Page 13 of Sex Ed

‘You know it.’

I then look to his whiteboard where he’s projected his topic of the day.Reproduction. Oh.

ED

You never quite know what you’re going to get with Mia. The girl can’t keep a secret. We know this because I ran a marathon once and got awful chafing with my nipples, so she announced this to the staffroom and Beth lent me some of her breastfeeding cream to relieve them.

After I woke up on Mia’s bathroom floor, having used a bathmat as a makeshift blanket, it was all I could think about. Not Caitlin, not the fact it felt like a cat had defecated inside my mouth, but the fact that I’d drunkenly told Mia – Mia with the big mouth – that I was a virgin. Why? I’d managed to keep it a secret to myself for that long, so why tell someone now? I left pretty swiftly. Did I bleach her toilet beforehand? I’m not an animal.

I never intended to be a virgin at twenty-eight. Who does? I don’t know how I got to this point having never had sex. I nearly had it. Once. After the story of that spread around my halls of residence, I had the nickname of Fan Boy for the rest of my university days, so I stopped trying. I studied. I got involved in all those endeavours where one doesn’t really meet women. I stayed in and drank with my housemates who were all physicists and chemical engineers. I joined the board games society. I can tell you all the squares on a Monopoly board but have never seen a real-life woman’s clitoris. After my degree, it was on to teacher training and as the years passed, it became an embarrassment, a source of shame, the reverse of a scarlet letter. I thought of ways to non-virginise myself, the obvious being paying a lady to have sex with me, but I wanted someone to want me. I also just never had the balls to go through with it. I mean, I had the balls. My balls actually ached with how much I wanted to have sex, but I sorted that out with my own hand, my longest-running relationship thus far. That is so very sad.

So now, I worry that this secret is like a ticking time bomb. Who will Mia tell? Has she told anyone already? Her housemate may have heard. How will I walk into that staffroom ever again? Maybe I can blag it – tell her that it’s a religious thing. Or maybe I have a mechanical issue with my male parts? It’s medical, people. But folk will still laugh and point and ask questions. Maybe I need to quit, move, leave the country. Mia just came in here now. She didn’t say anything. She smiled, but for her that can mean a number of things, usually that she’s up to no good. But at least she didn’t shun me or avoid me. That’s something, I guess.

‘Mr Rogers, you baked these? These are better than them ones you can buy in Starbucks,’ a voice says from the back of the classroom.

‘Thank you. I did… they are banana and maple syrup with cream cheese frosting. No one in here has allergies, right?’ I ask again. I did do a form that their parents all signed. ‘All good vitamins, kids.’

‘Miss Johnson was just telling us she thinks you could go on Bake Off. Why don’t you apply, Sir?’ I hear another voice say.

My body stiffens for a moment. They spoke to Miss Johnson? I don’t know if that’s a good thing. When? Where? Miss Johnson knows too much.

‘She did, did she? What else did she say?’ I say, my voice quivering slightly.

‘She wouldn’t tell us if you were married!’

‘Well, I am not married.’

‘Are you single? Are you dating anyone?’ a girl asks.

I feel my cheeks redden at the question. This is not professional talk.

‘You should go on Tinder, Sir. Girls love a man who can bake,’ another girl says.

I can see it now.Ed, 28, bakes well. Virgin. Like the olive oil.

‘Maybe. Where did you bump into Miss Johnson then?’ I enquire.

‘On the 65 bus.’

I stop to look at all of them. Surely if Mia had said, ‘He’s not married, he’s not even knocked boots with anyone’ then they would be looking at me strangely, with pity, with laughter. Not even my muffins could have calmed down that chatter. But that’s not Mia. That would have been cruel and that’s not her. Mia is eccentric, brash, really annoying at times, but never cruel.

‘She also told us she’s married to Harry Styles, is that right?’ a boy pipes up.

‘This is true. I went to their wedding. I made the cake.’

They all laugh, and the sound is a relief. They are a good bunch, this lot. Normally you do get the year groups and the odd class that act as the best contraceptive known to man, but this group seem keen on at least scraping through their exams and trying to have something at the end to show for it.

‘Right, enough of Miss Johnson’s wedding… Biology. I know half of you are here for the muffins, the other half are here to heckle whilst we talk about sex.’ There is sniggering across the boys in the back row which is not uncommon. ‘So, I marked the practice exam questions you did the other day. We need to talk through some things. I’ve not attached names to any of these, but here are some of the answers you gave me.’

I click a slide through on my board presentation.

‘What is E in this diagram? It is not a “plant wang.” It is a stamen, and it doesn’t “jizz pollen everywhere.”’

I knew what I was doing when I made these slides – I had to get them on side with some big humour because it’s 8 a.m. on a Monday morning.

‘And another, what is the function of the testes? Someone put to make “man milk” and “make sure the penis isn’t lonely hanging there on his own.”’

Someone high fives someone else at the back of the room. I raise my eyebrows at them.

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