I ran on the campus at the University of Virginia, up and down verdant hills, the landscape lush and clotted with yellow-leaved gingkoes and dogwoods in full bloom. There were so many trees it was almost claustrophobic. The dry expanse of the Panhandle felt a million miles away. One day, my volleyball coach pulled me aside with a furrowed brow. I felt intuitively that she didn't like me, although I didn't know why. "I've seen how much you run," she said. "It's ruining your vertical jump." She told me to stop running more than three miles a day. I didn't want to get in trouble, but I needed to get faster and stronger if I wanted to stay competitive, and I didn't trust her judgment. So I started taking routes where I knew she wouldn't see me, running in secret through the campus.

I had been admitted to UVA on a volleyball scholarship, and I knew my parents were proud of me for getting into a good school, even if my father seemed to have reservations about my going so far away. My parents had hoped that I would stay closer to home—maybe go to their alma mater—but I wanted to expand my horizons. Most of my classmates were staying in the state; leaving was the exception, not the rule. As I was packing up, my father gave me a dozen yellow roses. "Don't forget about Texas," he said. I would never forget about Texas—it was my home. But the world beyond was shiny and I was eager to explore it.

I loved everything about college. The campus was historic and grand, and the students were different from the kids I'd grown up with in Amarillo. They seemed scholarly and civic-minded, open and progressive. I wanted to study English; maybe, I thought, I would become a journalist, like Diane Sawyer or Katie Couric—strong women I'd grown up watching, whom I knew to be truth tellers in the face of injustice or hypocrisy. As a student athlete, I learned to multitask. There was never enough time to organize my thoughts before I wrote my papers; I bullet-pointed assignments in my head while I was doing other things. The volleyball team swam for conditioning several times a week, and it was there, in the water, in the meditative monotony of crossing back and forth in the pool, that I could think clearly, writing in my head. After climbing out, I'd rush back to my dorm room, hair still dripping wet, to clack out the words on my laptop. The computer was heavy and prone to overheating; often while I wrote on long bus trips to conference games, it would get so hot that I'd have to stack a pillow and several books on my lap to keep it from burning my legs.

My first semester in college, I took a class from a beloved psychology professor named Raymond Bice; everyone called his class "Bice Psych," and the enrollment was huge, a class of hundreds. One day, he was teaching a unit on memory. "I'm going to show you something today that you will never forget," he said. "And I know you'll never forget it, because memory is specific. You remember a moment. A thing. A visual. An object."

He held up a teddy bear. It was so big he had trouble lifting it over his head. "I can guarantee you one thing when you think of this class," he said from behind the stuffed animal. "You may have forgotten everything else, but you will always remember this." He was right. The image of that giant stuffed bear has stayed with me for the rest of my life, something I couldn't forget if I tried.

—

AFTER MY FIRST YEAR at college, I spent the summer in Austin. I ran there too, around the lake, stopping to look at the canopy of bats chirping under the bridge, or on the treadmill when it was too hot to be outside. I had landed an internship at the capitol working for Amarillo's representative in the Texas Senate, but they were out of session, so there was nothing to do. I wore pantyhose and skirts to the capitol every day, as was expected of women there, and carried buckets of ice to the office of anyone who called for it, since the building wasn't air-conditioned. I gained no real work experience, but that was never the point; it was about being able to put on my résumé that I had worked there.

A friend of my mother's set me up on a date with a former college football star. He drove a white Blazer and wore a gold chain around his neck, which wasn't my type, but he was good-looking, and I wanted him to like me. We went out many times, but he never kissed me. "I don't think I should," he said once.

"Why not?" I asked. I felt ashamed. I wondered if there was something wrong with me.

"Because I'm an all-or-nothing kind of guy," he said. "If you're not going to have sex with me, then I shouldn't kiss you. I can't stop myself." I couldn't argue with his reasoning, especially considering there was no chance that I would have sex with him.

Sex was utterly foreign to me. I had been taught what my body parts were but not how they worked or how to use them. I can still recall the specific humiliation of having to get my parents' permission when we took sex ed in the fifth grade; I kept the permission slip in my backpack until the day it was due, getting it signed at the last minute. Even with my closest friends, Rachel and Courtney, we never talked about sex. Our romantic fantasies were of being courted by boys, which had less to do with the levers of our own desire than it did with finding the answer to the omnipresent question: Do you think he likes me? This was important: We had to wait to see if boys were going to choose us. We knew never to pursue someone first; it was better to be pursued. If anyone in my high school was having sex, I was naïve to it; my friends and I were still conditioned, as proper southern girls, not to talk about it, even with one another.

As for my parents, they were less than forthcoming about what went on between adults. In my house growing up, I wasn't allowed to call a boy—he would have to call me first. As I got out of the car with my father when I was not yet a teen, on my way to a tennis lesson, he said: "Your mother was a virgin when I married her, and I expect you to be the same." I froze, uncomfortable at the mere mention of virginity. I couldn't bear to look back to see the expression on his face.

"Uh-huh," I said. "Got it." As quickly as I could, I slung my racket bag over my shoulder and closed the door firmly behind me.

It was bred into you, between school, church, and southern morality, that a woman was meant to look pretty, take care of the kids, and somehow maintain the appearance of chastity while doing it. Boys were wolves pursuing their prey; girls should protect their purity until it was torn from them by the force of male lust, not their own desire or agency. My mother was always skittish about people approaching her from behind; it wasn't until I was a teenager that my dad told me the story of how, when my mom was a high school senior, the milkman surprised her in the kitchen, throwing her to the floor in an attempted assault. She screamed and fought him off. "So it's not that I don't trust you," my father would say. "It's the guys I don't trust."

In my experience, my father was right to mistrust the boys. My high school boyfriend always seemed to want more from me than I was comfortable giving. Once, at a party, he led me into a bathroom so we could make out. I could feel that, like any hormonal teenage boy, he wanted as much as I was willing to give, but I felt claustrophobic and afraid. I flung the door open and bolted away from him, back to the safety of my friends. I never slept with him. My culture had taught me that my virginity was sacred—the ultimate prize. It was my responsibility to protect and mine alone.

The principles of achievement I applied to academics and athletics also applied to sex. My understanding of romance existed at the intersection of the patriarchy that raised me and my father's paradigm of accomplishments, where the best was expected and everything became a game that could be won through hard work and determination. To prove my merit, I needed to be chosen by a man—someone special, someone powerful. To be wanted would confirm my value. I had my own desires—I knew that I liked guys who were tall, confident, and funny—but those were secondary concerns. What really mattered was that I cultivate the credentials that would make someone like me, that I become salable to the world of men who would determine my worth. Hopefully someone would find me more valuable than I'd been that day on the football field when I'd lost the homecoming crown.

That summer in Austin, I lived in a big shared house near the University of Texas with several other girls. I was bunking with a girl named Sarah, who was from Dallas; she was a year older than I was and a fellow visiting student. We had been assigned a sparsely furnished room with two twin beds, since we were both only there for the summer. One night I came home after having been out with friends. When I arrived back at the house and went upstairs to my bedroom, Sarah was still out. It was late, but I was hungry, so I went downstairs to rummage around in the kitchen for a snack.

I fished around in the pantry until I found some graham crackers. I ate them idly, looking out the sliding glass door into the backyard. Suddenly, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching me. I couldn't see anyone out the door, but I felt it—an eerie, instinctual knowing. I realized that I was wearing only a T-shirt and my underwear, and I felt stupid and irresponsible for being half dressed where someone might see me, for allowing myself to be this exposed and vulnerable. I wanted to check that the door was locked but knew that none of us carried a key, so that was the only entry for the other girls to come home later in the night. Instead, carefully, I left the kitchen, went upstairs, and got into bed, pulling the covers over my head. Surely, I convinced myself, it was all in my head. Eventually, fear still tight in my body, I fell asleep.

In the night, I awakened to the sound of screaming. It was as high-pitched and shrill as a tornado drill. I looked out to see that the bedroom door was wide open. Then I looked over and saw that Sarah's bed was empty. I bolted up. "What's happening?" I screamed. I heard doors slamming, then girls' voices yelling, overlapping, a panicked choir.

"Stay in your room! Stay in your room!"

I slammed the door and slid down onto the floor. My whole body shook. After coming home, Sarah had gone downstairs to get a glass of water, and she'd run into an intruder with a pair of pantyhose over his head. They tussled on the hardwood floor, and he then fled, leaving the pantyhose stuck to the back fence. Eventually the police caught him, a serial rapist who assaulted fourteen women over the course of two years in Austin, holding them down with knives.

Traumatized and covered in bruises, Sarah ended up going home to Dallas for the rest of the summer. The other girls and I never processed our feelings about the incident. We barely spoke about it to one another, nor did I ever unpack what had happened with Sarah when I saw her at a wedding years later. Even though we had all been there, the experience was so violating that it was easier to pretend it had never happened. Instead, we brought a guard dog from the home of one of the other girls—a Labrador who snoozed by the front door all day and night as we stepped over him to leave the house.

With sex, as I understood it, there was a terrible push and pull. Men wished to take something from you—your purity, your chastity, your goodness —and would endeavor to do so, by force if necessary. As a woman it was your duty to defend it. If you failed, you would only have yourself to blame. I never slept in only a T-shirt and underwear again.