Wow. Oh. Okay. In the ten-minute-mile run of sexual activity, she’s a varsity cross-country jock and I’m a fat kid at this point.
“Oh,” I say. “So now you’re, like, A Full Woman.”
She rolls her eyes. “Is that how that works?”
I shrug, thinking of my inability to write a sex scene.
“So, uh, how? Did it happen?” I ask.
“I don’t know. He invited me over last week, and his mom was out of town at some conference. It just happened.”
“Very romantic,” I say, and immediately feel bad for snarking.
“It was!” She sounds wounded that I’d shaded her beautiful virginity loss. “He even lit candles and stuff.”
“Mike Neckekis lit sex atmosphere candles?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. I’m impressed.”
“I was too!” she chirps.
“So, then, how was it?”
She stares at the ceiling for a second, takes a breath as she’s about to speak, then stops and thinks.
“Good,” she says. “Weird.” Another pause. “Good.”
“Did it hurt?”
“It was kind of uncomfortable at first, but no, not really.”
“Did it feel, you know, pleasurable?”
“Sort of, toward the end.”
“You used a condom, right?”
Her head swivels violently toward me. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
A minute passes. Then she sighs.
“Yeah, no, we totally didn’t. I had to go get Plan B.”
“Did Mike go with you?”
“He had wrestling practice.”
“Did you go by yourself?” I ask, alarmed.
She nods.
“You’re kidding. Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?”
She looks off to the side and twists her mouth with concern.
“I thought you were mad at me or something.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve felt like that for a while. And then I read that story you wrote.”
I feel my face go red, the way it does whenever somebody brings up something I wrote IRL.
“Just because I have a boyfriend now doesn’t mean we can’t hang out and keep things exactly the way they are,” she says softly.
I shake my head, but I don’t have the energy to explain why everything’s different now, from my feelings about writing to my friendship with Ave. I feel blanched, totally drained of any cleverness or insight. Eventually we both start falling asleep.
While I’m still half-conscious, I dimly register Dawn, backlit from the hallway, quietly pulling my bedroom door closed.
Chapter 24
I LOOK DOWN AT THE SMALL CLUSTER OF FOLD-OUT CHAIRS below me, where Ruth’s family and a couple of her friends sit. From the front row, Dawn gives me an encouraging nod.
I take a deep breath.
“Okay, so the problem is, it’s impossible to write a eulogy because nobody is really honest about who they’re writing it for. Theoretically, it’s supposed to be for the person who passed away, right? You talk to them in heaven—or, if you’re agnostic, you imagine them sitting in the front row with popcorn and Mike and Ikes or something—and tell them how much they enriched your life, how kind and wonderful they were, what a joy to be around. But at their core, eulogies are selfish. They’re not for the dead person; they’re really for the rest of us, so we can say goodbye the way we would have if we’d seen it coming.
“Which is especially tough in this case because one of so many things that made Ruth special is that she wouldn’t want me to give myself that pass, to turn her into a saintly little old lady whose only interests were fresh Toll House cookies and lumbar back pillows. I think I understand now why people do that: because the pain is less acute if you blur out the idiosyncrasies and specifics of this person you loved and make it more like a generic grief template, like you’re saying goodbye to some neutral, safe stranger made out of geriatric Mad Libs.
“The word eulogy comes from a combination of the Greek words for praise and elegy. Ruth would call bullshit on both. She’d probably ask for a Viking funeral instead. You know, that kind where you put the body in a canoe and push it into the lake and set it on fire. And she’d want it to scare the crap out of the Melville Prep boys’ crew team in the next boat.