A. Gliss

The Boy Who Cried

By A. Gliss

I first lose my virginity behind an IHOP dumpster. My manager and I are the only workers there. The restaurant at the edge of our small town is always deserted except for the post-church and high school theater rush.

“You sure you wanna do this?” he asks. He smells like flour, butter, cigarettes—and I want. His one-stud earring and gold-cross necklace, which he keeps twirling with untrimmed fingers, glimmer in the sun.

“I’ve never done this before,” I say, and this is enough. He is desperate to take, and I am desperate to give.

“No kissing, okay?” He says it like a question, but I know it’s a demand. I nod. He pulls his pants down, his belt buckle jingling, and enters me. Pain stabs through my body. I dig my fingernails into a cavity between the bricks. Weep holes, they’re called.

He spits on the ground. The asphalt, still so hot from the summer day, makes his spit sizzle. “Fucking faggot,” he says, his mouth still sounding full of saliva, underwater.

This past week, my manager had been undressing me with his eyes. I knew it would lead to this. He asked if I wanted to share a cigarette with him outside. Even though I’m young, I can still read between the lines.

I must be bleeding, but he doesn’t stop until we hear a car pull up at the front of the store. He slips out of me and in through the back door. With blood probably running down my leg, all I can think of is the emptiness where he used to be.

I stare at the red sunset, my pants around my ankles. My manager finds me like this. I must look ethereal against the backdrop of the setting sun that consumes my youthful soul, but he quickly looks me up and down and says, “Don’t come in to work again.”

The boy who cried wolf. We know the story. I imagine a different fable. One where, instead of the wolf attacking his flock of sheep, it attacks the boy, and his screams echo throughout the village as his flesh rips and blood pours, but the villagers still don’t believe him. Once a liar, always a liar, they think.

The next time I lose my virginity, it’s in a car’s backseat. We meet at the gym, and he teaches me how to use all the machines.

As he spots my bench press, I look up to see his erection poking through his gym shorts. He squats down next to my ear and hisses, “I know what you are,” and my arms are weak, ready to collapse. The bar is about to crush me, but he saves me at the last second.

“Let’s go,” he whispers, even though we’re the only two people in this section of the gym.

“Go where?”

“Out to my car.” He pauses and emphasizes each word, as if talking to a child.

We drive until we find a parking lot with its lights off. An abandoned warehouse, I think. Maybe my father worked here once. Maybe this is the place that drove him to drink himself to death.

He unbuckles and turns toward me, still smelling like the gym: salty and sour. We sit in silence.

“It’s not going to suck itself,” he says, then laughs violently. His head tilts back, his chipped yellow teeth like a lighthouse in the darkness.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” I say. The lie leaps out before I can stop it, but the second I see his eyes and smile widen, I know I’ve made the right choice. I evolve from a pathetic appetizer to a five-course meal.

“Let’s go to the backseat,” he says, then opens the car door. He doesn’t walk around to open mine.

I’ll do anything you ask, I think, but don’t know why. I have choices. I could have never gotten in his car. I could have ran out of the gym when he almost let me get crushed. When he hissed my identity like it was venom he couldn’t bear to taste. But I can’t.

Before he enters me, I say, “We should use lube. It’s supposed to help, I think.” I put on my best performance.

Either he doesn’t hear me or doesn’t care. He pushes his way inside, and my body clenches, but that only invigorates him more. I stare at the car windows, suddenly unable to look at his face anymore, wondering why they’re not fogging up like in the movies.

I only realize I’m crying when he wipes my tears. I turn to face him, and I smile, and I almost say, “I love you,” but bite my tongue, tasting blood.

The wolf dresses up as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma. She somehow doesn’t realize until the wolf’s teeth are upon her, swallowing her whole. I think she realizes long before she crawls into bed with the wolf.

The third time, I move up in the world: finally on a bed. I meet him when I drunkenly add twenty years to my dating app range.

Inside his house, he does not offer me a glass of water. There’s only one picture frame in his living room, but it’s face down. I keep waiting for him to use the bathroom so I can peek at it, but he never does.

The stairs creak as he leads me up to his barren bedroom. The blinds are closed. He pulls out a separate comforter from a box underneath the bed. His body betrays his age when he uses the bed to help him stand back up. He drapes the comforter on top of his other one; its curdled stench of sex hits me from all the way across the room.

“I’m a virgin,” I blurt out.

“Okay,” he responds, monotone. I want to leave. Sprint down the steps, not even yelling sorry behind me, but still checking that fucking picture frame in his living room before I leave. But I’m not sure I can ever leave.

He walks over and pulls my arm to the bed, violently, but pain and love are deeply entangled. Everything feels entirely rehearsed. Fake sex scenes I’ve seen in movies have more passion than this. I think of Brokeback Mountain, the first gay sex scene I ever watched, and imagine my cute mountain romance as we sleep in tents and watch the stars that feel, in that moment, created for our eyes to witness, the stale tin coffee on our tongues as we kiss, the creek we swim together in naked, trying to tackle one another, the--

He finishes, and already begins putting his clothes back on. “Early morning tomorrow. Sorry,” he says. I pull on my clothes and rush back outside to my car. I realize, too late, that I forgot to look at that damn picture frame. I’m about to type out a message, saying I think I left my keys, or when’s another time we can meet, but I see he’s already unmatched me.

A wolf begs a long-neck crane to remove a bone lodged in its throat. He promises a handsome reward. So the crane reaches its head down the wolf’s throat. The wolf’s teeth caress the crane’s feathers. The crane manages to dislodge the bone.

The crane asks for its reward.

“You’ve already got it,” the wolf says, “since I let you take your head out of my mouth. I could have snapped it shut any moment.”

The wolf’s right: stepping inside its mouth and leaving unscathed is a blessing.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth all blend together. The shave and shower before I arrive, the dirty sheets, the clothes scattered across the floor, the Quentin Tarantino movie posters, the one-pillow beds, the fire in their eyes when I reveal my trump card: a virginity that, in reality, has no weight, but they think it’s something that now belongs to them, and men love to own. But I live for that fire in their eyes. It keeps me warm. It sustains my survival.

The lie becomes real. Every time I say it, I believe it myself.

I now know why they call it a body count, though.

The wolf, ready for its next meal, sees a lamb. The lamb, however, looks so helpless as it plays in a river, with its tiny ears and short fur. So the wolf comes up with excuses to devour its prey: it stirred up mud, it told lies, it betrayed its family, it stole from another—all of which are proven false.

But it does not matter. The wolf has found its prey, and it will take a bite no matter what. I imagine a different story where the lamb says the perfect, magical words to have the wolf spare its life. That the river does not soon run with the lamb’s blood. That a wolf, even with its sharpened teeth, doesn’t feel forced to use them.

It begins as a cliché: with a look across the bar. Then two looks. And three. By the fourth, he finally walks over.
We check off the college conversation housekeeping list: major, classes, hometown.

“I’ve never heard of it,” he says when I say my hometown.

“It’s small. I had like 47 people in my graduating class.”

“Fuck that. How did you survive?” He asks it like a joke, but I can’t get the word out of my head: survive. I survived.

I am waiting for the question that always comes: “Wanna go back to my place?” And I always say no, thinking of the blood down my leg, the windows that wouldn’t fog, the reused comforter and face-down picture frame, the eyes of Uma Thurman with a cigarette in her hand.

But it never comes. We exchange phone numbers. He says, “Hope to see you around,” as he walks back to his friends, and I internally scream at myself that no, I am not in love.

A wolf dresses up in a sheep’s skin that had been cast aside. It approaches the flock of sheep, avoiding the vigilant shepherd who prevented it from getting close before. The shepherd grabs a knife, though, and enters the flock of sheep to get food for his next meal. The sheep he digs his knife into is the wolf in disguise.

So there are stories where wolves are punished. Where their disguises don’t work. I just wish I heard more of them.

The first date: a restaurant tucked away downtown underneath apartment flats, with tables packed too closely together that makes it almost impossible not to eavesdrop, plants in window sills, and walls displaying and selling local art.

The question will come here, I know. And I can’t bear to give up my body again as an offering, but I am so afraid to lose him. I shaved, just in case. But the question does not come. I practically skip back to my car. I parked five blocks away; no one had ever taught me how to parallel park.

Three months later, as we sit on his balcony drinking wine and watch moths swirl around the overhead lights, the question comes: “Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?” I ask.

“To have sex.”

The wine suddenly tastes more bitter than sweet. I gulp it down, buying myself time to think. If he said the words “make love,” I might have said yes. Stupid, I know. Foolish, I know.

The lie comes out with the wine’s bitterness: “I just want to take it slow since I’ve never had sex before.” I feel as if I must provide some sort of explanation, and this is the easiest one to give.

“Really?” he asks, his pitch rising.

I just nod. I can’t repeat the lie. I stare at the moths and finish off my glass.

In my college town, there’s a famous monument: The Black Angel. A nine foot statue that, supposedly, was once bright gold, but is now a charcoal black.

Of course, with any infamous haunted statue, myths are bound to surface. The most famous one: If you touch the angel when you’re not a virgin, you’ll die in a week. If you touch the angel as a virgin, you’ll receive good luck.

I remember a story a friend on my freshmen dorm floor told me: A girl, dared by her friends, touches the Black Angel statue. Seven days later, she goes missing. Posters appear everywhere throughout the city. Her big smile displayed across the posters follows you everywhere: at parks, bus stops, libraries, lecture halls, bars. An old lady, during her routine morning walk by the Iowa River, spots a floating severed leg stuck on a log. A kid finds a pile of teeth buried in sand on a beach. He brings a fistful to his mother, asking her how much money the Tooth Fairy will give him for all of them. The teeth are what allow authorities to identify her. Some posters are taken down. Some linger for months, crumpled up in piles of trash, under rocks, in bathroom stalls. Some are put up in new places. It takes many semesters for students to forget what her smile looks like.

We decide to visit the Black Angel, bored out of our minds. We’ve lived three blocks away from it for three months, but have never gotten around to it.

“I should have brought gloves,” I say as we walk there, the cold Iowa air biting my fingers.

“I’ll warm them up for you,” he says, taking my hands into his. He’s still teaching me that a touch can be soft, undemanding; that our bodies are not meant to be used as exchanges. Ever since the wine night, he has not brought up having sex, and I love him for that.

We reach the statue; it towers over us. The sky is a sheet of gray, as it has been for the past three weeks. I forgot what the sun looks like. Coins cover the statue’s base. Perhaps this is another myth, like dropping coins into fountains.

“Why are there coins?” I ask.

“It’s a way for non-virgins to still receive good luck without touching it. Wait.” He pauses, as if scripted. “You should touch it.”

I immediately regret coming here. I should have said it’s too cold; that we can just look up a picture on Google; that we should watch a movie instead.

“I’m good.”

“Why not?”

“It just creeps me out.” I envision my teeth, pulled out one by one, floating down the Iowa River. The missing posters scattered across town. What picture will they use?

He releases his hand from mine, its absence signaled by the cold sinking into my dry skin. “Come on. Give it a go. Not many people on this campus can touch it. Who knows what luck it’ll bring?” Why is my boyfriend so dead set on my “virgin” hands touching this tombstone?

“Virginity is just a social construct anyway. What does it even mean?”

His head snaps towards me. I refuse to meet his gaze. Instead, I stare up at the Black Angel’s hollowed eyes. “You said it’s important to you,” he says, and I fall further into the hole I tried to escape. “I thought that’s why we haven’t done anything yet. Right?”

My deep exhale creates a cloud in front of me. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m ready,” I say as a distraction, and it works. My boyfriend’s eyes brighten—but, almost instantly, darken into that familiar hunger I’ve seen many times before. My stomach sinks.

“Let’s go,” he says. His hands find mine with a tight squeeze. We leave, a newfound urgency marking our pace. We jaywalk across multiple streets, cars honking at us as they pass. With each block we pass, his hands squeeze tighter and tighter.

He begins gently as we climb into bed, our naked bodies silhouetted against the wall, hardening, the space heater humming in the corner since our apartment’s heating rarely kicked on, but I’m already sweating, his lips taste like lemon, his skin smells like Old Spice, his hot breath presses against my face as he asks, “Is this okay?” and I nod, I smile, he is slow, his lips not leaving mine, and I can’t believe I waited so long for this, and our cat scratches at the door, but we cannot escape this moment, as one of his hands slide up my stomach, my chest, and to my--

Throat, he pushes deeper, violently, and a pain stings my stomach, and I realize, now, of course, that he simply waited to show his teeth, he slaps me, he flips me over so my face is shoved into the mattress, he pins both my arms, and I bite down on the sheets as his tempo increases as he calls me a slut, a whore, a bitch, a liar, he pushes, and pushes, and pushes, the space heater hums, the cat scratches, my silence does not stop him, my clenching body excites him, I want to scream stop, stop, stop, stop, but is this a sacrifice a body must make for love, is pain and violence a part of this process, this must be the case, I wonder if he’ll wipe my tears, how long I’m able to hold my breath before suffocating, if he’ll still love me now that I’ve given this away, if the chase of this lie is the only thing that makes me valuable, if, if, if, if, if, if--

He finishes with a sigh, his breathing still heavy, my mouth sealed, he flops over onto the bed, says that was amazing, I say I need to go to the bathroom to wash up, and when I open the door, the cat dashes inside, I stare in the bathroom mirror, shocked there are no external marks on my body when there are so many internal ones, I wipe my dried tears, I shower and scrub, and scrub, and scrub, and once I’m done, I crawl back into our bed, his arms wrap around me, and as heat radiates off his body, I think to myself: I can manage through that again.

A. Gliss graduated from the University of Iowa studying English education and creative writing. Writing has always been his passion, and he still carves out writing time during the chaos of his first year as a high school English teacher. Whenever he's not reading, writing, or grading papers, you'll find him doing yoga or rewatching episodes of the reality TV show Survivor.