It would be easy to say my innocence was taken from me by Clay in the woods as a child. I always felt aware of the situation, but never guilty about it. Sometimes I told my parents what we did, and they told me I should feel guilty about it. I have no recollection whatsoever of what happened in those woods. Whether I suppressed it or it just wasn’t significant enough to remember, I’m not sure. But I do remember distinctly Clay asking me once about how it felt with him inside me. My parents were watching my brother play baseball, in the Mustang league. He was 10. Clay was 9. I was 5. Clay was inside me then, or at least he asked me what I thought about it. I don’t really remember. How I felt about it, I couldn’t say if you put a gun to my temple. I don’t remember it happening. My response is anyone’s guess. Mostly, I felt nothing. I was too young to enjoy it, I assume. Clay wasn’t.

One Halloween in middle school, when I reached Clay’s “maturity”, around 12 years of age, Thomas invited over a bunch of basketball players to stay the night. If sugar highs are a real thing, we were deep in the midst of one, pillowcases filled with candy, scarfing it down by the mouthful. We stayed up all night, and as it got late, the conversation got sexual. We started talking about jerking off. A lot of us hadn’t ever done it before. Thomas had a computer in his room, which was rare at the time, and soon there were a lot of naked girls on the screen.

We stayed up all night playing with ourselves. I wanted desperately to look at Thomas instead of at that screen, but I couldn’t. He didn’t want me looking at him in that way, and I could relate.

A couple of weeks later, I went to the first real party of my life. Thomas and I got invited to hang out with a group of girls from a different school for a birthday. We played Truth or Dare. The girls dared Thomas to grab me by the back of the neck and lick the inside of my ear. Thomas pulled me toward him, my back to the girls, and he did it. With his tongue still in my ear, he said, “We are turning them on so hard right now.”

What Thomas didn’t know is just how much he had turned me on. I was stiff as a board. My dick could’ve sliced right through the Hope Diamond. To this day, I still get weak in the knees when someone licks my ear. From then on, Thomas would pretend to be gay with me pretty often to get attention from the girls. He didn’t really need my help, though. He went on to be a model for Rue 21.

By the time we reached high school, it became mandatory to shower together after practice and games. The guys were really curious why I wouldn’t shower with them. At 14, I couldn’t even think of showering with Thomas without immediately getting hard. And if I did get hard, all those “fictitious” rumors would quickly become fact, and I’d never make the NBA.

I told myself I’d never check out any of the guys naked. But in the middle of the first practice, Thomas kept saying he couldn’t wait to get naked and shower. All the guys seemed so giddy to do it. The whole situation seemed really strange to me. Thomas was out of his clothes before we even got to the locker room. I tried not to look, but I’ll never forget the way his naked body was framed perfectly in the doorway of the shower. The Statue of David paled in comparison. I remember admiring Thomas with my mouth wide open for what seemed like eternities, but might’ve been only one second. At some point, he saw me. Red handed, I jumped backward like a scaredy cat. I thought he’d be mad. I thought he might kick me in the ribs and call me a faggot like my last best friend did. Instead, he just said, “Are you getting in or what?” I played it off cool. I said, “Shit, T, I would, but I gotta split.”

That night, I jerked off the most I ever have in my life. I felt terrible about it. Thomas and I could be friends only and nothing more. I knew that. I tried to want that, too, but after his naked body was burned into my mind, I needed more.

The guys started speculating why I wouldn’t get naked with them. First they started teasing me for being uncircumcised, then for having a small wiener. I found it strange how much they talked about dicks, especially mine, which they hadn’t even seen. Finally, after our first away game, Thomas got me naked. We had to wear a suit and tie to our away games, to rub it into our opponents’ faces how snobby and private our school was. Thomas said, “Look, nobody cares about your dick, okay?” I continued pulling my suit out of the locker in protest. Thomas tackled me and said, “I’m not letting you ruin your goddamn suit.”

I showered beside Thomas that night. When I was washing my face, he whispered in my ear, “Shit dude, that thing is huge. What were you afraid of?” I didn’t get hard. I couldn’t believe it.

A year later, in chemistry class, Thomas was trying to hook me up with the hottest girl in school. He was drawing illustrations of my wiener and showing her, really exaggerating the size of it. He wrote my number on it, and put the drawing in her chemistry book. Thomas and I were shooting basketballs at the Y when she texted me. He snatched the phone out of my hand as soon it dinged, and when he saw who it was from, I think it was the widest I ever saw him smile.

A week later, that girl’s boyfriend hanged himself on the back porch of his house. Apparently, he’d been going through a lot at home, and after an argument with his mom, he just walked out back, tied a noose around his neck, and lifted his feet of the ground until he suffocated. Maybe I was just vain, but I always felt awful about it.

I think that’s when I lost my innocence.