I was together with my very first real boyfriend: the first person I was ever in love with. I met him when I was 16 and we'd been together for two years. I was in boarding school. In the fall of my senior year we started having issues. I wasn't really into it and he wasn't really into it, and although we still kind of loved each other, it just wasn't really working out.

He kept getting crushes on other people and would pursue them. I was sort of clinging to him even though I knew things weren't that good. I wasn't on birth control because we weren't really sleeping together that much, and I was trying to figure out my body situation. We would sleep together so rarely that we would just pull out. Really dumb. So much stuff was going on that I just didn't think twice about birth control.

I was about to leave my dorm to go home for Christmas when I suddenly realized that I hadn't gotten my period in two months. I took the pregnancy test and realized I was pregnant. I called him up and was very calm about it. He didn't believe me. I was so angry and upset that I just hung up.

I decided to be with him at his parents' house when I was going to have the abortion, as a last effort to make him take responsibility. We went to the Planned Parenthood in Boston. He wasn't talking to me at all. And wasn't touching me. After the procedure, I was bleeding really badly and was in a lot of pain, and he still wouldn't touch me. We got to the car and I just cried like crazy and he was totally weirded out-- totally uncomfortable with it. It was the one time in my life that he'd ever let me down so badly. We got home. I was in bed wearing like 10 pounds of maxi pads. And he took off. He went out.

Slowly things got better. Things definitely got better, because I remember thinking: how soon can we have sex after having the abortion? Such an 18-year-old thing to think. I think if that happened to me at this point in my life, I would treat it so differently. Not that I would do anything differently, but I think I would take things more seriously. Or understand that the things I do affect my body.

When we got back to school I felt years older than everyone else. I guess I felt like I couldn't really connect with people.