I was a freshman in high school in San Francisco, California. To this day, I don’t know why we moved there, but we did. It was brutal for me. I’d always been the smallest person in my class. I’d been teased all through elementary school for my size. I was kind of shy, not shy like afraid shy, but more socially shy. My childhood had sucked. To put it bluntly, my dad was an asshole. He wasn’t physically violent too often, but he was emotionally and psychologically abusive to my mother. He berated her constantly, to the point she was almost invisible. She had zero self-esteem and never spoke up for herself.

I was an inconvenient afterthought for my dad. When I was really little, he ignored me, and I thought that was hard. Until I got old enough for him to notice me. Somewhere in middle school, he started treating me just like my mother. I was too smart and that was stupid. Or so he said. Everything was stupid about me, according to him.

I never had any friends because there was no way I was going to bring them home. When I got to high school in the small middle of nowhere town where we lived in California, I managed to make one or two friends. Then, I was ripped out of that little town and plunked down in San Francisco at a hip, big city high school.

It was no surprise to discover I didn’t fit into the new social order. I was still tiny and hadn’t grown into myself at all. I had no curves, none to speak of. You could hardly tell I was a teenager. I didn’t fill out until my junior year. There I was, shy with hardly any friends and with a mad crush on one guy. Floyd Lewis was dreamy and cool and everything I wasn’t. He was a star football player. I told myself he was worthy of a crush because he was smart too.

I blushed every time I even looked at him. I was that socially awkward, and I knew he wouldn’t pay attention to me. My nickname was Shorty, and I was the butt of plenty of jokes. I supposed I was passably pretty, but it seemed near impossible to be objective about myself in hindsight when it came to adolescence. All I knew was it was a socially lonely time and emotionally stressful.

Then, my crush asked me to the school dance.

There I was, little Lucy Caldwell, and the cutest boy in the school asked me to the dance. I was nervous, but beside myself and stupidly excited. Those few days of bubbly joy and I-can’t-quite-believe-this-is-happening looked so ridiculous after the fact. Floyd was tall and strong and had girls swooning over him in the halls all the time. As word spread like wildfire through the halls of our high school that he’d finally graced one lucky girl an invitation to the dance, I got plenty of dirty looks from other girls. I didn’t really have any friends, so it didn’t sting as much as it might’ve. I ignored them.

I was floating on that silly, heady joy that only a girl who desperately wanted to fit in could feel when she thought maybe, just maybe, she might be.

The evening of the dance arrived, and even though I had worried Floyd wouldn’t actually show up, he did. He even came to the door with flowers. He was quite charming with his slicked back brown hair and flashing dark eyes. He gave the flowers to my mother, earning him a glare from my father. In hindsight, I don’t think my father knew how to interact with him. My father almost refused to let me go to the dance.

For once, my mother stood up for me. She begged him to let me have that one small thing. So I went. I couldn’t say it was wonderful. I was too nervous for it to be anything really.

For the dance itself, Floyd tugged me around on his arm. I was more like a piece of his clothing than a person. He socialized, he laughed, he let other girls fawn over him, but he was gracious and polite. After the dance, he took me to a park where I’d never been and kissed me. My memories were messy and blurry. I was too overwhelmed with nervous anxiety to really feel much. I had no experience to judge his kissing. I was definitely an entirely inexperienced kisser, and I didn’t want to lead on that was my first kiss, my first anything. Kissing moved to heavy petting to him tugging my dress up. None of this was bad. Oh, it was awkward, and he was a little rougher than I would’ve liked, but it was just that he lacked finesse. It simply was what it was. I’d sadly assumed a part of my mother’s way of dealing with men, which was to acquiesce.

I lost my virginity in the back of a fucking car on the night of my first and only school dance. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t fun, or intimate, or anything like that. It hurt, and I felt like an idiot, mostly because I didn’t know what to do. Floyd was, well, he just was who he was. He seemed rather happy with himself after the fact. He kissed me on the cheek at the door, and I went to bed, barely sleeping.

The next day came, and I walked into school to find SLUT scrawled on my locker. Somehow between the night before and that morning, Floyd bragged that he took my virginity. The rumor, like so many others, spread far and wide through the halls of the high school. To this day, I didn’t know if Floyd knew his bragging would result in my social shame, but it didn’t really matter. I never spoke to him again.

Maybe I was a challenge to him. I learned after the fact that there’d been bets about whether I would go to the prom with anyone and whether I was a virgin or not. My social shyness bit me hard. Even worse, somehow my father found out. All the way up until sixteen, he never laid a hand on me physically. I walked home that day, and he blacked both of my eyes right in front of my mother, declaring that I had turned into the whore she’d been. He shouted he only hoped I didn’t get pregnant because that was how she’d trapped him.

While those two black eyes had been awful, they sent my life careening down a different path. Despite my not-so-stellar home life, I was an excellent student and I never missed school. When I had my very first absence from high school, my guidance counselor sent the school resource officer to check on me. My father never bothered to think he needed to stay home, so he’d gone to work. So had my mother. The school resource officer called child welfare after I answered the door, and he saw my black eyes.

My mother was given a choice—me, or my father. They weren’t going to let me remain in his care, so she had to decide. She chose him. I got shipped off to foster care for a year before she found the strength to choose me later.