AFTER PROM

Man. After prom. Cocaine was all the rage that night. All the girls that had made my living hell and the guys that had ignored me for 5 years were suddenly my best friends. I had my high school bully, who once said she was going to kill me when I walked into maths class, feeding me a coke from her false nails. I happily accepted, forgetting the hell she put me through. That night 2 guys tried to rape me, one was the guy I lost my virginity to earlier that year, and one was his best friend. I am so fully aware that what they did was wrong but I can't help but blame myself because when they kissed me, I kissed them back so I was asking for it right?

But the consensual escapades, that is what I'm here to tell. I remember seeing Jak, clearly intoxicated, sitting in the corner of the garden. I went over to check if he was okay, he seemed lost. Jak was popular, a rugby player, he had sent nude photos to most of the girls in our year and blanked each one when face to face, but tonight i sat next to him and we talked. For a total of 30 seconds, before he shoved his hands down my pants, I laughed and asked him what he was doing, he didn't reply, just kissed me, i didn't stop him, I kissed him back, inviting his hands back down my pants. Before I knew it I was bent over the barbed wire at the edge of the garden. He put it in, but I didn't feel it, his dick was that small I couldn't feel anything. My second time having sex and as we were walking away I had to ask ‘’did we just shag?’’ We never spoke after that but his cum that dried up on my shoe stayed there for the rest of the night as a reminder.

Brayden wasn't from our school, he was with the two guys that doesn't know what no means. Apparently, cocaine makes me want to kiss people, so even though Brayden was not very nice to look at and quite frankly boring, when he lent in, I welcomed him. Brayden was clearly a lonely individual, I'm guessing his advances were usually met with rejection because he fell in love that night, I spent a vast portion of the night trying to get away from him, and he was persistent. I think he finally got the hint when he heard I had ‘kissed’ his two friends, something tells me his two comrades didn't tell him all the information about their time spent with me, anyway, this isn't about them. When Brayden heard, god forbid, I hadn't been loyal to the silent agreement that we were not to, shall we say, mingle with other humans for the rest of the night, well he tried to jump off a train bridge, cocaine is a crazy thing.

When people ask me about my after prom, I joke about my sex with Jak that I couldn't feel or the poor Brayden that had his heart broken by yours truly but I fail to bring up the only things that come to mind when I think of that night, the two things that made me realize what is actually waiting when you are at your most vulnerable.

Nyx Void is a nonbinary, neurodivergent writer and poet from rural Alabama and Wisconsin. Their published poem “Till Death Do Us Part” can be found in The America Library of Poetry’s 2020 contest collection Together.