For first-timers, fucking can be scary as hell—especially when your birds-and-the-bees talk was nothing more than a rushed message from your dad: “J-just wear a condom.” Well, what happens when you’re a virginal18-year-old having a naked make-out sesh when, despite your intentional dry-humping (surprise!), your pecker becomes covered in a warm slime you’ve collected somewhere between the thighs of a chubby, panting Spanish girl named Maria*?!

While most of my small-town classmates began sweating out their sexual anxieties on their parents’ davenports somewhere between the onset of puberty and the ninth grade, I was too much of an underdeveloped, cross-country-running dweeb to do anything about the matter (beyond chewing the inside of my cheeks while exhausting bottles of Jergens)—until the following fiasco unfolded the night before my first day of college.

I had met Maria because in high school, one of my friends and I liked Spanish class as much as we loathed our violent, hick classmates. The solution? Senior year in Spain. I returned to the States to get ready for college and, when she came to visit, to make passes at my friend’s chubby and very cute host-sister who was visiting for a few weeks. “Oh, Jesus, dude–Maria’s a huge, gaping cunt,” he warned, oblivious to the beauty of the Fupita-having mega-babe he’d spent a year cultivating identical anal flora with (seriously, that’s what happens with roommates). As soon as she and I hung out that afternoon we were exchanging Castilian as awkwardly as we were exchanging spit in the deep-end of my parents’ tractor-barn-cum-pool-house when nobody was looking.

Maria’s last night before heading back to Spain: Hanging out in my new college town, we head back to my dorm room, where, judging by my elevated heart rate and the stiffy making a pup-tent out of my cargo shorts, I’m hoping—as much as I’m terrified by the prospect—that we’re gonna fuck each other. In the pitch dark on top of my bunk, Maria—Catholically allergic to birth-control—and I have managed to strip each other’s clothes while we wriggle against each other for what seems an uncomfortable length of time. My dual- petrification causes me to stall, and I’m unable to utter uno momento so I can get a condom. We slowly make out as I dry-hump her inner thigh until my dry-humping becomes wet. I recoil.

¿Qué te occure? I clutch her shockingly wet inner thigh before clasping her doubly-wet vagina with my now pre-cum-moistened hand. Oh, no—I’ve just impregnated Maria!!! I make whimpering sounds as I scurry down my wooden bunk ladder.

“What?!” she says while I shadow-box with a t-shirt. “¡Qué no pasa nada! You didn’t go inside me.”

I slam the door on my sedan and spin like a corkscrew through the parking ramp on my way to—where else at three in the morning for the morning-after pill?—the university hospital’s ER. I make a pact with God that I’ll stay a virgin throughout college if he just lets this one slide, but I haven’t prayed nightly in a while so I don’t think I’m on the best terms to be bartering with Him. I begin to see my future unfurl: I tell my parents I fucked up, drop out of college, and move to Spain where I work a menial job for the next 18 years to support a child I’ve fathered with girl who’s practically a stranger. Halfway to the hospital, my scrotum cinches up when police lights begin whirling in my mirrors. Shrieking, I pull over. The cop sticks his nose in the window. “I’m-sorry-my…girlfriend’s-pregnant-and-and!” The cop flashes a light through my interior. “Where’s the girl?” I blurt, “Well, sir, I just feel so responsible!” I blow a 0.0 (seriously, I hadn’t yet learned to party) and the cop leans in close. “OK, so here’s what’s gonna happen: You’re gonna turn on your headlights. You’re gonna put on your safety-belt. You’re gonna quit goin’ 25-over. Now, get on your way—I’ll follow you to the hospital.”

My reflection flashes on polished linoleum as I sprint down empty corridors. I reach the ER where I sit down the first nurse I see and give her the sexual play-by-play. Judging from the harsh grooves in the nurse’s face, she is 35 years old going on 60, and she’s been sick of this shit since she graduated nursing school in the 80s.

“Did you penetrate her?” I honestly wouldn’t have known what that would feel like.

“Err… ”

“Did your penis enter your girlfriend’s vagina?”

“It was wet but I don’t…”

“Were you using contraceptives?”

“I didn’t think it would get to that point!”

The nurse tells me there’s no real risk of Maria having been impregnated if I did not, in fact, penetrate her vaginal cavity with my erection. Instances of “immaculate conception” are extremely rare, she tells me.

“Are you sure?”

She nods. I tell her OK, but I still want the morning-after pill just to be sure. Bored, the nurse sighs and asks my age.

“18.”

“And your girlfriend?”

“16.”

Her eyebrows arch. She sits upright. Finally she comprehends the urgency of my situation. Folding her hands in her lap, she tells me that if I insist on getting Maria the morning-after pill, I would have to, according to state law, plead guilty to statutory rape in the presence of a police officer who would then arrest me**.

“Don’t worry though. We’d see to it your girlfriend gets the pill,” she says before proceeding to tell me how many young lives she’s seen gone to waste over carelessness like this. I spend the better part of a minute weighing whether a life spent as a prison-castrated childless “sexual-offender” would be a better option than winging what’s concretized in my mind as a joyless life of shitty jobs and fatherhood. The way I see it, life will either be super super sucky or just super sucky. At a terrifyingly close margin, I decide I’ll take my chances and go home.

“That’s a good choice.”

Back at the dorm room, Maria is fully dressed and reading a magazine. I sit down next to her and fix my gaze on an undecorated wall. When Maria notices, she tells me I’m freaking her out. We spend a restless night in separate beds before we said goodbye to each other—without so much as a kiss on the cheek—as she takes her ride to the Des Moines airport.

Classes begin—which represents the first time children are allowed to imagine themselves as fully-functioning adults—and I’ve spent the first three weeks unable to sleep, eat, or do anything remotely enjoyable. I tell my buddy what happened and that I’m ready to man up for the unborn child. I begin to think I should just begin my miserable dish-washing career now—an occupation I masochistically selected for myself as punishment. I almost call my parents.

Nearly a month passes before Maria sends me an email. “I got my period. I told you not to worry!”

On that magical Monday, I received what felt like a new lease on life. The date? September 10th, 2001.

*Maria’s name has not been changed because all Spanish girls are called Maria. Her name is anonymous by default.

**Eight years later I learn how much the nurse was completely fucking wrong.

-PETER MADSEN

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