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What Boys Are Made Of
If you knew my high school, you wouldn’t be surprised by the allegations against Kavanaugh either
Every night this week I’ve had nightmares and insomnia. I’ve been sleeping badly for 25 years, but constant nightmares are new. Last night, I dreamed that I was in a small town and some men catcalled me, so I lured them into a basement with promises of sex. My co-conspirators were waiting to chain them, chop them up, and sell their meat and bones to local butchers. I didn’t exactly want this to happen, but I didn’t exactly not want it to.
This week, I’ve been thinking about moments in my teen years that I thought I put aside long ago. I remember a family dinner with a… friend?—hard to say — who was a bit older than me and had gone off to college at a party school. He got drunker and drunker as the evening went on, and when we were the only ones who hadn’t gone to bed, he took hold of me and tried to kiss me. His chest as I tried to push him away felt like tensile steel. He swayed, too drunk to insist; I was very, very lucky. His belligerence boded ill.
If you think I’m exaggerating, I went to a dance with the same guy’s brother, and he, stone-cold sober, made out with me very aggressively before we got in the car to go. He reached up my dress and into my body without permission.
