Page 27 of Guy's Girl
On Thursday, during his 6 p.m. coffee break, Adrian digs his phone out of his pocket, hoping the buzz he feels will be a response to the application he submitted to Disney a few days before. He knows it’s early, but—
It’s a message from Ginny.
GINNY:Hey, brunch this weekend?
He pauses. He has a choice. He can let Ginny down easy, the way he would with most girls. It would be so simple. Three words, tapped out with the rough pads of his thumbs:Sorry, I’m busy.He’s done it so many times.
But then he thinks of Ginny’s laugh. Her enormous green eyes focused only on him, as if trying to peel back his skin and study what’s underneath. He thinks of the thickness that fills the air whenever she’s around. The fist at his center. Thewant.
ADRIAN:How’s noon?
The next weekend, Ginny has bottomless brunch in the East Village with Adrian. She drinks too many mimosas, and Adrian laughs as she skips through Tompkins Square Park.
They pick up coffees from a street cart and sit on a park bench.
“So,” Ginny asks. “When did you lose your virginity?”
Adrian chokes on his coffee. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
He thinks for a moment. “I was eighteen.”
“Who was she?”
“A girl from back home.”
“Girlfriend?”
He shakes his head. “What about you?”
“Seventeen. My boyfriend.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It wasn’t.”
Ginny was supposed to lose her virginity on her birthday. That was what she and Andy agreed to. He would’ve preferred it happen sooner, of course, but to his credit, he never pushed. Never even asked.Shewas the one to set the due date.Shewas the one to tell him: seventeen years old is good. Seventeen years old is enough.
At the back of her mind, Ginny had doubts. Sometimes, when they were kissing on his bed, she would become suddenly, terrifyingly certain that she needed to break up with him. Right then, right that moment.He isn’t the one, her brain would whisper.
But I like him, she would whisper back.
But do you? Do youreally?
It was anxiety. She knew it was. Anxiety is a surgeon skilled at carving things open that were never meant to be touched in the first place. She will examine your life from every angle. Look for cracks, abrasions, weak spots, doubts. And when she finds one, she will pick it apart, bone by bone, worry by worry, until you can no longer tell truth from fiction.
And so it was with sex.
Back then, Ginny was still recovering from the guilt uploaded into her body by a decade and a half of Catholicism. She liked theideaof sex—liked the way it felt when a certain part of her pelvis rubbed up against a certain part of Andy’s thigh—but she knew it was bad, too. Naughty. And every book read, every movie watched, every article inSeventeenmagazine—they made it seem like losing your virginity was some sort of threshold: once you crossed, there was no turning back. You are no longer the same. You never will be.
The closer her seventeenth birthday drew, the more Ginny started to panic.
She started to think. Hard. Made a list of pros and cons:To do it now, or to wait?She drafted messages to Andy. Deleted them. Drafted more. Deleted them again. The surgeon was hard at work. By the end, Ginny couldn’t remember why she wanted to have sex in the first place.
Here’s the thing about Anxiety: once she grabs hold of an issue, you cannot think or reason your way out of her. It’s the mental equivalent of chasing cars down the highway.
On the night of her birthday, as Andy’s hand crawled down her stomach, she panicked. Started to sweat. “Actually...” she said. “Can we just...?”
