Purity

by Jackson Pearce

  Daniel’s face falls. “Wait, what?”

  “Come on,” I whisper, slinking one of my legs around him. I press the condom into his hand.

  “Wait, Shelby,” Daniel says, his voice loud and filled with surprise. “I can’t have sex with you.”

  My mouth drops and my breath escapes. He doesn’t want me. What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with me?

  I jerk away from him, and he falls to the floor in surprise.

  “Wait—look, sorry, but—”

  “What?” I drop the condom. “I’m good enough for second base, but not a home run?”

  “Jesus Christ, don’t go all crazy. I just don’t want to have sex.”

  “Why not?” I snarl as I stand up and button my pants, trying not to look at the happy rainbows on my underwear.

  “I don’t know,” Daniel mumbles as he grabs his shirt off the futon. “God help me if you got pregnant. My mom would kill me.”

  “Hence the condom!”

  “I don’t know, I just… no. Come on, we can make out, maybe even do some other new things….”

  “No,” I say flatly. Boob squeezing and Cheetos aren’t going to get me out of being a thirty-five-year-old virgin, thank you very much. “You know, it’s not that big a deal, Daniel. It’s just sex.”

  Daniel looks taken aback for a moment; then angry surprise sweeps over his face like a wave. “So what are you, some kind of slut now?”

  “Not hardly,” I growl. I grab my purse and leave the condom lying on the floor, where I genuinely hope his mom finds it. I storm out of his room, down the stairs, and toward the front door. I feel stupid, silly, embarrassed, like a failure. I knew this was crazy but—

  “Wait!” he yells from upstairs. I freeze. Did he change his mind? “You forgot your DVD.” He appears at the bottom of the stairs with the case but doesn’t hand it over. “What was this really about, Shelby? You break up with me because you don’t like my hobbies, then come over for the first time in ages and want me to have sex with you?”

  I sigh. I never explained the Promises to Daniel, and I’m not about to now, much less explain the LOVIN plan. Instead, I settle on, “I just was hoping to lose my virginity finally. You know, I figured I’m getting older, it’s about time—”

  “Oh my God, are you serious?” Daniel asks. “So… I was your booty call?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “Forget it. I’m going home.” I spin on my heel, but Daniel catches my arm.

  “Look, Shelby, I’m sorry.”

  “Whatever,” I say. I can hear myself sounding like a bitch, but I’m too frustrated to rein myself in. Daniel opens his mouth again, but I turn and dodge his attempts to stop me. Five minutes later, I’m trudging down the dark street alone. I open up my cell—Ruby has called four times while it was on silent. I dial her back.

  “You disappeared! How did it go? Did he argue about the condom? ’Cause guys are sometimes dicks like that, no pun intended.”

  “He argued about the condom, all right. But then he also argued about the sex in general. So instead of having sex, I’m just walking home.”

  “What? How is that possible! Did you wear the right panties?”

  “Apparently he’s still a virgin, and he’s not interested.”

  “Wow. Have you told Jonas?”

  “No.” I cringe. “And so far the only other guy on my list is Ben Simmons….”

  “Is he a Ridgebrook guy?” Ruby asks.

  “Yep. Drama kid.”

  “I think I’ve heard of him before. Nice guy, kind of sleeps around?”

  “That’d be Ben.”

  “Huh. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? That when you were dating Daniel and maybe able to have sex, you weren’t really interested, but now that you’re interested, it doesn’t work out.”

  “Thanks, Ruby. Being willing but not able is exactly the problem I wanted to reflect on.” I sigh.

  “Sorry,” Ruby says. “I didn’t mean it like that. Just that life always seems like that—the minute you want something, you can’t have it.”

  “I guess,” I say. “Anyway, call you tomorrow?”

  “Sure thing, Shel. Don’t worry about it too much, okay?”

  “Right.”

  I trudge down the main road. It’s wide enough to walk on, and I’m too irritated to get nervous when cars drive by. Not my safest move, but right now I don’t care. I’m too focused on Ruby’s words. Willing but not able. Such a simple, primal act, and I’m not able to do it. It seemed way easier when losing my virginity was just an idea, a something-that-might-eventually-happen thing instead of a plan. I look up at the moon.

  Maybe it’s God.

  The thought comes to me like a flash, something I didn’t mean to think that zips through my head. Maybe God is stepping in and keeping me from having sex. Not that that really meshes with that whole free-will thing that they were always telling us to be grateful for at church, but it wouldn’t be the first time God—and the church—disappointed me. After all—I prayed. I prayed more than anyone has ever prayed. And it didn’t do a thing to help Mom.

  I kick a rock in the road, then return my eyes to the sky. People talk about how they can’t believe anyone could deny God’s existence, with things like stars and sunsets and circulatory systems and creativity. I understand, though. Because losing your mom is way, way more powerful than stars.

  I bring my eyes down to gaze at the road ahead. Maybe God is more like me. Maybe he couldn’t save Mom, maybe he couldn’t answer the millions of prayers I sent his way, the millions of prayers everyone sends his way. Maybe the church, Princess Ball lead sponsor or not, has it all wrong—God’s mysteries aren’t because we can’t understand his plan, but because he doesn’t have one at all.

  * * * *

  Walking home seemed like a better idea when I was storming out of Daniel’s house. Two and a half miles later, my feet hurt and I’m incredibly sore from the dance lesson. After much debate, I pull out my phone and call Jonas.

  “I thought you were on a hot date tonight,” Jonas says.

  “Not quite.” I sigh. “I’m really sorry to ask, but do you think you could pick me up?”

  “Absolutely,” Jonas says, his voice now serious. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. Nothing bad happened. Nothing happened, actually. I’m on the corner of Cypress and Regan Street, over near the drugstore.”

  “You’re where?” Jonas asks, and I hear the muffled sounds of him pulling on clothes.

  “We can go grab something to eat maybe? I’ll buy.” I hear the rattling of keys and then the sputtered sound of Lucinda cranking up.

  It takes Jonas only fifteen minutes to reach me. He rumbles up with a wary look. I climb in and chuck my purse to the back. The McDonald’s smell of Lucinda combined with the sandalwood and fabric softener scent that hangs around Jonas sweeps over me. I inhale. It’s a comforting scent, one that drives the lingering Cheetos smell from my head.

  “I’d really, really love to know how a sex date with your ex turned into you standing on a street corner,” he says. His hair is all stuck up on one side, like he’d been lying on the couch when I called.

  I sigh. “Can we go get milk shakes or something?”

  Jonas looks down at his T-shirt, which screams of having been in a ball on the floor. “I think Harry’s is still open. They have milk shakes, right?”

  “I guess.” I lean my seat back and close my eyes. “My date bombed,” I explain as Lucinda trucks toward the restaurant. “I thought it would be easier.”

  Jonas glances my way as we pull into the Harry’s parking lot. I continue, “I thought Daniel was kind of a sure thing. He was always more than happy to fool around when we were dating.”

  “So were you, but you wouldn’t be hitting him up for sex if you weren’t loopholing out of a sex ban,” he says.

  “True… I guess…” My throat tightens a little. “I guess I figured he’d want to have sex with me regardless.”

  “Wait,” Jonas says, tur
ning the engine off. “Are you worried that he didn’t… want to?”

  “He clearly didn’t want to, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” I say, sharper than I intended.

  “No, he thought he shouldn’t. Sort of like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t eat that candy bar because I’m on a diet’ or whatever. It doesn’t mean he didn’t want the candy bar. Just that he didn’t want to… uh… have sex with the candy bar.”

  We stare at each other for a moment, then laugh. Jonas hops out of the car and comes around to my side. I reluctantly open my door and step out.

  “Does this mean you’re on to guy number two?” he asks, his voice a little tense as we walk into Harry’s. It’s one of those restaurants where they stick up junk on the walls, and I have to duck under the antlers of a jackalope before answering.

  “Yep, on to Ben Simmons, I guess—I haven’t thought of anyone else for guy number two. At least he isn’t likely to miss the hint when I throw myself at him.”

  “Ben Simmons isn’t likely to miss a girl in any regard….”

  “Exactly why he’ll be perfect,” I say. “I just have to figure out a way to… you know. Cross his path. We haven’t talked in years.”

  “Welcome to Harry’s, home of the Harry Hot Dog. Table for two?” a bright-eyed hostess interrupts us. Jonas nods, and the hostess leads us through a maze of empty tables to a two-person booth tucked away by the kitchen. An old baseball glove and a bat are nailed to the wall beside us.

  “You could talk to Anna,” Jonas says as he browses the menu. “She hangs out with him from time to time.”

  “Didn’t she say she made out with him at a party?” I ask.

  Jonas pauses to order us both chocolate milk shakes when the waitress arrives. “Yeah,” he finally answers me. “But it was a long time ago.”

  “I guess I could ask her.” Anna isn’t someone I really talk to outside of school. Surely there’s an easier way to meet Ben.

  “Here,” Jonas says. “I have her number.”

  I’m surprised, but then again, Jonas has always been a bigger fan of Anna’s than I have. I copy the number into my phone, finishing just as our shakes arrive. I’m not as hungry as I thought—I stir my milk shake till the whipped cream vanishes. Ben Simmons. Who’d have thought? I didn’t really want to have sex with Daniel, but I remember that back when we were dating it had crossed my mind. So it didn’t seem too crazy to have sex with him. But Ben? I’ve never wanted Ben, not really.

  “Are you okay?” Jonas asks.

  “Yeah.” I shrug. “Just thinking about Ben. I never really pictured how I wanted my first time to be, you know? But now that I’m trying to have it, I feel like I’m giving up some fantasy that never even existed to begin with.”

  “Like what?” Jonas asks cautiously.

  I flush a little. “I don’t know. With someone I love, I guess. I never thought I’d do the whole wait-till-marriage thing, but I think I wanted it to be with someone I cared about.”

  Jonas sighs and sits back in the booth. “You can always try to talk to your dad again,” he suggests, and I’m grateful that he knows me well enough not to try to persuade me to break the Promises.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. I’m afraid that if I fight it too hard, he’ll get the wrong idea and think I’m shacking up nightly. Besides, it’s not the sex itself that bothers me, so much as having to make a choice about my virginity so soon. I didn’t realize I had secretly planned how I wanted my first time,” I say, trying to make it a joke. “I mean, you probably have a secret plan for how you want it to go, too. Think about it.”

  Jonas grins, but his ears turn a little red. “I guess I do. And mine doesn’t involve Ben Simmons, either,” he says, and I laugh. There’s a moment’s silence in which I zone in on the cherry at the bottom of my milk shake glass.

  For Jonas’s sake, I change the subject and let him show me his most recent list—colleges he wants to apply to, the ones that need extra admissions essays marked with a messily drawn star.

  An hour later, we’re pulling into my driveway. “Thanks for picking me up,” I tell Jonas as I swing my feet out of the car.

  “Don’t mention it,” he says. “What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief.”

  “I don’t know that quote,” I answer, frowning.

  “The Winter’s Tale. Not one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. But seriously—Daniel’s loss.”

  I smile, then step back and shut the car door.

  Inside, Dad is planted in front of the television, sound asleep. It’s almost eleven, so whatever show he’s watching has long gone off to make way for a Super Shammy infomercial. I try to shut the door quietly, but he sits up anyway.

  “Shelby? What time is it?”

  “Eleven,” I say. “Sorry I woke you up.”

  Dad looks at me carefully, his expression a mix of curiosity and confusion. I don’t really have a set curfew, but eleven is later than usual. He wants to ask me where I was, I can tell, but he won’t, because he never has before—it’d break the routine. Even so, the weight of the night’s events is heavy in my mind, and something that tastes oddly like guilt forces me to look at the floor. Dad exhales.

  “I wrote you a note,” he says, pointing the remote to turn off the TV. I grab a slip of paper off the counter: Cake Tasting Friday at Noon!

  “There’s a cake tasting?” I ask. “Like, at the grocery store?”

  “No,” Dad says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “It’s a wedding cake bakery. Sweet Cakes or Sweet Caking or something. I can go alone, if you want,” he adds quickly.

  “Uh, no. I’ll go. No problem.”

  We stare at each other for a moment longer.

  “Well… good night,” Dad says.

  “Night.”

  24 days before

  I did not anticipate my Thursday going this way. I wanted to spend the day lying around, trying to get over what happened with Daniel, and getting up the nerve to call Anna about Ben Simmons. All that accompanied by at least one quart of ice cream.

  But no. I thought Dad was going to some sort of planning session with the rest of the Princess Ball committee and just wanted me to come. It isn’t until we get to the church that Dad springs it on me: I’m here to talk with a group of Princess Ball attendees. And the pastor. They call it a Princess Meeting. I call it Personal Hell.

  I mean, forget the fact that I pretty much always hate talking to pastors—they have this way of sneaking God into the conversation. You’ll be talking about something mundane, like creamed corn, and all of a sudden creamed corn is a symbol of how God loves you. But pastors aside, I just don’t want to be around the other Princess Ball attendees. From what I’ve heard at school and seen at the waltz lesson, most of them are good girls, sweet girls, girls who have “it” figured out, whatever it is. They’ve got straight As and flawless makeup and whole families and probably golden retrievers.

  Hanging out with those kinds of girls feels like showing up to a party naked. No, they don’t laugh and point—they swarm to help me, include me, talk to me, when all I really want to do is run home and find a shirt.

  I sigh as I walk down the church hallway; the sound of thirty-some girls in full talking frenzy pours down the corridor. I take a deep breath and turn the corner into the classroom.

  The room is the preschool Sunday school room, covered in craft projects and bright posters. I recognize almost everyone, either from school or from my youth group days. I take a seat as far away from everyone else as possible, which is tricky given that the chairs are arranged in a messy circle. Mona Banks waves from the other side of the room; I pretend not to notice, but she heads my way regardless.

  “Hey, Shelby!” Mona calls.

  “Hi, Mona,” I say, without an attempt to match her enthusiasm. She slides into the chair next to me and flips her hair over her shoulder.

  “So, I was talking to some friends about the ball and how you get to plan it while we were working on this Habitat
for Humanity house this week. They were so jealous!”

  “Things are going pretty good. We have a cake tasting on Friday.”

  “Oh, I’m jealous! I also heard about this thing that my cousin did at her city’s father-daughter-princess-ball thing; I bet you already know about it. With the roses?”

  “Haven’t heard of it,” I say, which Mona interprets as “Tell me more!”

  “Well, everyone gets a big white rose and they take your picture in your dress with it, handing it to your father,” Mona explains, twisting her hair around her fingers.

  “Sounds… showy.”

  “Yeah, that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?” Mona says. She waves to a few other youth group girls, who venture our way. “A big show about being good daughters and whatever?”

  I laugh a little. “Right. Right.”

  Mona laughs, then lowers her voice. “Though I have to admit, it’s kind of funny. The questionnaires and the whole bonding thing… like they think this dance will make me go talk to my dad about stuff. It’s like those drug promises they make you sign in elementary school—do they really think those work?”

  I stare at Mona for a moment. Mona Banks? Perfect Girl poster child? “What do you mean?” I ask.

  Mona giggles and her friends lean in to listen. “I mean, come on. It’s just a dance. Those vows they added in are so stupid, but… they make my dad happy, so whatever, I guess….”

  Right. You aren’t bound by promises. This is just a joke to you. I almost feel betrayed—these girls look like the cast of one of those cheery don’t-do-drugs videos they make you watch in health class, and have everyone believing it. But they aren’t. They aren’t perfect. I shouldn’t be jealous of Mona and her total, complete faith after all, because it’s not real—she’s like a math problem, the kind where you got the right answer but didn’t show any of your work. Mona is the right answer, but she didn’t get there by going through anything difficult, by questioning God, by doubting. She landed there by playing a part, but she’s never done the work.

  I swallow. I’m still jealous.

  I’m about to respond when the pastor steps into the room, all smiles and shampoo-commercial hair.