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I told myself that it wasn’t my fault.

Yvette

When I was nineteen, I briefly went out with a black girl from Pasco named Yvette. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a very sexy turquoise dress at a Pasco High School dance. When I introduced her to my brother Matt, I could tell he liked her too and I felt guilty about that.

I went to eat dinner at Yvette’s house and the food was totally different from what my family ever had. It was soul food. Her mom even called it that.

She was a virgin and we often talked about having sex and where we should do it.

My cousin Tana gave me a key to her apartment and I often stayed at her place when she was gone. Her fish needed to be fed.

Yvette and I eventually tried to have sex in Tana’s bed. It almost seemed too planned out and it was hard to get excited. Yvette said she wanted to do it, but we couldn’t make it work for some reason. I was nervous and started to have performance anxiety. Her vagina was slick but felt like a wall. Her hymen would not budge.

I didn’t see her for about a month after that. I knew it wasn’t working out without her having to tell me. But I saw her one last time at a party in East Pasco. It was at some DJ’s house—the kind with weeds and dirt in the front yard instead of grass. Some raw homemade-sounding hip-hop was blaring out of the living room stereo when I came in. Everyone looked at me suspiciously since I was the only white person there. Yvette led me to a dark bedroom and we went in. I couldn’t see a thing but I could hear her breathing hard. She reached into my pants and started jerking me off. My pants fell and I could sense her moving down my body as I stood there, surprised and unsure of what to do. I touched her head softly and felt her short blunt hair until I came.

Basement

Right before I moved out of my parents’ house to live with friends in Richland, I relegated my suitcase of porn to the basement, a narrow dirt-walled space that had been there since before the fire. I tried to bury it under some saggy boxes and moldy clothes, but my dad found it later. I claimed not to know anything about it. I said it probably belonged to Mark.

The Stilts

My first apartment was at the Stilts, the cheapest housing in the Tri-Cities, in uptown Richland. I lived there for two short months. The first month I was living with three other guys who had decided to move out right as I was moving in. I was the only one there for the second month. The one thing I remember about the Stilts was that it used to be an army barracks or something. There were six rooms in each apartment, with a small kitchen and bathroom. A lot of kids just out of high school lived there and there were always parties.

It was a period of time for me where I tried to exact revenge on the ghost of Pam. I still resented the fact that she was my first real girlfriend. Initially blinded by my pubescent desperation, I eventually realized she was simply a dullard. I regretted all the time I had invested in her, only to have her cheat on me. She instilled in me a precedent that I would constantly rehash—seducing people and then cheating on them. I was guilty of using bodies as I recorded sound bites in my brain—little quotes about how much of a nice guy I was, how cute I was—that I played back in my head to somehow validate my actions and make myself feel good. I was taking advantage of anyone I thought was as weak as me.

Holly

Holly was sixteen when I started going out with her. I was nineteen and trudging through my one and only year of community college in Pasco. I met Holly at the Palace and I was attracted by her combination of toughness and innocence. On the surface, you’d see a leather jacket, torn jeans, wrestling shoes, and jet-black hair spiked into a Mohawk. But she also had the sweetest dimpled smile and she would write mushy love letters to me and invite me to do stuff with her and her mom. She was also a big girl.

I feel bad saying this