My Virginity is a Piece of Cake
And You Can Eat it
Submitted by Hollie Ann Keller. Trigger warning: Mentions of rape, child abuse.
I lost faith in Christianity the same night I lost any cravings for cake. I sat underneath a white tarp at an all-girls church retreat, bulbs were strewn all over the black bars giving the illusion of purity. It was midnight.
The exhaustion played across the faces of the young girls as the rain echoed off the sickly gray outside of the dirty tarp, cold, icy water pouring between the overlapping corners of the tarp. There were fifty-some girls in attendance, but none of them sat with me. Thick odors of wet wood wafted quietly beneath the tarp while we waited patiently for the leader to arrive. A fuzzy moth, pink and yellow, dozed on the tarp.
There were murmurs of the ritual for that night; some called it the virginity talk, others the purity talk, and some didn’t dare to speak of it. While the boys from the previous retreat got to hunt, fish, and traverse the woods, we had to cook, clean, and suffer through “the talk”. The leader arrived bearing a cake. Her hair was slicked back in a wet ponytail, a saccharin smile painted across her face. The leader’s beady eyes were deceiving, she seemed she breathed innocence and knowledge, but the cloying scent of manipulation and shame filled the air too quickly…
