The first time you wear ripped pantyhose in public, you are seventeen. He is twenty-one and spends a weekend pressing lies about the universe into the column of your throat, the soft space between your thighs.
Pretty, pretty, pretty. Mine, mine, mine. His palms fit around your kneecaps in a way that makes you feel small, so you inhale as much of his cheap cologne and the damp bedroom-air as your lungs can hold, trying to take up more space—trying to play the role of Woman instead of Girl, Lover instead of Friend.
The third time you let him wander into your bed, he says you are like a drug to him; addictive, toxic. You think it’s romantic until his fingers are around your throat, the pretty brown eyes you fell for in the supermarket shut and hidden against your collarbone.
It has taken you eighteen years to realize that you don’t want to be someone’s drug, you want to be someone’s flower—you want to sit in a boy’s windowsill and be taken care of, not inhaled and stubbed out between thin sheets of paper on Saturday nights.
