When I am 16, I start dating a 28-year-old man. I don't realize at the time that we are dating. He is the director of a local theater group and I am a girl he cast in the role of the maid in every single play he produced. All plays have maids, it seems. Or at least, all plays with low royalty fees. I don't call him my boyfriend. I am not savvy enough to understand that the mechanizations of what is happening are a weird courting ritual.

He is tall and has black, curly hair and a mustache and is built like a linebacker. He is clever and we make each other laugh, and he invites me into his apartment where we smoke and drink and do things that make me revel in my sudden turn from a pink sweater- and lace-wearing nice girl to a bleached denim punk rocker who swears and smokes and hangs out with people who are almost 30 and drink room-temperature brandy from tub glasses. I go from having seen one penis to pretending not to be embarassed when he plays porno movies for me (that he says he only got for his brother's bachelor party).

I didn't recognize then that he was trying to teach me, trying to work up the nerve to progress into what was ineffably wrong. I am only 16, but I have a pair of pert double D's (oh those boobs that defied gravity, how short-lived they were) and can get into bars if I am wearing sunglasses. My eyes, he says, always gave me away. He tells me that my body looks 26 but my eyes are too wide, too innocent, too virginal. I make people think bad thoughts, he says. I laugh, thinking this is a joke. It has to be a joke, right? Because that's what kind of friends we are. Joking friends who watch his porn movies and quip about technique. It is the first time I ever understand that oral sex can be performed on a girl, that it was even possible. He tells me I am repressed and that really, I just need to have sex and everything would be better. Pop that cherry. Make him proud.

He does not say that it should be sex with him. In fact, it shouldn't be sex with him. No, he had standards. I did not meet them. In fact, he jokes about my complete lack of sex appeal.  When coaching me through my roles in his productions, he sits in the front row of the theater and yells, "Be fatter! Be sloppier! Can you unbutton your shirt so we can see your stomach?" and I flip him the finger and tell him to go fuck himself and, inside, want to die for being so hideous. After performances, back at his apartment, he pours me a brandy and then coaches me on the proper method to give a blow job. He teaches me about relaxing my throat and gives me a carrot to practice on, visibly wincing when my braces snag the vegetable. There are no warning flags, because how can it be? I am fat. A fattie. He is not interested. He tells me that my lips are blow-up-doll lips and sometimes he changes from sweat pants into jeans in the middle of the evening. When I use his bathroom, he always reports that he is listening to me pee.

Before anything ever happens, he tells me that we can no longer see each other. I'm confused as hell. I don't know what's going on. I thought we were friends? No, he says, I make him feel like he's 17 again and yet he's not interested in me and I must leave. I am just a silly little girl and he was just letting me entertain him because he felt sorry for me because I was fat. When walking out the door of his apartment, I announce to his driveway that I'm never going to eat again, and for several months, I almost do exactly that, existing on single apples and eating half bowls of Special K with my own baby spoon so that it turns to mush before I can finish. He sees me walking to school every morning (probably because I purposely choose a route that passes his apartment) and afterward leaves a message for me to call him. I do, and he picks me up and takes me to a cemetery, reiterates that I should have sex and it would fix my head. I ask if this is supposed to be an offer. He tells me that his biggest fear is that one day he's going to turn around and I'm going to be standing there naked. Then he tries to kiss me, tongue snaking through my lips, smoky and slimey, exactly not how it is in a John Hughes movie. I push him away and walk home crying.

I spend the next year believing that I am hideous, a freak, someone that no one in their right mind would find attractive. I lose weight through Puritanical means. I punish myself. I decide that I am going to become a spinster. I make a plan to dedicate myself to career and push ideas of romance out of my mind. I am always horny. When I masturbate, instead of just picturing a fantasy man, I also picture myself in a perfect, slightly shorter body with much better skin and smaller boobs.

After a year, someone tries to set me up on a blind date, describing the potential as being a younger version of the 28-year-old director. I go. He is tall and has black, curly hair and a mustache and is built like a linebacker. We spend the entire night driving from make-out spot to make-out spot. He touches my face as though it is fragile as a porcelain doll and when he puts his hands on my body, I feel grounded and contained within my skin. It is mine and is it within reason and it is incredible. He sticks his hands into my pants and tells me that his greatest need is to see me naked. Somewhere in my brain, the vault containing all of the director's words is opened and one by one, they start to float away. —Weetabix