Free The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb

diary, she solemnly wrote, “I’ve come to the conclusion that in life, virginity is silly, and in love, blow jobs are not enough.” The next day, she stole a leopard thong from J.J. Newberry.
    She wanted to fuck him. It didn’t have to be in one of the perfect large beachside homes of the soap opera stars whose antics her mother now watched constantly while lying in bed. It didn’t have to be in the many-roomed, ivy-covered mansions of her books. It could as easily be in his Trans Am parked along the beach. There was a cove near Race Point where you felt lifted right out of the world. She wanted to go to the quiet closet of that cove. She wanted to give him her body. When he played in his band, she used to watch his hands as they ranged along the frets and imagine his nakedness somehow as an extension of the sounds he made onstage.
    “Take this,” he said, holding a pill up.
    “What’ll it do?” She wasn’t frightened, only curious.
    “Nothing, really. It’ll just make you feel free.”
    She smiled at him.
    “Sure,” she said.
    An hour later she was sitting in the car at the beach thinking how the waves were like hands as they individually unfisted against the sand and how peaceful it would be to go to the bottom of the ocean and just lie there being massaged by those long green fingers. She was thinking that the secret of the universe was that everything lived apart from everything else but was connected by the bright, living fluid of eyesight. And in eyesight there were no failures or winters or famines. Instead, everything was perfect and extended forever in all directions like daylight. His face of a beautiful living creature was drawing very close. His eyes were glistening with tears. Her own eyes were filling too, even as she felt her body suddenly leave her bones, fly through the air and gather in a far-off tree, where it sat there looking peacefully out at the world, like a cat.
    They went steady for a year, during which time they began having sex. It was uncomfortable at first, and she was faintly disappointed. But it seemed to mean so much to him. When they eventually drifted apart, she told herself that she was no longer a girl but a woman in possession of a new illumination: that sex had a way of allowing men to believe they were permanently in control. But that once you got it over with, the far more important business of life lay waiting, and because they were distracted by their recent performance, men could easily—like large machines pivoting smoothly on ball bearings—be rotated at will.
    Six months before college, with mementos of Randy now moved to the back of the closet in the slow sideways crawl of objects through her room and into storage in boxes and on high shelves, she took a solemn vow of sex. Immediately afterward, with a completely impassive look on her face, she began fucking as many boys as possible. She fucked them in cars. She fucked them in the living rooms of their parents’ houses. With cramps in her legs, she fucked them standing up in the supply closets of school. She told herself she was storing up important experience. She told herself she was experimenting her way toward what would eventually be mastery.
    She felt nothing, nothing at all. She was utterly numb. One evening around this time, she took a knife and cut herself slowly and repeatedly on the arm and it was like opening a window in the house and letting the bad air out of her own body.
    Then she matriculated at Smith College, which resembled a British country mansion with its pavilions and lawns and winding flagstone paths. She took a full roster of English courses and dated sporadically and with no particular satisfaction among the widest, deepest talent pool of boys she’d ever seen. She had two lesbian flings, but her interest quickly flagged. Though she had a private off-campus room and kept mostly to herself, she sometimes spent time with a group of black-clad girls who read everything and knew everyone