The Mystery of the Conch Shell Condom via Butchie

I was an emerging poet who loved and dated a boy for over a year just because he was the lead singer in a band and (this is what's more important) wrote the lyrics to all their songs. His mom—a local public high school English teacher who wanted desperately to be a writer, and with whom I hoped to connect so sweetly with that we'd go see Charles Dickens' plays together at Christmas, both of us wrapped up in scarves
she'd knitted, or else we'd take bus trips to New York City just to smell the public libraries—hated me. Luckily, she hated Pennsylvania more, but before leaving for a week-long vacation in the Florida Keys with her overweight Match.com police officer (someone she called "Bubba,") she left him with a box of conch shell, spiral-shaped condoms, which are just as strange as you might imagine, "because I know what you're going to do in my empty house."

The 10 Best Stories About the First Time You Had Sex

The 10 Best Stories About the First Time You Had Sex

(To this day, I've never been able to find these condoms in a store again, which means that obviously way back in 2004, his mother must've ordered them specially from an online porn shop, which is great fun to think about!)

Chris and I were, as you might well guess, completely disgusted and freaked out, but we were also seventeen, so after striping one another bare, we began to have sex the only way we knew how: the way they do it in porn, with my back pushed against a wall, my legs wrapped around his waist, and Chris thrusting anxiously into me with unparalleled awkwardness and noise. I began to bleed—just a little at first, and "Keep going," he said, "don't worry!"—but then the blood continued, and in retrospect, it really wasn't any more blood than I imagine any other girl lost, but at seventeen, on a white shag carpet, in the upstairs hallway of a total bitch, we both panicked. We stopped having sex to try and clean the carpet, but the wet paper towel only smeared it and made it worse, and then we decided, Well, fuck it then, and resumed our former position, except now Chris' hands were bloody and wet from all the failed cleaning and we smeared it all over the wall.

I came, which is perhaps what's most surprising here, but we spent the whole rest of the week repainting the hall, scrubbing the carpet with every kind of "sit and wait" foaming cleanser available from our small-town hardware store, and every time I was over, we'd return to the hallway to neurotically examine the spot from different angles and in different light.

We didn't date a whole lot longer—that kinda push the kibosh on sexiness—and his mother has since moved, but I can't help but think about that hallway whenever I visit home.

The mysterious conch shell condom, however, remains a mystery.