Tamara Faith Berger

“I was thinking: Girls get scared way too often. Girls get stupidly scared. I was not scared.Telling myself not to be scared kind of worked.”

“My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky could fail me, I didn’t care. I’d pass just with the bibliography. I was compiling a list of every single book I’d read or that I wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum…I was writing my essay, writing easily now. I didn’t have a reader anymore like Lee or Chris but I imagined that I was writing for them both. Maybe I was writing for anyone who could fucking stand me.”

“All men think that a woman walking alone at night is a whore.”