Never Have I Ever

SOMEBODY SHOULD BE MONITORING MORE carefully the decisions of people who are crazy for each other. Because before sophomore year started, my group of friends and I—having whittled ourselves down to a tight, seemingly indestructible five—made the adorable and unwise decision to live together in one room for the entire coming year, and someone should have stopped us. It was just one room. One room with two bunk beds and one loft. I had never been to sleepaway camp as a kid because I had been too scared to leave home, and I imagined that sharing a room with my four best friends would make up for that. We’d play Truth or Dare every night. We’d lie in our beds and laugh until six in the morning. We might even play that game where you try to make each other levitate, whispering “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” and we would say we didn’t believe it would work, but we all kind of would.

This is not how things generally turn out when five nineteen-year-old women live in a room together, no matter how big it might be. It’s like that, a little, at first. On an early fall weekend, we sat in a circle in the middle of the floor and played a round of Never Have I Ever, that great simultaneous divider and unifier of college girls. There is always a fork in the road, a wild divergence in the earliest quarter of the game, and if you do not have some baseline of sexual achievement, the rest of the game becomes very boring very quickly. I could have left the room and my inability to participate would have been no more noticed than it was with me there. I could have left the state. I kind of wanted to. Whereas Rylee’s fingers disappeared into her fist within minutes, mine remained stretched out and self-conscious about even being attached to my hand, which never did anything dramatic or stupid or cool. People usually pretend to be embarrassed when they play (and win) Never Have I Ever, but this is a game that is fundamentally about bragging. And according to the way the game was going, I had done nothing worth writing home about. Not that my parents would ever want to receive that kind of letter. But you know what I mean.

Somehow, by the middle of fall in our sophomore year, Rylee had gotten a lot farther down that road than I had realized. She was having sex—not frequently but not infrequently, either, with not all that many guys but with more than zero. (At that point, she stood out: Lacy and Joyce had long-term boyfriends whom they were presumably sleeping with, but they were always both extremely reticent about that topic. Colleen wasn’t dating or having sex, but she was making out with impressive vigor.) And even though I always knew when Rylee’s rendezvous were happening, it’s sometimes hard to understand the magnitude of one’s experiential difference from others until you hear it listed off, in lots of vivid and alarming details, in a game of Never Have I Ever. That first time, it felt kind of bad—funny, but also kind of bad—but I thought it might end up being okay if I could just have some time to catch up. But Rylee was just a much faster runner than most of us, and in sophomore year she really took off. This is not necessarily hard to do when one’s opponents are standing motionless. But still.

So over the next couple of months we, the other four, got mad at her. Not just for having sex, though that, I’m afraid, was not a small part. It was because she was sleeping with guys who treated her like shit, ones who refused to walk her home and, occasionally, ones who ended up having girlfriends who were still in high school. It was because she’d always start her partying with us and end it without us, disappearing halfway through most nights to follow guys back to wherever. It was because we were worried. It was because she wasn’t using thirty-seven forms of birth control all at once, even though I kept insinuating that would really be her best bet. It was because she was drinking a lot, choosing to do these things to be happy but never seeming all that happy the next day, or the one after that. It was because we were at once self-righteous and jealous—self-righteous because we didn’t need that kind of attention, jealous because we sometimes wanted it anyway.

We started fighting, vicariously, through our utilities. I turned up the air conditioner at night, and someone else would sneak over to turn it all the way off at 4:00 am so that I woke up sweaty. Rylee stayed up well past midnight talking to guys on AIM on her desktop computer, and the next morning I would tell her that her keyboard was oppressively loud. Colleen nodded. The late-night instant messaging had to go, we agreed. She really punched those keys. Rylee retaliated by taking baths in the communal bathroom we shared among eight of us on the floor, locking the door and soaking for over an hour. We all shared that big room, it was all of ours, but none of us were really welcome. It was just definitely, definitely too many people in one room.

At the end of the semester, Rylee moved out. Lacy moved with her, and the two of them got a double in another dorm building on campus. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away. Still, our respective rooms were much quieter and calmer and we thought it would help. And it did, a little. But it’s hard to smooth over a semester’s worth of built-up resentment. It’s hard to stop a roll once you’re on it. Rylee kept distancing herself from us, and somewhere along the way, in late mushy winter, Lacy (who was prone, when she was stressed or bothered by whatever thing, to periods of bitchy, unexplained silence, ignoring the people around her to the point of ridiculousness) inflicted an especially unforgiving silent treatment on her. This made Rylee run farther and faster still, to the point where I could hardly see her any longer.

But things got a bit better between us (at least, between me and Colleen and Rylee) for no good reason other than that we were tired, and it became April. April and September, in the Midwest at least, are the two months that usually make everything a little easier to take. Spring made us all happier, made us miss each other. It made us all want to chase boys with renewed energy, and so it seemed pretty unfair to keep judging Rylee for doing the same, but on a bigger and more successful and sexier scale. It wasn’t a perfect reversal, but it was better.

April also marked a full year gone since I had last kissed anyone. It was not for that reason alone that I lost my mind, but it did not hurt. It had been a Cold War year, and I was sick of hearing about everyone else’s advancements. I wanted to make out with someone again as soon as possible, and maybe, hopefully, even progress a bit farther than where I’d been, which would not have been hard at all. This is some version of what I said to myself early that spring: To the moon, or bust.

You know that thing people say about sex being like pizza? That even when it’s bad, it’s good? I have another proposal, another sexual-activity-as-food analogy: Kissing is like a milk shake. I’m going to go at this in a few different ways, so just hang in there. Even when you’re starting to feel sick, you want to keep going. Even when your mouth is tired, you want to keep suctioning. It will make you wonder if you even know how your mouth works. You will realize that breathing through your nose has its limits. Something will feel very wrong, and kind of frustrating, but it will also feel very right. You want it always, but especially while on your period.

And it’s just kind of hard to leave well enough alone.

It was thanks to Colleen’s, Rylee’s, and my participation in college tennis that year that we had come into contact with this small yet powerful bastion of male sexuality going by the inauspicious name of Dylan. He was a freshman on the boys’ team, and we didn’t know anything about him apart from the fact that he was dead sexy. He didn’t talk much, but when he did he was funny and charming. He was persistently tanned, with green eyes and a mop of black hair. A hot, well-kept mop. I want to say that he looked vaguely like Adrien Brody, but I’m not even sure that’s fair. They both had black hair and they’re both sexy in a way that can’t really be explained, so I guess there’s that. I didn’t have a legitimate crush on him or anything—even I knew this was someone I could not reasonably hope to date. His existence was one of those rare occasions where everyone gathers around to simply admire someone’s beauty, without really feeling the need to compete over it or make it an issue. Our girls’ tennis team viewed Dylan as our tiny, small, hot, perfect tennis trophy man. Sure, we’d tease each other—“I got to sit by Dylan in the trainer’s office while we both got our ankles wrapped, like soul mates.” “Shut up, I hate you, I hope you actually die.”—but we knew that Dylan was a precious natural resource, meant to be shared and used only sparingly. He was like sexy coal.

That being said, one hundred percent of us would absolutely have made out (etc.) with him if given the chance. So I wasn’t crossing the line when I decided to mine a little bit of Dylan for myself. (Ugh, this coal metaphor!) Any one of us would have done the same thing. Any one of us would have met the same sad fate that I did. It’s not about me, it’s about nature. Probably.

I don’t know what came over me the night it happened. I’ve shared my theories, but only with the recognition that they don’t quite cover it all. I am not the sort of person who just decides she’s going to win somebody over and then does it. I am not a good aggressor. I am not a lighthouse. I’d never before set out on a boy-related mission and actually accomplished it, and I never have since, either. I am sure this was something cosmic, something magical. I think it was the tequila.

As we pre-gamed in Rylee and Lacy’s dorm room that night, I told my friends about my plan and they cooed in a way that was somehow both approving and wary. They knew, by the laws of nature, that they could not stop me. But neither could they protect me from whatever might happen next. I saw the fear in their faces, but I ignored it, because I was maniacal by that point. “Mark my words,” I told them, without further clarification. “Mark… my… words.”

My mission was not elegant. I can admit that now. It involved more running, more drunken yelling, and more semi-hostile interrogation of Dylan’s frat brothers than I would have liked. Sure, in a perfect world I would not have called his friend “black shirt guy” quite so many times, or at all. And yes, it probably came off more rude than it did flirtatious when I threw two of Dylan’s cigarettes on the ground, once I finally found him in the courtyard behind his frat house. I was a creature possessed. So after just a few moments spent standing alongside Dylan and my friends, I decided to take action. I grabbed his hand and dragged him out to the basement dance floor. I don’t know if I even said anything. I can’t recall, and I don’t think that’s even (just) because I was drunk. We went to the farthest wall and went about “dancing,” which is to say that we swayed in the same directions together at a proximity that might be considered inappropriate in most contexts. At first my back was against his front, but I turned around to face him after a few songs. My leg was sort of in between his legs and my hands were up on the wall behind him. Was I trapping him, a little bit? It might have looked like I was trapping him.

Dylan and I did that look-at-each-other-until-something-happens thing, which is so frustrating I cannot stand it, so I kissed him. I wasn’t about to let another Eric situation happen. I wasn’t going to let Sexy Coal get away just because I didn’t show enough interest when I had the chance. The kissing itself was just all right. Better technique than Eric, more thrilling than Ethan, but does that really mean anything? It was the kind of good kissing that is really only good because of how hot the person you’re doing it with is. So we made out for parts of a song, danced a little bit more, made out a little more, and repeated. It’s not so much that I was having a genuinely great time as it was that I didn’t know when, or how, to stop. I sort of felt like, if I had put in all that work, and actually made this thing happen, and he was willing, I might as well keep kissing him until some third party legitimately forced me to cease and desist.

That happened in a much realer way than I was expecting.

Suddenly, a girl I had never seen before was in my face and screaming at me. She wasn’t mad, at first. Just drunk.

“Oh my GOD, my boyfriend just totally yelled at me because he thought that you were ME and that I was making out with some other guy!!!” she squealed.

I was confused for many reasons, among which were the facts that I was at least five inches taller and five shades paler than she was. Nobody with any kind of vision would confuse us in a lineup. But it was sort of a funny thing to have happen, so I laughed in a way that I hoped would suggest that I wanted her to see I was kind of busy at the moment.

“Oh, haha, nope!” I said. Back slowly away from Sexy Coal, I thought, and nobody gets hurt.

I turned back around, unknowingly leaving a quickly forming wall cloud in my wake. It was happening. I had broken a law of physics or something similar—whatever rule it is that states that perfect hot trophy people are not to be messed with, lest you set the earth’s weather systems off balance. Behind me, the girl started screaming. I didn’t even actually hear it, because I had tequila earmuffs on (that IS a thing). Later, in the post-apocalyptic world that was born the next day, my friends told me they saw her storm off screaming about “that fucking bitch” she’d just talked to. I would never learn why. My best guess is that she thought I somehow insinuated that we could never be mistaken for one another? Like I thought she was uglier than me or something? I really don’t know. There is probably no real answer to be had, other than the fact that karma had stepped in to take me down a notch.

That was penance part one.

Part two came later in the night, and it was so much worse. After a few more rounds of making out—my lips starting to hurt, but my liquid brain refusing to just call it a night—Dylan took a pause to tell me he thought it was time he headed back. I could hardly hear the words coming from his mouth, because of the howling desert winds that had taken up spinning around us. This was not how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to want to keep kissing me. He was supposed to ask me to come back to his dorm, so that I could sleep over and then have to walk back in the morning in my shiny party clothes. I (probably) didn’t want to have sex with him, but I wanted to do at least one or two semi-gross steps beyond the making out we had already done. I wanted some goddamn progress.

“Are you sure? Really? You’re leaving?” I asked, still holding his hand.

“Yeah… I’ve gotta go do some homework.”

And just like that, it was quiet. The clock struck midnight—midnight on a Saturday—and I turned into a pumpkin.

Allow me to take a brief intermission here to explain that there will be no sex. Not with Dylan (which I know might be surprising given how well things were going where we left off, a few sentences ago), and not with any of the guys I haven’t introduced you to yet. Not with any secret, lurking strangers I’m keeping hidden in between. It hasn’t happened. It’s not happening. It’s going to happen (I hope??), but it won’t be here. Let me just say this: Tina Fey once said, a few years ago, that she was twenty-four when she had sex for the first time because she “couldn’t give it away.” From what I could gather via the Internet, everyone seemed to think that sounded pretty late. I was twenty-two when she told that story, and I worshipped Tina Fey then as I do now. So I held that deadline out in front of me, on the peripheries of my mind, and I only worried about how old I’d be when it happened until the day I turned twenty-four without it having happened, and then a bit more for a couple of months after that. Then I stopped caring about the hypothetical age I’d be when it happens, because I knew this much: I will definitely be even older than Tina Fey was. Oh well.

Here are the reasons: I mostly haven’t had chances, and when I’ve had chances I haven’t realized it. Or I did, but didn’t want them. An example: When I was a senior in college my cute friend Johnny, who was drunk and had already, I think, fallen asleep once that night, made out with me on a couch in his house, and then sort of pulled me down so that I was lying on top of him, but backward. Just… backward, my back side on his front side, the way two people would look if they had been stacked. He was weird, really, and this sort of move was not unprecedented coming from him, and he was just my friend who liked making out, so I didn’t really think anything more about it when, from below me, he reached around and slid two fingers—forefinger and middle finger, but wouldn’t it be funny if it were the pinkie and the thumb?—down my shirt and one inch deep into my bra. And all I did was lie there. I thought his fingers needed a resting place, maybe. I was tired. After a few minutes, I gently grasped his wrist, lifted his arm, and let it flop to the side of the couch. “Okay,” I said. “Good night.” Then I went home.

Some time later, my friends would tell me that that was a sign I was supposed to flip over and proceed with… doing stuff. “Are you serious?” I said. They nodded. They were all sure of it, somehow. Unanimously so. “I don’t understand you people,” I said.

I just don’t know how anyone ever knows what to do with their bodies. I catch myself worrying about what my arms are doing when I am walking alone, and that is just walking. Alone.

So I am a basket case, generally, and picky, and have almost always had crushes on people who usually don’t have crushes on me, and it’s rare that I’m so attracted to a stranger that I could imagine having sex with him at that exact moment. And even when that has been true, I am only able to talk about thinking about it, from a safe distance. I have no idea what I’d actually do about it. But generally speaking, I’d like to date someone, at least a little, first. Add all this to my somewhat looming height, an unintentional bracing hostility toward people I don’t know well, and an end to the era in my life when I might have felt the need to do something the first time to get it over with, and it’s not hard to end up a twenty-five-year-old who hasn’t had sex. I put practically no effort into it at all. And that’s why I don’t think we should be calling people “virgins,” or implying that virginity is a noun you can lose. These words insinuate a preciousness that I do not feel. My vagina, while nice and useful, is not an orchid.

So if someone around me says something about “virgins” being helpless or hopeless or sad or weak, or I watch someone tell someone else that he would become more relaxed and more fun, happier, and better all around if only he would get laid, that is how I know that person is a dummy and I don’t want to talk to him or her any longer. Sex is not a wizard, whatever magical-seeming properties it might possess in its better forms. If your friend says to you, “You’re being mean, you need to get laid,” your problem is not sex. Your problems are that you might be acting like an asshole, and your friends are definitely idiots. I have lived twenty-five years in this body by myself, and I feel pretty confident that, by now, my personality is staying as it is. I’m going to stay a little uptight and anxious. I’m going to continue enjoying plans and Post-its and clean, orderly spaces. And though nobody has been dumb enough to say anything close to “You need to get laid” to my face, I resent the idea that anyone might think, if they knew my history, that I’d be slightly different by virtue of having a penis—however briefly—inside me. That is some phallocentric bullshit if I ever heard any. Hypothetical penises don’t make the rules. I make the rules. I love the rules.

And one last small tirade on female sexuality before we drop all this and never speak of it again, before we return to Saturday at midnight: Guys who would make fun of girls for sexual inexperience are terrible people, and when girls do it to other girls it feels even shittier. Guys who shame girls who haven’t had sex want them to feel like they aren’t doing their job, which is to be sexually available and attractive to guys. (And never mind if they are gay, or just uninterested.) Girls who shame other girls for these reasons are helping those guys. They are saying this: You are not accomplished where it matters, and I am better than you. I have proven that men find me attractive, and that is what counts. These people, boys and girls and men and women alike, are all dickheads. They make me so mad that I have to move on.

So there will be no sex, and though I really hope it is not always that way, that is fine. Sometimes it’s annoying—mostly in the loins region. Loinal region?—and obviously I’m going to get tired of it at certain points more than others, but it’s fine. I’m no longer bothered by things I haven’t done, simply for not having done them yet. I probably wouldn’t have ever been bothered, at least not in the timeline sense of it, if movies and TV and a handful of very loud, awful people didn’t keep bothering me and the people in my vicinity about it all the time. Jesus Christ!!

But okay, back to Dylan. This whole time, I’ve just been standing confused in that frat house basement. Homework! Get a load of that.

There are an amazing number of questions that fly through a person’s head when the person she’s just made out with tells her that the reason he can no longer make out is that he has to go do homework. At midnight. On a Saturday. The main one is just “What?” Some of the others are “How did I get here, to this place in my life?,” “Can someone sweep me out of here with a cane like in the old movies?,” and “What am I going to eat when I get home that could help make up for this?”

I suppose I could have said something like “I’ll come help you,” or “Can I come with?” but that would have required a tenacity I’ve never had for situations like these. Besides, I was embarrassed enough as it was. I did not need a second no. And even if he hadn’t split like that, even if I had asked if I could go wherever it was he was really going, I didn’t know what I would have done when I got there. We both knew, I’m assuming, that sex was not really in the cards. We were barely even playing cards. So he walked out. And the next morning, in the cafeteria, I told my friends the full account of what happened, and they laughed. I laughed, too. I had a new war story.

None of this is to say that I gave up hoping we’d get to make out (etc.) again, just once more at least. I was embarrassed, but not THAT embarrassed. Maybe he really HAD gone to do homework? No. I never thought, really and sincerely, that that could be true. But because we were friendly thanks to tennis, and because he hadn’t seemed opposed to the making out itself, and because he was so hot, I still hoped to summon that night’s power again, because up until, say, 11:55 pm, it had been pretty exhilarating. I had been, in admittedly relative terms, forward with someone I had really wanted to be forward with. For one night—well, for part of one night—I’d been a lighthouse.

Rylee, meanwhile, having taken only a very brief break, had resumed getting into trouble, and by then the school had noticed.

It was at the end of a bad week in May—our fighting having picked back up, the spring magic only able to last so long when the same things that made you mad keep happening—when a mutual friend called me around twelve-thirty on a Friday night to tell me that she’d found Rylee on the floor in the girls’ bathroom, passed out and ashen. The friend had called for an ambulance and was on the way over to my dorm to pick up one of my roommates and me—already home from a bust of a party, at which I talked to Dylan but did not kiss him even a little—to go to the hospital. We sat in the emergency waiting room for twenty minutes, until a nurse allowed us to see her.

People don’t look real lying on hospital beds. They look like dolls, and you sit next to them waiting for the real live version to walk around the corner to sit by you and comfort you. It was scary those first few moments, until she awoke as we walked through the curtain.

“HEY KATIE DID YOU GET TO MAKE OUT WITH DYLAN???” she screamed.

Everyone in the room, including the two nurses handling her IV and various tubes, burst out laughing. Any small moment of relief is funnier than it should be at the hospital. Clearly, Rylee was not in the best shape she had ever been in. But that was still her lying there, charming and vibrant as ever, concerned more with my romantic pursuits that night than with her own sorry state. I loved her for that.

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” I said.

“Oh well,” she said, eyes fluttering. “There’s… will… always be… the next times.”

The nurses enlisted my help in holding a bucket for her to throw up into, which is probably one of those things you can never imagine being willing to do before college. It made me feel better, and less afraid. After a year spent trying to help someone deal with things I didn’t understand without having the first idea how to do it, it felt nice to have it be so simple: Hold this bucket, and don’t move. She dry-heaved, spitting (or trying to spit) into the bucket I was holding next to her head. “Well THAT didn’t go anywhere but my mouth,” she said. I tried not to laugh too much, but it was no use.

She was always going to be excited for me, I realized. It didn’t matter to her that she was so far ahead with sex and guys, or that I couldn’t commiserate in whatever sex issues people who are having sex have. She was never going to patronize me. She would never tell me that when I had sex, or when I had a boyfriend, I would understand. I think I had assumed that she would be that way. Her drunken hospital proclamations indicated otherwise, and that made me happy. So that, plus the spitting, are the reasons I couldn’t stop laughing.

Still, it was otherwise not a good night, and in the morning there would be sad and hard decisions to be made. Because she was already on behavioral warning with the school, this new development didn’t seem as funny to the administration as it was to us at that moment. She’d have to leave, which she did by her own choice, before there was a chance for it to be anyone else’s.

The next fall, Rylee started at a new school and we started talking on the phone every day. It’s hard to start a new college as a junior. Most people have their social situations pretty much figured out by that point. So she was lonely, and because I missed her a lot, I was, too. We were two hours apart now, but when we sat talking on the quads of our respective campuses we kind of figured out that we must be best friends because we just didn’t like any of the people around us as much as we liked each other, which was a lot.

I visited her that fall on a three-day weekend. She was living at her parents’ house and we sat on her childhood bed, looking through her diary from the previous year. She let me hold it and read it myself, which was one of those moments when you feel like somebody must really love you and you just want to squeeze them (nicely) until they burst. As I should have expected, having lived through our sophomore year myself, it was not a pleasant read. In one part she wrote about feeling like she wasn’t really sure that she could trust me, or that we could ever be good friends. I knew, of course, that my own diary said things about her that were just as negative. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt to know she’d written angrily about me, too.

“Don’t feel bad,” she said when she saw my face. “I don’t feel that way now.”

We flipped through more pages until we got to the end, where I saw that she’d very neatly and carefully written out a list of what looked like the names of every boy she’d ever kissed, slept with, and/or dated. Rylee had made the list that summer, back when she was feeling pretty bad about its size, and at a time when I (regrettably, embarrassingly) might have judged her for it, too. Now I found it a treasure trove. The Dead Sea Scrolls, but more informative. Rylee’s not a Sex and the City character, but considering that most of the list was just make-outs, it definitely wasn’t small. “Oh my God,” I said. “This is amazing.” She even had a rating system—a “1” next to his name meant kissing plus, a “3” meant they had slept together, and a “2” meant some of that awkward stuff in between.

Going through those ratings made a lot of the things that seemed hard about the past year seem pretty funny, now that we were looking at it in list form. “You have accomplished a lot,” I said. “My list would be pretty pathetic.”

“You should make it,” she said. She handed me a pen.

I have a little section in Rylee’s diary now. My own little list of mishaps is written in the upper right-hand corner next to hers. It is a relatively small list, and sometimes, mostly for symmetrical purposes, I wish it were more expansive. To balance our achievement gap a little, I added a few non-boy-related collegiate escapades to my list: Cigarettes (3–7). The time I went out at 11:00 pm and was back throwing up on the floor, off of my top bunk, by 11:45. A particularly inappropriate Halloween costume. Or two.

This is not a list recorded for bragging rights, neither to grant them nor take them away. It is not a list of shames or regrets. It is just a list of some things we’ve done, bad and good and hot and weird, on our way to growing up.