When I was a sophomore in university, I had a crush on a guy in my outreach group. I was incredibly frustrated because he was the one guy in the group who never spoke to me throughout the entire year, and it was a pretty small group. He only every talked to this other guy and they were tight as hell. On the last day of the outreach program, his buddy was absent and we ended up talking. By this time, my crush was long gone, and we just chatted about the respective people we had started to date. I told him about the little things I loved about this French guy I was seeing. Out of the blue, he asked me if I had slept with him yet. This caught me totally off guard because I'm from a very conservative Catholic family (my dad's a minister) and I was a virgin at the time (19). In fact, because of how sheltered and introverted I was, I had very little awareness that my peers were having sex already. When I told him I was a virgin, he laughed in face and refused to believe me. He said he knew who I was and that I was far from being a virgin. I kid you not, this was literally our first conversation ever. When I finally convinced him I was telling him the truth, he broke down and told me how sorry he was for judging me. It turned out he was pretty conservative, himself, and stayed away from me in the group because of everything he had heard. Still out of the loop, I asked him what the craziest thing he had heard about me was. He looked away and didn't want to tell me because I wouldn't be able to handle it. I tried to play it cool and act like I didn't even care what it was. I asked him to humor me. He said, "Basically, everyone believes you've slept with 35 guys at this school. Seven of them told me personally." I was speechless. I didn't even know 35 guys at the school, since I hung out on my own in the library. I laughed but I could feel the heat of the tears forming behind my eyes. He still kept apologizing profusely for believing the rumors, but the increasing pounding of my head drowned out his voice. When we left the outreach area and rode back to school, I went to the bathroom and cried the hardest I've ever cried. I went home that day and thought about how to tell my mother I couldn't go back to school. We had never talked about boys or sex before, so I had no idea how to bring it up. But I ended up telling her exactly what the guy said to me, "There's this rumor I've slept with 35 guys at school." She looked me in the eyes and asked, "So then it isn't true?" I dropped out of school and my mental state spiraled all the way down. Ended up losing my virginity to the French guy, who I knew by then was just using me. Slept with probably 35 guys that year, lost count. I'm now in a steady relationship and I've finally found stability, but looking back I really let that rumor get into my head. I wasn't ready.