Free Sex Object by Jessica Valenti Page B

stinging on my leg moving up my thigh. When I came out on the beach my leg was bright red and swelling and I yelled at my father that he promised I wouldn’t get stung.
    It made for a good story for my classmates when I got home though, and the jellyfish—which I had never really seen, just felt—got bigger every time I repeated the story to a new friend.
    THERE SIMPLY CAME A POINT WHERE THE KNOWLEDGE MY father had wasn’t enough to help me anymore. It happened around high school, I think, when my parents couldn’t talk to me about my homework. Later, when it came time to research schools and apply to colleges, in a way I was worse off with them than I would have been on my own.
    Their advice was based entirely on what they wanted so badly for me rather than what was possible. And because I wanted to please them so much, I didn’t fight hard enough to tell them anything other than what they wanted to hear.
    That’s how I found myself taking tours of colleges completely out of my reach—schools like Wesleyan, where my father wanted me to go so badly that he had me visit twice, the second time to have an informal interview with a student leader who might recommend me. I mumbled and blushed my way through our conversation—I had never met a person close to my age who spoke so much like an adult.
    In the end, they were satisfied when I decided on Tulane over a handful of other decent colleges that had accepted me. Despite its distance, when my parents saw the campus buildings and ivy and grass, it looked to them the way they imagined colleges were supposed to look, and so they were happy and proud.
    When my father had a heart attack during my winter break a few months later, he made me promise as the doctors worked on him that I would stay in college. I went out to the parking lot and smoked a cigarette. I was already on academic probation, hardly going to class, and knew that I could not tell him.
    All of my successes were his successes, but all of my failures were mine alone and I didn’t want to sit with that thing by myself. And so I said nothing. I went back to school, but not to classes, and told my parents I would not be going back my sophomore year. They convinced me to drive to Albany, New York, where I enrolled as a nonmatriculated student at the SUNY there and moved into the dorms for transfer students, small rooms with metal-frame twin beds and a tiny square refrigerator under the window. Even there, I couldn’t quite get it together.
    I met boys and drank often, skipped class and lied to my parents. It took me two years to find my footing but I managed, just barely, to graduate. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the graduation ceremony so I went to the smaller informal reception for English majors, wearing a spaghetti-strap dress rather than a graduation gown. We drove to Woodstock later that afternoon with my then-boyfriend to celebrate with a dinner.
    A few years ago, my parents realized they couldn’t afford to stay in our house in Queens but that young hip families would pay a lot of rent to live there. And so they moved into a small apartment in Astoria that used to be mine, their furniture cramped into the tiny rooms pushed up against the walls. Around the same time, the cherry tree in our yard started to die, disease crawling up the trunk, resulting in fewer and fewer cherries. They didn’t tell me when they chopped it down—I saw the hacked stump when I dropped by one day to peek over the fence to see what the house looked like without us in it.
    It looked smaller than I remembered.

BOYS
    THE COUCH DOWNSTAIRS WAS THE BEST PLACE TO HOOK UP. THE open, no-walls setup of our house may have given my parents the feeling that nothing that bad could have gone on under their noses after they went upstairs to sleep, their bedroom right above us. But the benefit of living in a loftlike space with your parents is that you can always see them coming.
    And so the