Flesh Wounds (excerpt)

"I never romanticized virginity."

I never romanticized virginity.  I was too fat to be allowed to imagine that anyone would desire me and too brainy and weird and steeped in the unemotional narratives of anthropology textbooks to believe that virginity was somehow magical.  Simultaneously I was too queer, although I didn’t have that word for it yet, to do anything in regard to the kinds of swoony, moony, straight teenagers in love on prom night stories I heard and read except wrinkle my forehead and feel a vague, uneasy distaste.

It wasn’t that I never had feelings about boys.  I did, very much so.  I felt that I wanted them all to want me so that I could prove that I was worth something in what seemed eternally to be the winner-takes-all sweepstakes of successfully playing the game of being the right kind of female person to be important.  If occasionally I succumbed to the emotional contagion of having a semi-romantic feeling about one or two specific boys, it was mostly because I had decided that the boy in question was one I would prefer to want me.   The smart ones were at the top of the list.  Ones I knew and had good conversations with were also at the top of the list.  What they looked like barely registered, which made me capital-W weird in yet another way.  It wasn’t that I didn’t know what boys I was supposed to like, or what boys were always the subjects of swoony lunchroom gossip, or what sorts of teenaged boymeat was offered up on the cover of Tiger Beat and so on as a lure to girls with whom I shared a demographic.  They just weren’t interesting.