I stole Mackenzie Mallory’s boyfriend.
Mackenzie was a day student at my boarding school. Her tight ringlets of brown hair made me think about running my fingers through them.
She was perky––annoyingly so. I liked Mackenzie, but I also envied her because she had something I didn’t: a boyfriend she boned on a regular basis.
All my friends were losing their virginities and talking about sex constantly. I felt left out. I’d done endless hours of fingerbanging, but the way people talked about going all the way made me want to deflower myself as soon as possible.
I suspected that popping my cherry with someone I didn’t care about would be better. Ultimately, I didn’t want a broken heart. So, rather randomly, I decided to make Mackenzie’s boyfriend my target. I decided to seduce him.
His name was Ricardo. He and his parents had recently moved to the US from Peru. Ricardo was a short guy, probably 4’10” on his tippy-toes. On the other hand, I am just shy of six feet tall. When we stood next to each other, Ricardo appeared to be half my size. He was also really ugly.
Ricardo and I shared the same lunch period and some mutual friends. Lucky for me, Mackenzie was slotted into an earlier lunch break and couldn’t monitor my interactions with Ricardo. I started flirting with him shamelessly, cozying up to his lunch tray.
“Oh Ricardo, it’s so cool that you play on the baseball team. I wish I understood the rules of the game, but I only really know about the bases. Like 3rd base… hahaha,”
I would coo to him.
“It’s easy,” he replied, “just hit the ball and run,”
Seated at the lunch table, we were almost eye to eye. His eyes sparkled when he spoke.
“You know,” I continued, “I played tee-ball when I was seven. But the ball doesn’t fly at your face when you play that game.”
“I can show you how to hit a home run,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Can I take you to the batting cage this weekend?”
My seduction was underway.
I am a siren, I thought. Ha! This is going to be easier than I ever imagined! I will conquer this man, and he will take my virginity.
On Friday night, Ricardo picked me up for our secret date. Cunningly, I snuck down to the school’s gates so that my friends wouldn’t see me leave. Several of the girls in my dorm were very chummy with Mackenzie, and I suspected that they’d rat me out.
I slipped into his car, and we drove to the sports center. I wasn’t worried about getting caught because none of my friends would be within a mile of the batting cages. They hated baseball, and football was king at my school.
For being such a tiny man, Ricardo was very confident. He was a take-charge kind of a guy, and he stood behind me, arms wrapped around, holding the bat like the actors in old movies do.
I felt a little embarrassed.
I bet everyone here thinks he’s my son. I mean… I don’t care that he’s so short. But it would be great if he wasn’t so ugly. Whatever. Just focus! All I have to do is let him stick his dick in me. How bad can that be? After I lose my virginity, I will feel like a goddess, and boys everywhere will fall under my sex spell. I will knock them down one by one.
Afterward, we had dinner at a faraway all-you-can-eat pizza place, and I continued my Praying mantid tactics.
“So, Ricardo… since you asked me here to show me how to hit the ball, I’d like to take you on a picnic. Let’s go next week, maybe during our lunch break.”
Leaving the campus during the school day was forbidden, but I didn’t care. I was being a bad, bad girl, and if I had gone this far, I might as well break a few rules, too.
“I know just the place to take you,” he said, smiling like a man who’d just fixed a horse race. Ricardo was going to get lucky, and he knew it.
The following Wednesday, we crept away during our extended class break and headed to a remote spot in the woods. It was just atop a grassy knoll, next to a creek. I conveniently forgot to bring food. That didn’t matter, obviously, because the picnic was a ruse. We both knew we were there for one reason: dry humping.
We rolled around on the ground with our mouths attached and arms circling each other. Ricardo’s legs ended just below my knees.
After about 45 minutes of foreplay, we collected ourselves, wiped off the wild brush, and drove back to school. My plan was going as calculated, inching ever closer to my goal of cherry-popping.
I sat through the rest of my classes that day with my eyes glazed over, not realizing that there was an enormous grass stain on the back of my shirt. During my afterschool activity in the school’s fitness center, my cheerleader friend, Taylor, plopped down beside me while I was crunching to Abs of Steel.
“I saw you walking down the stairs after Chemistry,” she said. “I’m just wondering why you have that big green spot on your shirt. Where were you? You’ve been very weird lately.”
I lied. “I was sitting by the lake, watching the swans.”
She narrowed her eyes, trying to decipher my expression, but then she decided to drop the subject.
After my tense exchange with Taylor, I resolved to confess my plans to Amelia, our group’s queen bee. Out of everyone, I was sure she would understand my sexual quest. After all, she’d lost her virginity and been fucking her Physics teacher for months.
Amelia had an Irish boyfriend back at home in Pittsburgh. She missed him and had phone sex with him every night inside the payphone booth in the hallway. It seemed to me that Amelia had tried every kind of sex. I’d even watched her boyfriend finger her with one of his toes in the back of one of her Dad’s stretch Cadillacs that past October. Her father made custom cars for sports heroes and celebrities.
While I was fascinated by sex and had asked Amelia a million questions in the past year, I was also terrified. What if everyone found out about me losing my virginity and branded me a slut? My mother had always told me that women with loose reputations were the lowest of the low.
But my curiosity was too intense. I was dying to taste-test everything the way Amelia had.
During the break before evening study hall, I waited until I was sure that Amelia was alone in her room, and then I tore across the hallway, slamming her door behind me.
“I have something very grave to discuss,” my heart fluttered.
She plopped down on her bed, “OK, weirdo. Spit it out.”
“Amelia… I am having an affair.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“I’m fooling around with a taken man.” I swooned and wilted onto her roommate’s bed.
She rolled her eyes and walked to her closet, pulling out a pair of penny loafers.
I wanted her to dig deeper and listen to me. I longed for her to give me the absolute authority to exercise my inner slut.
“Amelia… I am about to fuck Ricardo.”
She dropped the penny loafers and whirled around.
“Mackenzie’s Ricardo?”
“Yes, that one.”
She shook her head, trying to process her shock.
“Hold on. What the hell? Why are you doing that?”
Shit, shit, shit. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.
“Um…I don’t know exactly. I guess I just really need to have sex. I need to have lost my virginity. I’m eighteen, you know. I mean, I can’t stay a virgin forever.”
Amelia looked down her nose at me. “I think you’re strolling down the wrong path, kiddo. This won’t end well.”
Two days later, as I was passing the cafeteria, Mackenzie burst out of the doors, sobbing. It was clear Amelia had betrayed my confidence.
Mackenzie had enough self-respect to break up with Ricardo. Apparently, she confronted him and discovered that we had gone on two secret dates. She delivered a note to me through Taylor.
“You hurt my feelings. I am in love with Ricardo, but now everything is ruined, and it’s yours and his fault. I thought you were my friend. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You are a mean girl. This is terrible. My mom says, ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater,’ so you better bet he will do the same thing to you that he did to me. And I won’t feel one bit sorry for you. You’re gonna regret it big time that you broke us up. You’re a bitch. Sad and mad, Mackenzie.”
I wish I could say that the letter reformed me and that I apologized to Mackenzie, vowing never to see Ricardo again, but I had sunk so far into my evil plan that her words didn’t even penetrate.
The girls told the whole school that I was a homewrecker, so Ricardo and I did the respectable thing and pretended we were in love. Being out in the open took most of the thrill out of being with him.
Nonetheless, I had committed to walking the path to Sexville, and I was damn well going to follow through.
About a week after the public announcement of our relationship status, I decided to be totally frank with Ricardo. We were driving in the rain to the same all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant.
“Ricardo, I want to do it with you.”
“Do it? Like have sex? Now?”
“Yes. Right now, Ricardo. I need you to do it to me.”
He smashed the gas so hard it lurched me forward. “You got it, babe. Let’s go to my house.”
He lived in a crappy neighborhood where chain-linked fences quarantined messy yards. He pulled open the screen door in the garage, and we walked into the living room, where an old woman was watching a telenovela.
“This is my granny,” he explained. “Abuela, we’re going back to my room.”
She didn’t seem to care much; she moved her mouth sideways and grunted. We walked past her, down the hallway, into his room. He turned the thumb lock on his door. We laid down on his bed, which had nubby sheets with the New York Yankees logo in a pattern alongside a baseball and bat. A shelf full of faux-gold trophies hung over his bed. He smelled of Drakkar Noir.
First base: He smothered me with kisses.
Second base: He slipped his hand under my shirt and wrapped his fingers around my red satin Victoria’s Secret bra. I wore a matching thong, having prepped in advance for my night of nookie.
Third base: His hand went into my panties and past my bush. But he stopped. “Shit… we can’t do this here because my Grandma might come in.”
I was both irritated and disappointed.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “Let’s just lay down in the closet.”
We crawled off the bed quietly, and I laid down in his small walk-in closet. My legs poked out like the dead witch in The Wizard of Oz. He unzipped his jeans and pulled down his boxers.
Surprisingly, his dick was huge. Not only long, but also thick.
Oh. My. God. That enormous thing has to go inside me?
Fourth base: With no additional prep, he pulled my pants down and plunged into me.
I winced as he forced his large penis into my dry, virgin vagina. He pumped up and down a few times in missionary position, and then, in a state of ecstasy, he shot his wad, collapsing on top of me.
I started to freak out. I should have used a condom! What if I’m pregnant? It really hurts down there. I didn’t think it was going to hurt this bad. I gotta get out of here. I can’t stand him being on me for one more second.
I tapped his shoulder, and he rolled off of me.
“Um, I have to go to the bathroom. Where is it?” I said, standing up.
He gestured toward the living room. I pulled up my pants. Something was dropping out into my underwear. Something wet. I scurried to the bathroom, totally mortified and scared that his grandmother might be there in the hallway, staring me down.
I tiptoed down the hall. I closed the door and sat on the toilet. When I peed, I could feel something emptying from inside me. I wiped and pulled the paper up to look at it.
It was a mixture of white fluid and blood.
EW! Sperm! And blood? Am I bleeding? No one told me I would bleed! Is this what they mean by “cherry” in “pop the cherry?” How disgusting. That was it, I wanted to go home.
I bled for the rest of the day, a kind of watery blood… I felt shitty. Sex was nothing like what people made it out to be. Is this what I had lost my virginity for?
I thought, I can’t believe that everyone goes so crazy over sex. It doesn’t even feel good. Making out is way better. Why don’t people just make out and then have sex when they need babies? Maybe I did it wrong?
It took about a year after I lost my virginity for me to get the hang of sex. As for Ricardo, we had sex only once more. The second time, he tied me up with toilet paper and told me not to move, which brought a fun twist to things.
However, after that, I broke up with him.
To spite me, he told every sportsman at school that I was into rough sex. For months, baseball players, soccer dudes, and football bros would chase me down the hallway chanting, “Whips and chains, girl! Whips and chains!”
Mackenzie was right, after all. I absolutely regretted breaking her up with Ricardo.
