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WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?

I think of Isaac Harver and bad words, my heart racing.

This is not me.

six

“Mystery solved,” Brooke announces as she drops her stuff on our breakfast table. “Cole has a little dick.”

Lilly stops peeling her banana. “You didn’t seriously do it?”

“Sure did.” Brooke tosses her ponytail off her shoulder as she swipes an orange off my breakfast tray. “I put in my run this morning, and he was working on sprints. I asked him to satisfy my curiosity, and while that may be taken care of, it’s the only thing he’ll ever be satisfying.”

“You are unbelievable,” I say, taking back my orange and tearing off some segments for her.

She shrugs. “The funny thing about dicks is that we never get to see them limp, you know? It was chilly this morning, Cole was a sweaty exhausted mess, and I’m all, ‘Hey, pull down your pants,’ and it’s like boom—erection.”

Lilly nods like this is an AP class and Brooke is spouting high wisdom.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I reassure Lilly, worried she’s going to take too much direction from our less-than-modest friend. “The female G-spot is typically only three inches deep, so as long as he’s past that it’s a perfectly serviceable penis.”

“Thank you for the medical analysis, Sasha,” Brooke says, squishing a piece of orange. “When you’re making out with Heath do you instruct him to create a vacuum on your areolae?”

“No,” I shoot back, ignoring the blood I feel rising to my face. “And I don’t think that’ll be happening anytime soon, anyway.”

“Oooooo . . . why’s that?” Lilly leans in closer to me, and Brooke steals what’s left of my orange again. This time I let her. There’s something reassuring in the nearness of them, our body heat comingling with shared words, the little bit of orange skin I can see clinging to Brooke’s teeth that I might tell her about. I may not like my friends all the time, but when you go to a small school you cut your losses.

And I know they feel the same way about me. So I spill.

“Heath called me last night, totally pissed. Apparently Charity”—I raise my eyebrows at Lilly, as if she’s accountable for her cousin’s actions—“told everyone I was asking about getting abortions in bio. So of course this means I’m pregnant.”

“Uh, except for the whole you’re-a-virgin thing,” Brooke says. “When they showed us those pics of syphilis in sixth grade they might as well have signed you up for nun school.”

I want to correct Brooke with the word convent, or inform her that I’d have to be Catholic to be a nun. Instead I shudder, remembering the picture she means in perfect detail.

“I’d have to be stupid to have sex,” I say, repeating the first words out of my mouth when I walked out of that doomed health class years ago.

“Yeah,” Brooke agrees. “Or normal.”

“Whatever,” I shoot back. “Herpes. Gonorrhea. Pregnancy.” I tick off the cons with my fingers, each one a solid fact that came with its own explicit slide in sixth grade that burned into my mind, confirming that sex could only ruin my life.

“Pish,” Brooke argues, raising her own fingers. “Oral. Vag—”

“Stop,” I say, but she only shrugs.

“They didn’t tell us the good parts, you know?”

“And no pics either,” Lilly says sadly.

“Regardless,” I go on, trying to get the conversation back to the fight with my boyfriend. “Heath and I don’t have sex, which I pointed out to him. And then he says—and I quote—‘Just because we don’t have sex doesn’t mean you can’t be pregnant.’” I stress the pronouns exactly the way he did, so that the implications are perfectly clear.

“Wait . . . what?” asks Lilly.

Brooke smacks her on the forehead, leaving behind an orange seed. “He’s saying if she’s pregnant, it’s not his. And that, my friend, is top-tier bullshit.”

“Thank you.” I smile at Brooke. She may be the most uncouth person I know, but she’s loyal. And right now her back is up.

“What a penis hole,” she says, drawing the attention of some nearby freshmen. “You’re completely frigid, dude. And I say that with affection.”