I got up and started rifling through Eric’s bedroom. His walls were adorned with Man United and Eminem posters. I squatted down to take in the titles on his bookshelf—seeing the full set of Enid Blyton, I smiled, but then, as I pulled out a drawer under his bed, my expression collapsed. A stack of sticky porn magazines awaited me there—with dead-eyed women on the covers, touching their bare breasts and spreading their legs. They were the first really sexualized women I’d ever seen and I felt instantly sick. I flicked open the top magazine using my fingernail and found the inside pages even worse. Models sat with their legs spread, their neat labia wide-open, pouting with giant lips, the accompanying text telling me that Kelly loves it when people come on her tits. I picked up the magazine and read it properly, learning about these additional sexual things I didn’t know might be one day expected of me. Of the extra-extra-curricular acts boys like Eric were being groomed to expect. I didn’t know men might want to ejaculate onto my body, rather than just into it. My breasts, my stomach, my face... Nausea roared up through my bones. I knew, from an intellectual perspective, that teen boys masturbated. I mean, they made jokes about it constantly at school. But there was something different about this evidence of what he jacked off to. Eric, the boy I sat next to in chemistry, who I often shared a Bunsen burner with. The boy who I considered a friend. The jokes we’d shared, the growing up we’d done together, that one time on my first day back when he asked me earnestly how I was...now I knew he came home, locked his door, and got off on these glazed Barbie slut dolls called Kelly. Did he ever think of me like that? Want to explode into my face? Expect my body to look like these bodies? I threw the magazine against Eminem’s face, then the rest of them, and got up and left them on the carpet.

Downstairs, I found Amy and Kim sitting on the bottom step. Kim’s head was hanging down as she sobbed. Amy’s arm was around her as she made parental hushing sounds. “There there, hon, it’s not worth it. I love you. You’re amazing.”

“What’s happened?” I asked, sitting two steps above them. “Kim? Are you OK?”

Kim twisted her sodden red face around to me. “She knew how I felt about him, and now...now...” The crying returned and she reburied her face in her lap while Amy soothed her with increased urgency.

“She’s not worth it,” Amy said, in a dulcet tone. “She’s just a fucking slut.”

“Hang on, are you guys talking about Jessica?”

Amy nodded at me grimly with the expectation I’d nod along.