The talking leads to touching, and the touching leads to sex, and then there is no mystery left.

I meet him in a bar called Billy Bob’s Family Billiards. I am here with Carolyn to see her boyfriend’s band play their first gig. I lose my virginity in a dress that isn’t mine. He plays a twelve string guitar and drives a white 1987 Monte Carlo S.S. That stands for Super Sport. There are things in life that are hard to understand when they are happening to you until they are explained to you, like diseases. And after your disease goes away you do things differently, as if doing the wrong thing will bring the disease back.

I am sixteen and I get a disease that forms rashes in the shapes of countries on my body and swells my joints to three times their normal size. This is not an exaggeration. He visits me in the hospital and sneaks me out to smoke a cigarette. I have been on steroids for about a week and am feeling jacked. When I smoke the cigarette I collapse outside and prolong my stay for another four days. The name of my disease is the B19 virus, generally referred to as parvovirus B19 or sometimes erythrovirus B19 was the first (and until 2005 the only) known human virus in the family of parvoviruses, genus erythrovirus. B19 virus causes a childhood rash called fifth disease or erythema infectiosum which is commonly called slapped cheek syndrome.