Metallica T-Shirt.

Confirmation bias.

The sun is getting lower in the sky. The war paint in our school’s colors is starting to feel uncomfortable on my cheeks. Out of anyone else on the tennis team, I’d had the longest match against the rival school. I’d won. Barely. And on any other day, I would’ve gladly gone home, made myself a giant sandwich, and fallen asleep promptly. But my evening was only just beginning.

It was my band’s second year in a row being asked to play a set during the homecoming night festivities which meant for the second year in a row it was our biggest show even if it was only the people in the immediate vicinity who were paying attention. Speakers projected our tunes all across the playground and out into the field. Hot dogs, brownies, and lemon squares in the distance were catching the attention of my stomach. We’d concluded our original songs already where I really botched a guitar solo. But a string of a few covers ending with half decent renditions of “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” were elevated by crowd participation. 

Now in our second year of high school, I had greater familiarity with the boys across the street through combined clubs and electives. I had enough familiarity to know that Ryan loitering by our performance area all while we were packing up was not a good thing. 

Ryan was the undisputed class clown. A little chubby. Filthy rich. But like a lot of kids at the school it was old money so he wasn’t obnoxious about it. In his view, there was nothing to be obnoxious about. I’d already threatened to kill him in front of many spectators the previous school year for starting a rumor about me. And my threat was so graphic and convincing I got detention for it (I admitted to my history teacher that I’d taken an interest in medieval torture techniques). He saved face by telling everyone that it was a turn-on. “Anna the Impaler” had stuck though. 

“What do you want?” I asked with all the attitude expected of a fifteen year old girl. 

“I bought you a Metallica t-shirt,” he said getting straight to the point. It was in his hands. I could tell by the label on it that he’d gotten it from Hot Topic. 

“I like Linkin Park,” I said. 

“But you also like Metallica.” 

“I don’t accept gifts from boys.”

“Why not?”

“My dad said that to boys that means I’d owe you something.”

“Wouldn’t you?” he said with a grin. I didn’t dignify it with a response. “Come on. Just take it,” he insisted. 

“No.”

Ryan went to Northwestern. He’s still rich. 

My intellectual introduction to sex was much like what I wrote about in First Lesson. It was just as fantastical as it was brutally honest. Pornographic but factual in its intent. It lacked the cream and sugar that successful indoctrination necessitates. Far too bitter for a twelve-year-old. Or was it? As a piece of fan fiction, it was probably written by girls not much older than I was. Their indoctrination was already well on its way. 

Its contents stated that sex in our male world was an expression of violence. And the male culture that seeped through the walls of my school for girls stated that I would learn to like it and that this was called “maturity.” 

Getting my first production internship came out of nowhere. It was only a couple weeks until final exams sophomore year of college. I still worked the door most nights at a hole-in-the-wall nightclub sometimes until 5am. The interview was a quick one. They asked if I could hang lights. I said yes, I’d hung lights for all the plays I did in high school. They asked if I knew anything about audio. I said yes, I was in a band. They asked if I was good for a specific start date. I said yes, I’d find a way to take my last two exams early. 

I quickly learned that I was not the production manager’s first choice. The person they wanted had dropped out so late they didn’t have time to do an extensive search for someone else. And now the worst thing had happened: He had a woman in his ranks. 

I walked into a production environment that was ten times as big as I’d ever seen before. The lights I’d dealt with in high school were antiques compared to what I was rolling off the trucks. I wanted to learn everything about the gear. Learn how it worked. But when it came time to get started for real, I was sent off by myself to move an impossibly large pile of junk from one end of the field to the other. I was given no tools to do so. It took me all afternoon. When I came back the next day at 7am sharp, the production manager had a look of surprise on his face. 

“You came back for more?” he asked. “I was trying to get you to quit.” 

It didn’t take me long to kick and scream my way up to speed. The resident lighting designer worked as a professor during the school year. He was soft spoken, took pity on me, but he appreciated my enthusiasm and the speed at which I could absorb new information. He also appreciated that I didn’t spend any time horsing around.

Then amongst the guys working who were closer to my age, Stephen broke my habit of eating lunch in solitude. He saved me a seat at the table. His eyes didn’t glaze over while I enthusiastically spoke about Star Wars. By our opening night with an artist who drew in ten thousand people, I was the standout crew member.

But I was still sent off to do backbreaking tasks by myself, tasks that still cause me back pain to this day. Moving barricades. Lugging around feeder cable. Lifting lights the size of my entire upper body. Whenever it rained, I’d still be sent on my own to shovel out all the mud and mulch from the stage pit while others sat around drinking beer and stringing up women’s underwear that had been left behind at shows all over the backstage hallway. I told the production manager to take it down but was ignored. I told the general manager to tell the production manager to take it down. All the guys ended up doing so. I became “Anna the Prude.” They loudly spoke of their curiosity about when Stephen was going to “dick her down.” I was the only “her” around. I stopped taking his saved seats.

I assigned myself the task of reorganizing all of the lighting gels. It was well into the summer and the lighting supply closet was a mess. It didn’t take me long to eat lunch so I was accomplishing it during my breaks. One day, Stephen came in. 

“You’re not even going to look at me?” he asked.

“I don’t need your help with this.” 

His hands closed around my waist, tightening and roaming the more I tried to move. 

“I swear to god I will end your fucking pathetic life,” I said. It didn’t have the same icy confidence that got me detention in high school. I was terrified. I was terrified that he could tell I was terrified.

I don’t know what he told everyone else. But from their behavior, I can only assume he said things went further than they actually did. 

Stephen enlisted in the United States Navy. 

I never thought about dating. The concept seemed very removed from my reality. Dating was something other people did. Not me. Expecting me to date was like expecting a nun to date. Or a Jedi to date. It’s just not something that was supposed to happen. I never wanted to feel a man touch me. But at the start of my senior year of college, those first few weeks when there are plenty of parties and get-togethers to go around, a few of my acquaintances in the Black Student Union seemed horrified at my response to inquiries about my love life. 

“Don’t you think you should at least put yourself out there?”

“No,” I said. 

But I was feeling at the top of the world. I’d made it to senior year, after all. And by this point I was used to being a bit of a chaperone for women I went to parties with. Phone? Keys? Wallet? Do you know that man? Here, drink some water.

This is how a group of us ended up at a warehouse party in Brooklyn, the kind I tell freshmen not to go to because absolutely nothing good goes on there. I agreed to dress up but only a little bit. A necklace was worn. I swapped out a sweatshirt for a sweater. 

Situated in a corner and making note of all possible exits, a man comes up to me. 

“Bored?” he asked.

“Supervising,” I said. 

He went to a different college but this was a combined party advertised through word of mouth in organizations for black students from multiple campuses. We spoke about soccer for around ten minutes before he asked me to dance.

“Nope,” I said. 

“Your number then.”

“Nope,” I said again. 

“You’ve taken up several minutes of my time.”

“Then I won’t take up any more.” I gestured to the many other women at the party he could be talking to. He walks away. 

Later in the night he comes back seeming to be in a better mood. But there was enough alcohol around that it should’ve made me suspicious. 

“Hey, can I talk to you about something?” he asked, motioning to a hallway outside the main room. “Music is too loud.” I walked with him. I was expecting an apology. 

I narrowly avoided my first kiss.

“I don’t consent to this,” I recited from all the lectures. But it felt like I was saying it from the passenger seat of my own body. 

“If you meant it you would’ve looked me in the eye.” 

I put up enough of a panicked struggle that a couple of women passing by interfered. I should’ve thanked them but I was already outside. It would take me several blocks wandering around those warehouses to wave down a taxi. 

I was twenty-four when I got my first job as a music venue production manager, one year before my goal of twenty-five. I ran a tight ship. Tyreek ran a tight ship too as a bar manager. I didn’t want to overreact the day he called me pretty even though the compliment had all the effect of being held at gunpoint. I deployed the socialized defense tactic. I smiled. I then spent the next month doing my best to avoid crossing paths with him. Each time I failed, the compliments grew more vulgar. I smiled less. 

By the time he confronted me in the venue stairwell, I knew I had pissed him off. I’d run out of smiles and I’d run out of excuses. I’d told him no. Told him to stop speaking to me. The confrontation ended with him calling me a “fucking bitch,” a hard shove into the wall, and me recovering enough to only stumble down a couple of the steps. 

I quit a week later just shy of my twenty-fifth birthday. 

It was a great setup: Picnic tables, string lights, a few food trucks, and the darkening view of a sprawling farm. The beer garden was a side business the family who owned the farm had started. Molly and Leia, friends from high school, sat across from me with their drinks. I’d just gotten water and some mac and cheese. I never drink alcohol and nobody ever complained about having a designated driver. 

“I think he might be the one,” Molly admitted about a man that last I heard she had been on the outs with. “I really want him to be the one,” she amended. Leia gushed about it. Asked a few crude questions about his sexual prowess. 

“Have you ever said no to him?” I asked. 

“What kind of question is that?”

“Have you?” I pressed again. “Something big? Something small?” 

“We’re very much on the same page. But yes, I can say no to him,” Molly said.

“But have you?” 

Leia smoothly changed the topic.

She broke up with him a few months later.