Losing It

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I sat at my desk and stared at a calendar with a bunch of dancing tamales on it and played with a little piece of paper and thought about the fact that I was twenty-six and still a virgin. There was that, and then there was the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Chelsea Maitland. She was my first friend to lose her virginity. She was fifteen. She told me about it one afternoon on her parents’ remodeled back deck after school. The railings were made of a bright white vinyl material that hurt my eyes. It was when she’d gone to visit her sister at college, she said. They’d gone to a frat party, and there was a guy there who had been a counselor at a summer camp she’d gone to. She’d always had a crush on him, and they ended up getting drunk and walking to a lake together and one thing led to another.

“How did it feel?” I asked. I focused on a laid-back ceramic frog with an outdoor thermometer in it. We lived in San Antonio, that’s where I grew up, and fixtures like this were common. “I couldn’t say,” said Chelsea, with a little smile, her face folded and smug, like she was in possession of a secret I couldn’t possibly fathom, and she had to crowd around it and protect it. Chelsea Maitland of all people. We’d been friends for almost eight years, since we were kids, but the implication beneath our friendship had always been that I was the special one. That I would always be the one to get the thing.

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