CREATIVE NONFICTION 19
B. PIETRAS is a writer
with essays in TriQuarterly,
BuzzFeed Reader, Electric
Literature, and elsewhere. He is
currently at work on a novel.was a freshman in high school when my religion teacher faced
the class and asked, with a knowing smile, “How many of you have
seen pornography?”
There were about twenty boys in the classroom that day, and until
then, we probably weren’t paying full attention—some of us were
thinking about lunch, others about the quiz next period. But when the
question came, everything in the dusty room seemed to go still; the
air itself seemed to thicken, to prickle against our skin. Tense, wary of
a trap, we watched one another out of the corners of our eyes. Did he
really expect us to answer honestly? And what would happen if we did?
“C’mon, c’mon,” Mr. C. said, impatient, frowning at us in a cut the
bullshit sort of way. “Raise your hands if you’ve seen it.”
A middle-aged man with slick black hair going gray at the temples,
Mr. C. had a certain world-weariness, an aura of having traveled far
outside our sagging Rust Belt city. Though he was a devout Catholic,
he also liked to tell us stories about his wild years before he’d found
God. It seemed like a safe bet that, sometime during that lost era, he
had seen porn.
One boy raised his hand, and another followed a second later. It trig-
gered a kind of chain reaction, a sudden mass unmasking. In seconds,B. PIETRAS
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