The summer I turned sixteen, it was New Orleans August hot. Double-D breasts boiling, thighs scorching, buttocks burning hot. 

I wore a crown of sweat on my forehead as I walked past the swimmers and towards the platform diving board at the Tulane University pool. I would show these swimmers I was fearless despite my blistering infamy.

I walked past tall Mike whose hands had wandered under my bra when his girlfriend was out of town. Past his little brother Tommy, who’d sucked my ear after I’d slapped him. Past blond Dave my girlfriend had christened “Dreamcake,” who’d made me come and fall into lust with despite Amy, his fiancée. Past Pete who I wouldn’t kiss because he was nice. I counted the platform steps the way I’d tallied the boys in my diary. I felt their eyes on my ass, my ass firmed by riding my Flandria three miles up Saint Charles Avenue to get to the pool. My ass, the best part of my body, better than my obnoxious big breasts. I paused before diving as the taunt “Eat me, Oatmeal” flew up and pricked. The stupid nickname Tommy had given me because he was protective of Pete. Pete had been the kindest of all the boys, even after that night at the Boot, where we got drunk with Tommy, who got into a fight with Pete. Tommy had nearly killed us speeding in his car. 

Just before I dove, I thought about having offered up my virginity like the sweetest petit four of all the petit fours in the bakery to my mother’s thirty-something-year-old friend in May, a month before my absent schizophrenic father’s suicide. How my unrequited grief pirouetted me into the arms of all these boys verging on men. These boys with girlfriends off to the side. These boys I returned to despite the humiliation of being “one of those girls.” Humiliation being a part of an addict’s dynamic. And I was addicted to attention, something I never got at home.

At the edge of the board, I breathed, raised my arms over my head, holding my hands in a flat hand grab the way Pete had shown me, and dove. My body pierced the cool water. Surfacing, I swam to the ladder and climbed out of the pool, not making eye contact. On the bike ride home, I felt the woman’s anatomical saddle between my thighs, my crotch pressed into the cock-like black leather nose, and I pedaled hard.

Those boys were lost to me now.