’s relieved, even, that tonight’s not the night, not yet. Plus, now I’ve got real proof of his want. I can work with this.

Except . . . I can’t.

We sleep late the next day, and Jack makes us messy egg and cheese sandwiches. He turns on some football, and I try to distract him with the ear-nibbling thing Ryan taught me. This almost works. Jack even lets me touch the strip of skin above his belt where his shirt’s ridden up, but then he sighs and moves my hand and looks at me sweetly and says, Oh Giz, you’re going to make some guy really happy one day. I’m crushed to realize this isn’t so much a tease as a closing statement. By nightfall, we’re back at school, and he’s back with Michelle.

A few months later, when we return from the long winter break, he and Michelle are over. I must be next. Right? Sure enough, within days a plan is hatched. I hear about it not from Jack but from my friend Liddy, who is clandestinely fooling around with the best friend, Drew. Drew now has a single in Jack’s dorm—the same dorm from the year before, just re-shuffled—and Jack’s new roommate is off campus for the weekend, and Liddy and I are invited to sneak out! This’ll be my first time sneaking out, but not Liddy. Like all freshman and sophomore girls, she’s got a second floor room, but hers opens onto the fire escape, and Liddy has been making use of it since the start of the school year. She knows how to dodge the night-time security patrols. I don’t want to get caught, but she won’t let that happen and I know this is my chance. An hour after midnight, Liddy and I creep down her fire escape, cat burglars, then run the half mile across two playing fields and two parking lots to the boys’ dorm.

Drew’s left a rolled tube sock in the exterior door as promised, and I find Jack waiting for me. I don’t have a plan for what I’ll do, beyond knowing I won’t go all the way, not before mutually declaratory love at least, but I am open to facing my fear of the penis. There, right then, I get an idea: while I can’t give a better handjob than a boy, I’m sure they can’t get their mouths down there. Jack’s in boxers and nothing else. I don’t have to even undress to just kiss my way down his chest, tug at his boxers, close my eyes against the sight of the thing, move my lips over and around it and get it as far back onto my tongue as I can bear. I find my limit pretty quickly, but just as I start my retreat, I feel a pulsing and my mouth fills with a salty, almost clean-tasting fluid. I’ve never liked a mess, and am surprised I don’t mind the taste. I get it all down in just one big swallow, well, ok, maybe two. Jack says, Oh, Giz, oh wow, and we snuggle a bit before he gets out of bed and puts a record on and George Winston is playing “Pachelbel’s Canon.”

We doze until Drew knocks softly and says time to go, the sun’ll be up soon. I need to get back across campus while the getting’s good, so out into the frost-fallen early morning Liddy and I go. We make it back up the fire escape without even a single clang or a scrape. I’m just sure I’ve got this thing with Jack secured and am doubly sure when Liddy tells me she and Drew’ve made another plan. We’ll get a couple hours of sleep and meet the boys at breakfast and catch the bus to Boston for the day. It’ll be so much fun.

And it is, at least at first. The cab ride to the bus stop is conspiratorial and giddy. But the boys get seats next to each other—not Liddy and me—on the bus, and that’s ok but confusing. When we arrive at South Station and the door hisses open, we walk the few blocks to the Public Garden and into the Commons until the blustery cold drives us west into the wind-buffeting streets, and the boys find a place that sells them a few beers. I have one, which makes me drunk, but Jack’s not paying me much attention and is maybe even ignoring me.

We escape from the chill into the aquarium. This cheers me a bit. I love that big round tank in the center and am thrilled by the urge to climb over the rail and slip in there amongst the sharks. Later, I think, oh phew when, on the bus back in the early dark, Drew and Jack each get window seats near the back, and Liddy and I take our places next to them, and it’s hard to tell you what comes next, but here I go, anyway.

The armrest’s up and I’m sitting extra close, but Jack’s not talking to me. He’s not even looking at me. He’s just staring straight ahead, and I’m bereft. I thought the thing I did the night before meant Jack now knew he was the guy I’d make really happy, and not someday, but NOW. But he’s definitely ignoring me, still.

I stew about it until I realize: His expression’s cold, but his body’s hot. I believe the things I’ve heard (like Boys only want one thing and C’mon, I can tell you want it), and so I heed only what I want to heed, manners be damned. He’s tense, seems mad, even, but also he’s electric, almost zapping. So I will my hand off my thigh and creep it onto his. I feel, through denim, his hard proof and think, I can do this. And then his fly is down, and it’s dark enough in the night-lit Peter Pan, maybe no one will notice. I start to touch the smooth hard of him and then I know, gosh, actually . . . I can’t do this. Not because I’m worried about the public nature of the setting, but because I’m still worried I’ll botch a handjob. And what about the mess? Last night was so easy, so straightforward, really. I know the wet of my mouth will best the dry of my hand. So I just lower my head to his lap, close my eyes, and find him with my tongue. Soon, his hands grip my head like earmuffs, and I think, well, okay, then. But his hands aren’t an encouragement. Jack uses them to lift me off his lap and I open my eyes and he’s looking right in mine when he says No.

And while I manage to bury, at least for a while, much of what I do with the reputation this bus ride earns me, I’m never able to erase the memory of Jack’s expression, this very last time he looks me in the eye.

About the author:

E.C. Birdsall, a former art historian, holds degrees from Bard College and UVA. She’s currently writing a memoir.