Pricked by a Prick

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My car stuttered into traffic, sucking the exhaust fumes of a big-ass F-150 like it was its prison bitch while the playlist I made for your belly crawled through the speakers begging for permission to exist. But just like that, "Sweet Caroline" was decapitated, leaving nothing but an uncomfortable silent squirminess for where life had taken me—where you had taken me—and how I allowed it to happen. I looked at you, but you never looked back. I was a swallowed shadow, barely treading water… but not this day.

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It all started after my glow-up the summer before my junior year of high school. As an only child, I grew up on a steady diet of Bill Gothard seminars, Left Behind Tim La Haye videos, and enough long denim skirts and prudish red polos to clothe a thousand Duggar girls and suffocate a landfill. Life was a FEMA death camp of choking do’s and don’t's: no kissing until marriage, but after marriage a girl must pivot on a dime and perform like an insatiable freak in the sheets, willing to get it on whenever her hubby launches his starched khakis and bleached tighty whities onto the ceiling fan. Drinking anything stronger than constituted grape juice was a dire sin. In fact, almost anything that brought a smile to your face or induced a laugh was considered idol worship. Don’t get me wrong, I adored my parents; they were happy, sweet, simple people who unfortunately marinated in a version of God that forced shackles onto people.

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They were en route to a homeschooling convention when a semi-truck whipped in front of their van and killed them both instantly. Mom’s sister, Betsy, took me in. Her voice was a combination of gravel and sandpaper mixed in a slurry of gin and cigarettes. “What the fuck?” she said, holding up one of my Turn or Burn tee shirts. “This will never do. I’m trashing these shitty Handmaid’s Tale clothes for something that won’t keep you a virgin until you’re ninety-seven.”

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She raided her savings account, spending several thousand dollars on my new wardrobe: a tossed salad of satiny slip skirts, strategically ripped jeans, strappy sandals, and tight cropped tees.

 

“If you got good tits, show ‘em off before gravity takes hold and they start nibbling at your belly button.”

 

Next she hauled me to an upscale beauty salon that smelled of Tom Ford’s Black Orchid and sweaty sex with someone named Rico. Here, I was warmed up like a plate of truffle butter linguini with a crystal flute of champagne and a lavender-scented foot massage before they transformed my mouse-brown tresses into a soft, golden tone. Afterwards, we traipsed over to the MAC counter where this snotty little man—who had the persona of a dyspeptic ferret—gave a snarky tutorial on the proper method for lining my lips and smoking my eyes. By the time we were finished, I didn’t recognize the gorgeous girl staring back at me in the mirror. It took the whole summer before I settled into my new skin. I was a wolf raised by groundhogs, accustomed to excavating holes and diving into them at the first sign of secular danger, consuming a bland diet of unseasoned vegetables. But Aunt Betsy taught me how to sink my teeth into the joy of living like a carnivore and the proper way to howl at the moon, aka cussing and how to do it. “No! How many times do I have to tell you a jerky guy is not called a ‘penis head’—he’s called a ‘dickhead!’”

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By the time school started, I knew my way around “shit,” “pricks,” “bitches,” and “blow me.” I could cuss on command with the linguistic clarity of a wizened drunken sailor. I reskinned myself in Aunt Betsy’s image. Did I still love my parents? Absolutely. Did I miss them? Hell no! I was finally set free, and when school started, I settled into my pack—a cluster of hot chicks who weren’t afraid to howl in the dark and draw blood if attacked.

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I don’t want you to think I was one of those losers who peaked in high school and still recites its alma mater ritualistically as a bedtime prayer. But when I say that high school was the best time of my life, I’m not lying. There’s nothing better than scraping by in life with zero accountability, no concern for how you’ll pay your mortgage or how you’ll be able to afford health insurance. The only thing that concerned me was how my period made me look like a middle-aged woman named Carol who had a FUPA the size of a football field flapping inside her JC Penney slacks. But stewing about hormones and how I morphed into a puffy, pimply, petulant troll every twenty-eight days was child’s play compared to what I endured when I went away to college.

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I was working as a cashier at the university bookstore when this smug asshole clad in a vintage AC/DC concert tee bellied up to my register like it was the last call for alcohol and drawled with a cream cheese smile.

 

“Darlin’, you wear facial hair better than any girl I’ve ever seen.”

 

It was the second day of my period, I had a crop of pimples sprouting on my face like it was harvest time, my stomach likely resembled an inflatable device, and I was one cash register ring away from crying. I bit my lower lip and swiped his credit card, my tears a liquid wall behind my eyes. He noticed.

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“Oh my God.” He paused and looked at my name tag. “I’m so sorry, Ellen. I was just joking. I didn’t think you’d take me seriously. You’re like the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen and I got nervous and acted like a jerk. Can I take you to Carmelo’s on Saturday and make it up to you?”

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I looked up at him, embarrassed that he’d caught me committing a rare act of vulnerability. I deserved stoning, but then he smiled at me. It started in his toes—this golden light that sailed upward and once it docked in his eyes, it was as if God himself had commanded the sun to take a hike because he discovered something that beamed brighter. I handed him my number and he shot me a blinding white-bleached smile, walking away with the swagger of an alligator who had just swallowed someone’s favorite house pet.

 

For weeks, my iPhone was a pancake sizzling on a griddle. I flipped it nonstop, but it remained soggy in the middle and burnt at the edges; he never texted me about dinner at Carmelo’s. It took him two months before he showed his carefully curated face. He slammed a two-hundred-pound aerodynamics textbook on the counter.

 

“Sorry I never called. Mechanical engineering has my balls in a vice and won’t release ‘em until I get an ‘A’ in the class.”

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His eyes were the same shade as the ocean and his lazy crooked grin was a dangerous detour through a mountain pass. I faked an I-don’t-give-a-crap smile and handed him his change.

 

“Here ya go. Good luck keeping those family jewels from getting squashed by the hydraulic press.”

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He looked like a lizard that had a juicy fly ripped from his mouth.

 

“Wait, can I call you? I really want to take you out and show you off!”

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I looked above his head at the clock on the wall because I knew if I gazed into those stormy-sea eyes of his I’d crumble like a sandcastle on the shore.

 

“Show me off? Seriously? I’m not some prized heifer you can parade in an arena to make you look good. I don’t even know your name; you’re listed as ‘random dude from the bookstore’ in my phone contacts. You better get out of here before your nutsack gets crushed to death.”

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“It’s Cooper,” he said, his voice dropping an octave into that liquid wall of fake sincerity. “And I’m not a bad guy, Ellen. I’m just a guy who’s really bad at this. Let me start over. No prized heifers, no showing off. Just pasta. Please?”

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My heart was ice in the Sahara. How could it not melt? His face was choir-boy earnest, beaming with a purity that would have made the Virgin Mary weep. So I went to that dinner, slurped linguini and clams, and guzzled down enough booze to gag a wino. I had a fake ID and wasn’t afraid to use it. Cooper laughed. “You’re only eighteen! Shit! I could say you’re my daughter. I’m twenty-six. If we lived in Alabama, I could have been a parent at the age of eight.”

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I tucked this information into a double-secret compartment inside my brain and wrapped a chain around it. Aunt Betsy would have a coronary if she discovered his age. She’d probably call him Gramps and offer him applesauce and a fresh set of Depends for his trip home. But he started college late, at the age of twenty-three. He was an auto body repairman, a genius with a blowtorch actually. But it wouldn’t get him a nice house in the suburbs and a country club membership, so he decided to pursue an engineering degree.

 

“Hey,” he said after one too many gin and tonics. “I sure would like to do a little work on your body, tighten a few screws and take you for a test run.”

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One year later, I was a looted house and he was a squatter who knew how to twist the law and words to his advantage. I wept after I gave him my virginity one cold winter night. But he was a cigar Indian statue, eyes glazed with a frosty judgmentalism so thick and heavy that his eyeballs could have shattered in his skull.

 

“Stop. You’re making me feel like shit. You know you really are immature. Sex is what two people do when they love one another. I told you this is forever, but you’re acting like an infant making me question everything! I’m going out for a drink; you can let yourself out.”

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Jim Bob Duggar’s face flashed in my mind and boy was he ever pissed. I wanted to bury myself in a hole and not emerge until my shame died of old age. I felt like a prison slut and the only way to make it right was to marry my jailer.

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Our relationship continued on for two more years and I was a barnacle clinging to his hard surface with a crusty desperation, laughing off his insults and making excuses for his study sessions with Charlie, a female Colombian engineer with mile-long legs and boobs like cannonballs. He’d come back red and sweaty, smelling of bourbon and her Versace Crystal Noir. I’d greet him with a kiss and he’d recoil.

 

“Dang girl, you’ve got butthole juice breath. Go brush your teeth.”

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I erased myself and became someone I didn’t recognize—mushy bottom-of-the-shoe dog shit. It hit me the night when we were all gathered in Nottingham Pub for a birthday party and I reached across the table and grabbed a hunk of Devil’s food cake. He scanned my size-two body, his grin thin and weak, like a strand of thread holding up the hem of a pair of shorts, and punched the cake right out of my hand.

 

“Babe! Don’t eat that! Bulging tuna thighs are NOT attractive.”

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I shoved the cake in his face, flipped him the bird and stormed back to my apartment, ignoring his drunken pleas of “Come back, babe. I was just kidding.”

 

I plugged my ears with my fingers to drown out the sound of Lana Del Rey’s "Diet Mountain Dew" trailing behind me. The only playlist running through my head was "What would Aunt Betsy do?” I could hear her death-rattle raspy refrain: “I’d dump his sorry ass and get on with my life.”

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The next morning, the sun was a clinical, blinding white—the kind that stripped the bullshit off everything it touched. I climbed into my car, but I wasn't the prison bitch sucking exhaust anymore. I was a salvage operator on wheels, heading to his place to reclaim the life I’d left marinating in his auto body lies and butthole juice insults.

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When I got there, he wrapped me in his puke-stained arms and whispered in my ear, his breath reeking of vodka and a 2 AM Taco Bell run.

 

“Babe, I feel so bad that you got upset over my stupid joke. Everything about you is perfect. Seriously.”

 

I could feel the plaster in my wall begin to crack. The nails popped and the two-by-fours shook—oh no, I was going down in a pile of rubble—but then Cooper spoke and just like that the wall was fortified.

 

“You know something? There's nothing I’d rather do right now than bone you over the kitchen sink.”

 

Jim Bob Duggar flashed in my mind once again, his LEGO-man hair vibrating with holy rage as he frantically tried to shove a three-ring binder of scriptures between us to maintain a God-honoring side-hug. But for once, Jim Bob's purity patrol didn't make me feel like dog shit—it made me realize that even a cult leader had higher standards than this lizard.

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What about my standards? I looked at Cooper—I mean really looked at Cooper—and I shuddered. His crusty eyes were lizard scales; in fact, his whole face was one penicillin resistance away from complete demolition.

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I stepped out of his puke-stained reach, my size-two body suddenly feeling like it was made of industrial steel instead of mushy dog shit. He stood there, swaying, his lizard eyes blinking in the clinical light of my new reality. He thought he was about to bone me over the sink, but he was actually watching the barnacle detach herself forever.

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“Adios, Jeffrey Epstein,” I said, my voice as steady as a mechanical engineer reading a blueprint. “I’m vacating the island. Go find a new victim. I’m taking my life back.”

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I walked out, and for the first time in two years, the stuttering car started on the first try. I didn't look in the rearview mirror. I just breathed in the air—air that finally smelled like Black Orchid and nothing else.