[Neil Hilborn, Ollie Renee Schminkey, Both]

My school was fairly progressive;
They even taught contraception in our sex-ed class.

When I was 14, my dad handed me a box of condoms and said,“You know how to use these right?”

We were taught which preventive methods were the most effective.

I was in Texas, so dads with shotguns.

And where to go if something broke,
What's it take, how to fix
This mess you’ve gotten yourself in. We were taught about herpes and gonorrhea and Syphilis and how to keep all your fluids to yourself.

My friends taught me which clinics wouldn’t tell my parents.
Which ones handed out free condoms,
But I was never taught that there were worse things that could happen than a baby or a disease.

Yeah, we learnt about roofies.
We learnt how to respect when a woman says ‘No’.
We learnt about protecting your drink, carrying a pepper spray,
We learnt what to do when a woman is assaulted,
But not that this could happen to me.

I was a virgin when I was raped for the first time.
When it happened to me, it was 10 A.M. and my parents were home.
My textbook hadn’t described the way I wouldn’t even try to fight, there was no paragraph on how to stop him/her without making a scene.
There was no worksheet for how to stop him without waking up my sleeping parents.
There was no correct answer to her threats of suicides when I wasn’t in the mood.
There was no manual for the polite victim.
You know, it wasn’t like they said it would be

I was sober, he was sober.
We were
seventeen
fifteen.
They didn’t teach me that I wouldn’t know how to protect myself,
That my lungs would close up and we would make pretend husband and wife, make pretend love.
The thing about pretend
is that it flattens everything to one color.
It makes it too simple,
It makes it one syllable,
and that syllable is always captioned as a 'Yes’.

They didn’t teach me that I could wanna be with someone but not always want them
that being curious about sex doesn’t mean I was asking for it.
What I learned was I was supposed to want it.
I was supposed to feel stolen, supposed to feel like less of a human being.
I learnt that if you don’t scream, no one will listen to you.
They don’t write about the ones that got away.

I learnt that foundation comes in fourteen different shades.
No one wants to hear that your skin is changing colors.
They only ask how you’re doing
to hear you say 'Fine’; I learnt that I was supposed to feel fine, We were lovers after all.
And with a love like that
you hardly have to ask, right?
I don’t want to blame my school.
I don’t want to blame her.
I don’t want to blame my church, or my mother or even the boy.
We were just children.
But this is preventable,
So someone must be responsible for preventing it.
We can teach this better.

Some paintings are built from a thousand points of color.
If you stand too close, the sunset becomes just a series of red dots.
We teach that rape is always a man in an alley,
Always a clenched jaw and a closed fist,
Always a stained white shirt.
But I never used my pepper spray.
I never had to worry about an uncle or a locker room.

Do not confuse one story for all stories.
Do not stare at a red dot and say,
“The whole painting is just one color”.