One thing Tammy knew: she existed because of sex. She knew how babies were made, and she knew that sometimes people just went crazy and took their clothes off and writhed on a bed together. It seemed like people sometimes regretted it afterwards and snuck towards the door with their shoes hanging from the tips of their crooked fingers.

Sometimes, of course, sex was blissful, gauzy, soft. That was married sex, or at least youngish-married-people sex. Tammy imagined that sex under covers, probably even with some clothes still on, very quiet and unobtrusive.

Then, she knew, the baby would come. The baby would start knocking on the walls of their mother’s uterus, begging to be let out. The baby that came from the gauzy, soft, married sex was also gauzy, soft, clean. Only cooing, never crying.

But the baby that grew from the other kind of sex – she knocked and knocked, but her mother didn’t want to let her out. The mother did not want to see the poopy, crying, wrinkly thing that had been planted inside her. The baby would prove she had urges, that she pulsed sometimes between the legs.

The baby came out. They always do. But the mother turned her face and the father was far away and the nurse tried but could not stop the baby from crying. That baby. She always was trouble. So many demands. Who did she think she was?

Tammy knew she was that baby. The ugly, shitty, demanding one. She knew she made people turn away, instead of drawing them closer. She’d been rejected by the first person who could have pulled her close, kissed her forehead, and offered her breast. Tammy’d been rejected, all right. And she survived. So what else did she have to lose?

Tammy imagined that her mother had liked boys. She liked boys so much she got pregnant at 15 and gave Tammy away at 16 – probably so she could go have sex with more boys.

Tammy thought sex sounded amazing. It made people crazy. It made them unpredictable. It also made them love you. At least a little bit. For a little while.

Tammy wanted someone to want her. She wanted to be pulled close, to feel naked skin next to hers. She’d never had that, not really. Her adoptive mother commented on blood stains in her panties, tweaked her breasts as they passed on the stairs, noted just how tight those Jordache jeans were. Her adoptive mother told her about walking through the boathouse as a teenager, watching the couples necking in the docked rowboats. Her adoptive mother was jealous. She told Tammy, “Get it while you can,” and Tammy thought, Maybe this is my only chance.

Tammy liked the boys in her neighborhood – whoever was paying attention to her, she liked. They started ganging up on her, hands from all sides. They joked about raping her, which Tammy considered a compliment. They pulled her tube top down on the street, they doused her with water to see her nipples stand out, they felt her up under the desk at school.

Tammy didn’t want a baby – obviously no sane person would want a baby, and her baby least of all. But she did want the attention, and she wanted to be petted, and in certain moments, there was just enough gauziness in her interaction with a boy to make it all seem beautiful. She could survive on moments. They didn’t even have to be pure, really, just almost-there. She would string those moments together into something nearly whole. The moments could be buffed to a sheen by the right music, a special word, alcohol, a night breeze, and Tammy could close her eyes and feel them, strung together into a chain, encircling her, holding her, rocking her. It made it all worthwhile.

Tammy followed two boys to the sub-basement at school, where they had their lockers. The boys had always teased her and poked her and she liked that. Next to the lockers, they tore open her oversized striped shirt that closed with Velcro. They thought it was funny, and Tammy turned red but she wasn’t sure if she enjoyed it or not. They wanted her, right? They were paying attention to her! They were so passionate they couldn’t even control themselves, and she had caused it!

She smiled then, even though her face was red and she was backed up against the lockers. Then the boys stopped. They picked up their backpacks, said “Slut,” and walked upstairs.