Nantucket Blue

Nineteen





“SHANE AND I GOT IN A MASSIVE FIGHT last night about the Fourth of July,” Liz said the next day as we made the beds. “He wants to go do a little backyard barbecue with just a couple of mates, and I want to go to the party on Nobadeer.” I’d been asking her about Fourth of July all morning, hoping for an invitation, and she hadn’t seemed to pick up on it. “But I really don’t mind the fighting all that much because the makeup sex is fabulous.”

“That’s awesome,” I said, as if I had a clue. The truth was that I wasn’t exactly experienced. I’d only been to third base once with Greg Goldberg last fall, after we’d dated for three whole months. I hated to admit it, but I hadn’t actually felt anything that great. I thought that when a boy touched you it would feel amazing, but instead it was like he was programming his DVR with my vagina. I wondered if something was wrong with me. I could do this to myself, I’d thought, and not in that kind of a way, not in a touching myself kind of way. I just wasn’t into that, either, even though we’d been told in seventh grade by Mrs. Levander, the school’s sixty-nine-year-old nurse and self-declared earth mama, that there was nothing wrong with that. That we wouldn’t go cross-eyed or blind if we touched our “area,” no matter what anyone told us.

That’s what they told me,” she’d said, shaking her head. “And I have twenty-twenty vision. Believe you me, I should be blind as a bat!” She threw her head back in a laugh. All of us were biting our cheeks or doodling in our notebooks with a kind of glazed-over madness.

“Ooookay,” she’d said after realizing she was having a moment entirely separate from the rest of us. “Let’s see what difficult questions we have today.” She drew a question from the “difficult questions” box. It was a shoe box covered with shiny green wrapping paper where we were supposed to put anonymous, sex-related questions.

Mrs. Levander’s eyebrows rose and she made an O with her lips. “Here’s an interesting one. ‘What does horny mean?’ Anyone want to share?” We couldn’t take it, we all laughed. I laughed hardest, of course, because it was my question.

I was beginning to think that Liz and Mrs. Levander would really get along by the way Liz was going on and on in graphic detail.

“This is the best sex of my life,” Liz said as she unfolded a fresh duvet cover. We had to work as a team to fit the duvet back inside it. Because I was smaller, I was deemed the intrepid explorer, sent inside the cover with the corners of the duvet in hand. “It’s cinematic. It’s Technicolor. Do you know what I mean?” I thought that British people were all stuck up and only liked to talk about tea and crumpets and the queen.

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly know,” I said from inside the duvet.

“Wait a second,” Liz said. “Are you a virgin?” I froze, sensing this wasn’t cool in her book. Liz burst out laughing. “You are! You’re a virgin.” I felt her grab the corners of the duvet, and I crawled out, my cheeks on fire.

“There’s got to be an easier way to do this,” I said, patting down my staticky hair. Liz stood on the bed and shook out the duvet in place. I smoothed it out and zipped the bottom.

“Cricket’s a virgin,” she sang as she jumped on the bed. “I knew it. That explains everything.”

“Oh my god, Gavin is like, wandering the halls!” I said.

“You’re getting a bit old. How old are you?”

“I’ll be eighteen in August.”

“Eighteen!”

“That’s normal,” I said. “It’s like, perfect, for a girl.”

“Americans.” She stepped off the bed with narrowed eyes. “People think British people are prudes, but the truth is that Americans are. And why should it be any different for girls?”

I didn’t know why it was different for girls. It shouldn’t be, but it was. I hated it when people pretended otherwise.

“We’re going to have to fix this by your birthday,” Liz said. “I’m going to make it my mission.”

“That’s okay,” I said. Liz ignored me, stuffing a pillow into its case.

“Fourth of July, you’ll come with me.” At least I’d gotten an invitation out of this whole ordeal. “I’ll tell Shane, and we’ll get his friends in a lineup. You choose.”

“No, no, no, no.”

“I’m thinking Colin. His willy is just the right size. Not too big and not too small. It’s perfect for Goldilocks!”

“No, no, no, no.” God, I regretted this conversation. What I wouldn’t give to take it back. “The thing is, and this is actually really important to me, I want to be in love.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Liz said, laughing. “You can’t expect to fall in love by August.”

“Well, I want to at least really like him.”

“Do you have any candidates?”

“There was one guy, but”—I shook my head—“that’s over.”

“Oh! What about that writer fellow?” She wiggled her eyebrows. “An older man knows how to please a woman.”

“Gross!” I said, shaking a pillow into its case. “He’s married with a pregnant wife.”

“You girls almost done in here?” Gavin stepped into the room with a pile of fresh towels. “Sometimes I think Bernadette is right about you two.”

“You aren’t going to believe what I just learned,” Liz said, all lit up.

“Liz.” My voice was low. “Don’t you dare!”

“Cricket is an eighteen-year-old—” I smooshed the pillow in her face.

“I don’t want to know,” Gavin said, dropping the towels on the bed and leaving. “And change that pillowcase.”