Love Me: The Manoir

The First Sip of Vodka

I could have only been thirteen when I was invited to my first house party; it was mainly a pity vote because all of my other friends were invited but I was still anxiously excited for what was to come. This was what I had been waiting for ever since watching Clueless and marvelling at how mature those teenagers seemed at the party. I was ready for my initiation into the world of alcohol, boys, and heavy rap music.

Decked out in a choker and a black sweatshirt, I tried to hide my nerves as we walked into the house which was half full of people I could vaguely recognise from their heavily edited photos online. It was a house full of the local school's elite, and a breeding ground for the people who would later dominate the social scene.

One of the girls from my year drunkenly stumbled over, pointing at a litre bottle of vodka and telling us to pour ourselves a drink. Having no concept of mixing alcohol or drinking it, we poured a small amount in (can't have been more than a thumb's worth) and filled our glasses with lukewarm Coke which we sipped as we bobbed along to the music.

People were mainly stood outside as they networked, trying their best to get some hold onto the social ladder before it was pulled from under their feet. I imagined a small glow of warmth in my chest from the drink in my hand, but also a sickening amount of guilt about the lies I had told my mother that day,

To her knowledge I was at a sleepover where alcohol wasn't even a passing thought. I placed the glass down and went about the rest of my night sober, like all I had ever known.

My friends were better at playing the game of making friends than me. While they chatted to random boys who were outnumbered by the gaggle of girls around them, I was sat on the sofa with another girl while we chatted about nonsense. In reality, while we claimed we were having fun, we were both terrified of seeming alone or bored at this party. In reality, I couldn't wait till 11 o'clock so that we could leave.

A boy was standing in the corner of the room. This boy would later be the heartthrob of the year. I fancied to myself as a cast a gaze over at his perfectly chiselled face that when our eyes met he saw something special in me. In reality, he was probably just wondering who this weird girl with short hair was, and why she was taking up all the room on the sofa (poor party etiquette).

As we debriefed in the bedroom of my friend after the party, I listened as they spoke of all the people they met. I was in awe of how they had both managed to be so confident, but also so content with how their night had gone. I was beginning to think that maybe parties were not actually quite as cool as the movies had made out. Maybe I just wasn't designed for them.

I woke up at six in the morning the next day and convinced myself that I felt sick and hungover from the minute amount of alcohol I consumed. In reality, I was probably just sleep deprived. As I left feeling groggy, I wondered when I would next go to a party.

Unfortunately, it wouldn't be for another 2 years.

***

The void in my life which was not filled with boys (or parties) soon became filled with something a little darker - porn. I was introduced to porn in a rather unconventional way - someone had tagged another person on Instagram to the #eggplant which provided me with my first glimpse of twenty second clips of hard-core porn.

Now, I have always been fascinated with sex. The hard-core One Direction fanfiction smut I was reading before proves this, but this showed me what 'actual sex' was like. I felt both scared and rebellious at the same time, watching it only at the dead of night with the sound turned down low as I flicked through the images and videos. I allowed the faint tingling in my lower region to begin, and I would occasionally hump my way into exhaustion because the idea of actual masturbation terrified me.

I soon became filled with the intense desire to be - often brutally - pounded into by the men I would see in these videos. I had no notion of why exactly, but the idea excited me so much that it became part of my personality trait. Ella was someone who talked about sex all the time. Ella was someone who knew a lot about sex. At thirteen, I was already fantasizing about being used as a sexual toy for whoever wanted to use me, disguising it in an interest in BDSM which I would later learn I had no interest in at all.

These sexual thoughts moved me to an app which can only really be described as Tinder for kids. It was called Meowchat, and it let you swipe on the people you wanted to talk to. This was where my validation soon began to come from again. These boys would speak of the sexual acts they wanted to perform, dirty talking in the most cringe-tastic ways possible. I felt desired, I felt wanted, I felt like I could potentially be attractive enough for someone in this world to like me.

After introducing it to my friends at school, we made fake accounts with pornstars as our profiles, and in general the whole thing fizzled into one large joke which the teachers soon shut down with an iron fist. Like most things, it was a fad which satisfied a small amount of my craving to find some kind of purpose.