My high school sex life: one teenager talks about getting it on, turning it off and charting her own course through a sexual coming-of-age.(FEATURE)

I'M JACQUELINE WASHINGTON, and I'm 18 now--late 18. I was born and raised in east Oakland, and I'm about to graduate from high school. My school's really large, and I don't like it; I'm a small-school person. I would say it's about 1,500 kids. The last school I was at had at the most 230.

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I started going to this new school my senior year. My old school got shut down in August because our administrator was doing a lot of dirty stuff, and they caught onto it. A lot of teachers were even suing him. They could have got rid of him and got somebody else, but the Oakland Unified School District--which has board members who don't even live in Oakland on the board--they were like, "No, we're just gonna close the school." I was in that school for three years, and it's so small you become like family with these people. To just separate us like that--it made me mad.

And the teachers, they give you too much homework--yet, at the same time, there's not enough academics going on. They give you homework and say, "OK, here, you're going to do this or you're going to read this." But they don't really teach. I got like two classes that do teach, but in the others it's just, "Work on this packet and turn it in at this time."

As far as sex education goes, there's nothing at all. The counselors here suck. They're really terrible. It's weird. They don't teach it and it doesn't come up. In the school I was at before, everything was focused on you going to college. So they had SAT prep classes and stuff like that, but it was never about sex. If you're dealing with that, you deal with that on your own.

So a lot of kids are just depending on Planned Parenthood. My school before was in a mall, and there was a Planned Parenthood right there. So, we would have to go there. You're supposed to have body exams anyway if you're sexually active, and they will talk to you about it. They hand you paperwork about it and everything. But I thought we should be able to talk to somebody at our school about it, or something. There was one person who tried to offer that, but she was doing everything at the school, so it was really hard. I guess we all just learn by experiencing it. You say, "OK, I'm gonna do this with you. I choose to have sex with you." And then you talk to your friends, and we try to say, "OK, but be sure to stay safe. Wrap it up!"

I'm antisex now though. I choose ...