Today’s the day, I wake up thinking. I’ve arranged to have sex. Today. And why not? I feel a certain measure of relief thinking about it. With Leo, there was a lot of pressure attached to the idea. So many feelings. A certain degree of performance anxiety. But the notion of having sex with Nick feels completely different. With Nick it feels like two nerdy people simply getting this major life event over with, so we can say we did it and move on with our lives.
Casual, I’ve decided. Casual is the way to go. How did Afton put it yesterday? I’m going to cash in my V-Card.
It occurs to me belatedly that maybe me deciding to have sex is a form of revenge. Revenge on whom, I can’t say exactly. On Afton for trying to boss me around about what I’m ready for, or for her inexplicable ability to get any guy she wants to fall at her feet, at any time. On Mom, for expecting me to always be so good while she feels free to be as bad as she wants.
I’ll show them both.
But, underneath all that, it also comes back to genuine curiosity. To know what it will be like. I feel so terrible about everything right now. I want to feel better. Sex could make me feel better. And maybe it’s as simple as that.
I stretch my arms over my head. Today’s the day. Or maybe tonight.
I still can’t really picture it, Nick and me, becoming horizontal with each other. But I’ll get there. I’ve decided. Today.
I’m getting out of bed when I notice the spot of red on the white sheets.
“No,” I gasp incredulously. I run to the bathroom to check my pajamas. “No no no no no!”
Yes. My period has arrived. It’s like four days early. I knew it was coming, and it felt unfair knowing it would happen in Hawaii, because isn’t that how it always goes when you go on a trip? You have to pack the extra stuff. You have to worry about it.
But this, today, of all days, is the ultimate level of unfair. This is seriously going to mess up my life.
It’s like the universe doesn’t want me to have sex. Revenge or not.
“Nooooooo,” I moan. Right on cue I start to cramp. Why does that always happen, too, that the pain only comes after you notice you’ve started? I sink to the bathroom floor. I want to scream. I want to sob over the unfairness of this world. I want to eat ice cream and feel sorry for myself and possibly die.
A shadow crosses over me—Afton, standing at the bathroom door. “You sound like you’re dying in here.”
“Oh, I am,” I confirm. “Minute by minute, I’m getting closer to the grave. Give it seventy years or so.”
She scoffs and walks away, back to hating me again.
I get up, clean up, shower quickly, make use of some feminine products, and before Mom can come in to dump Abby off on me, I run down to the pool to meet Nick.
Only now I don’t know what to say.
He’s there. It’s nice that he’s so prompt. Leo was always running late for things. “Have you tried the acai bowls from the café? They are delectable,” Nick says as I approach the cabana by the Ocean pool.
He’s obviously trying to impress me with his AP-level vocabulary. Like a bird flashing his brightly colored feathers. Loquacious. Delectable. Squawk.
“It’s ‘a-sigh-ee.’” I drop into the lounge chair next to him. Another passing cramp. Ugh, if I could only cut my uterus out and fling it into the sea, that’d be preferable.
“It’s good.” He digs around in the bowl with his spoon and settles on a huge bite of sliced banana and blueberries. “Normally, I’m not a fruit guy, but this is making me rethink my position. What is acai, anyway?”
I have no idea. “Some kind of magic berry. Why don’t you like fruit?”
“My dad’s always trying to get me to eat fruit and vegetables. I have to make him work at the parenting thing, you know? I hate to be so easy.”
“Or, like, healthy, right?”
He shrugs his thin shoulders. “I try to be noncompliant now and then. Especially when it comes to my dietary choices.”
There’s an acai stain on the front of his shirt.
All morning I’ve been wondering if, when I saw Nick again, I would still have that almost-sexy we’re-about-to-kiss feeling from last night.
I don’t.
For multiple reasons, I guess.
He’s looking at my face. “Have you changed your mind?”
I feel bloated. God, I love being a woman. Oh wait, no, I don’t. But I say, “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You could be here to tell me you’ve changed your mind.”
“Well, I haven’t.”
“So we’re still on for having sex,” he says slowly. “I thought I might have ingested some bad pineapple upside-down cake yesterday and hallucinated everything that happened.”
“We’re still on.” I struggle to sound casual about it. “But we need a plan.”
“Absolutely,” Nick agrees. “It’s common knowledge that having sex always requires a strategy.”
“Right. Now be serious.”
He arches an eyebrow. “I’m very serious. I’m a very serious guy.”
I bite back a smile. Before this, I did think Nick was fairly serious. All my life he’s been this solemn, quiet kid standing in the back of our tour group (excluding that one time in Rio). But now here he is being a wisecracker.
His gaze drops from my face to what I’m holding. “You brought a notebook. So obviously you’re serious.”
“It’s my sketchbook.”
“Oh, are you going to show me some of your work?” he asks, too eagerly.
“No. I use this for everything. Sometimes I use it like a bullet journal.”
“Bullet journal? That’s alarming. Is this like a hit list?”
“No,” I sigh. “It’s like bullet points.”
He stares at me blankly.
“Like those dots you put in front of things when you’re making a to-do list.” I would continue to explain, but then I catch on that he’s messing with me. I smack his knee with my bullet journal, and he laughs. Then I flip it open. “So, wiseass, the plan.”
THE PLAN, I write across the top of the page. At the same time, my mind spins, searching for how this is even going to be possible, now that Aunt Flo has arrived. Today is out, for sure.
Nick leans over to read what I wrote. “Shouldn’t it say, the sex plan? We don’t want it getting mixed up with any of the other plans you’ve got written in that thing.”
I snort, but put in a little ^ and print the word SEX between the words THE and PLAN. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
His voice is quieter. I glance over at him again. His mischievous smile is gone. His face is even paler than usual. He looks scared.
Like how I felt with Leo, maybe.
I don’t want to think about Leo.
“I think we should start with where this supposed sex is going to take place. Not my room,” I add quickly. “I can’t—” My mind chooses this moment to revisit the image of the white robe. The dark hotel room. I gulp in a breath. “I can’t have sex where my mom or my sisters sleep. That would be too weird.”
“All right.” Nick nods thoughtfully. “How about—”
“Not the beach. And not a pool.”
“That would be a little public, don’t you think?” Nick’s ears are turning pink.
“Agreed. We need somewhere private.”
“Like my room,” Nick says.
I frown. “What about your dad?”
“I have my own room.”
I gasp. “Spoiled!”
He shrugs. “The conference pays for two rooms. There are only two people in my family. One of the perks.”
“So your room it is, then,” I say. “What room number is that?”
“407.”
I write that down. “But it has to be neat, okay?” I think about Afton’s first time, in that boy’s garage, next to the washing machine. “I refuse to do it next to a pile of dirty socks.”
Nick scoffs. “Do you think I’m a slob?”
“Um, no.” I try not to look at the stain on his shirt, or how it’s half tucked into his shorts. Or the general disarray of his hair. “Next question,” I say briskly. “When?”
“Well, we could—”
“I’m not going to be ready for at least three days,” I say quickly. Thankfully, my periods are fairly short. Three days should do it. I hope.
“What, do we need to take a class first?” He smirks.
“I need to prepare.” I need to recover from my body betraying me.
“Three days from now is Saturday,” he says. “So, Saturday?”
“Sure.”
“What time? Do you have a preference for morning or afternoon?”
He makes it sound like this is a dentist appointment. “Evening, don’t you think?”
“Night does seem more romantic,” Nick agrees.
I’m not sure that romantic is what we’re going for, but I write down, Evening. “But Saturday night’s the awards dinner,” I remember. “Maybe Sunday night?”
Nick shakes his head. “My dad and I are leaving to go to Oahu Sunday afternoon.” He rubs his chin like he has a beard there instead of three ginger strands of peach fuzz. “What if we slipped away during the awards dinner? Then nobody would come barging in—”
“You think your dad might come barging into your room?” That’s an unpleasant thought.
“He’s normally good with giving me my privacy—although I’ve never tried to have sex before, so who knows—but sometimes he forgets and just walks in. We always have the keys to each other’s rooms. But he’ll be busy during the awards dinner. He’s getting an award this year.”
“My mom’s a presenter!” I clap my hand to my forehead. “That’s brilliant, actually. We could go and come back, and they’d never even notice. It’s the perfect alibi!”
Nick’s eyebrows furrow. “Okay, two things I want to say here. First: I really hope you don’t think having sex with me constitutes a crime.”
“Of course not. We’re consenting . . . pre-adults.”
“Great. So on to the second thing: How long do you think this is going to take, that you imagine us sneaking out of the awards dinner and then popping back in without anyone noticing we’re gone?”
I stare at him. My own ears are undoubtedly pink at this point. “I mean, it probably won’t take too long. What, do you want to cuddle after?”
“I don’t know,” he says in a kind of choked-up voice. “Do you not want to cuddle?”
“I thought boys didn’t like cuddling.”
“I didn’t get the memo about what boys like. Maybe I’ll want to cuddle. I guess that depends on how the other stuff goes.”
“The other stuff,” I murmur. I am still finding it hard to imagine the other stuff. “Right.”
His eyebrows push together. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? You can back out, you know.”
“I’m not backing out.”
“I won’t think you’re a coward or anything.”
“I’m not scared. It’s just, when I asked you last night, it was kind of theoretical sex. And now it’s starting to feel real.” More real than it ever felt with Leo, in a strange way.
“If you want to call it off, at any point, I’m good with that.”
“I appreciate you being so flexible.”
“You feel like a cup of tea now,” Nick says, “but later you might not want a cup of tea.”
I blink. “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
He pushes his hair out of his eyes, smiling in a bashful way. “My dad made me watch this video about consent. The whole idea is that having sex is like having a cup of tea. It’s a British video.”
“Obviously.” I press my lips together to keep from laughing at this.
“My dad’s very British,” Nick explains. “He adores tea metaphors of all types.”
I know his dad is British. He strongly resembles John Oliver, I think, with his dark hair and eyes and his round glasses. Today is the first time I’ve noticed, though, that Nick has the tiniest bit of an English accent himself—an occasional softness around how he pronounces his R’s. Like in the way he just said adores.
I tap my pen against the sketchbook. “So, giving us possible cuddling time, and factoring in that the dinner’s going to be at the Palace Tower lawn, which is fairly close to here, I’d say we could get to your room and be back in an hour. The awards dinner usually takes like two and a half hours, at least, so that should give us plenty of time. We could even stagger our coming and going, so no one would know we were together.”
“Again, not a crime, us being together.” Nick sounds mildly offended. “And now I’m starting to wonder if you’re doing this out of some weird sort of nerd pity.”
“I’m not.” If I am being honest with myself, I’ll admit that I don’t completely understand why I’m doing it. There are a lot of possibilities, as I’ve mentioned: revenge, distraction, physical comfort. Maybe I want to prove something to Afton. Or I want to prove something to myself because of Afton. But when I think about her finding out, or, even worse, Mom finding out, I know I don’t want to have that conversation. Because if we talk about me having sex, that would lead, inevitably, to talking about the sex my mother is having.
So I don’t want anyone to know.
“It’s complicated, but no, I don’t pity you,” I say. “Sorry. I’m all out of fucks to give about the poor unfortunate nerds of the world. Or maybe I do have a fuck to give.”
Wow. I actually said that. Again, it feels like an alien has taken over.
Nick barks a laugh. Now his ears are a bright, fire-engine red. “Okay, good. Just so we’re clear about our motivation.”
“So we’re set.” I close the sketchbook. “Saturday night. Let’s say eight o’clock-ish? Room 407. I’ll see you then.”
I start to get up.
“Wait,” Nick says. Now he’s really flustered. He takes a breath and lets it out. “Don’t we need protection?”
I immediately feel stupid. That’s twice now that a condom has been the last thing on my mind. You never see that part on the sexy CW shows when things get hot and heavy. They never have to fumble for a condom, and yet they magically manage not to get herpes.
God. Herpes. Not that either of us are in danger of that at this stage, but still. “Right. Can you tackle that department?”
He swallows. “I can try.”
“Well, you’ve got to do more than try. I’m not on the pill, so . . . they’ve got to have them for sale around here somewhere.”
He’s nodding vigorously. “I’ll handle it.”
“What’s your cell number, by the way?”
He arches an eyebrow. “You’re asking for my number?”
“In case I get a hot tip on where to find condoms.”
He blushes again and rattles off his phone number, and I enter it into my phone.
“Okay, good. I guess I’ll see you Saturday night.”
He jumps up and gives me a bow. “Until then, my fair lady.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m attempting to be chivalrous.”
“You’re making it weird.”
He sighs. “That’s kind of my brand.”
“Hmm. I consider myself warned, then.”
I smile, and he smiles, and then we go our separate ways.
We try to go our separate ways, anyway. But as it happens, we’re both heading back to our rooms, and those are in the same direction. So we walk together to the elevator.
“What are you going to do with your little sister today?” Because he’s paying attention enough to know through all these years that I’m perpetually with my little sister.
I push the button for up. “I don’t know yet.” Mostly I just still want to go paddleboarding. That’s what’s sticking in my mind. After the sex, that is. “We’re going to try all the slides.” The back of the resort features a string of connected swimming pools and several water slides. In other words: paradise for a five-year-old.
“Sounds fun,” Nick says.
“What are you doing today?” I ask to be polite.
“I have a date with destiny, too.” He laughs like he just told the best joke ever. “Sorry. I’ve always wanted to say that.”
“I don’t get why it’s funny.”
“Destiny is a game . . . that I play . . . on the PS4. Destiny 2.”
“Oh.”
“I could show you sometime.”
I shake my head. “Let’s stick to sex.”
“ADA!” The doors to the elevator open and Abby and Mom are standing in front of us, Abby already in her swimsuit and goggles and arm floaties. Her nose, which bears a white stripe of zinc on it, wrinkles when she sees me. “You can’t slide like that. Come on! I want to go on the water slides. NOW.”
“I have to run upstairs and put my swimsuit on. It will only take a minute.” I glance up at Mom.
“I can’t wait for you,” she says tersely. “I’ve got to be there early. I’m presenting this morning. I’ve been texting you. Why didn’t you answer?”
I decide to be petulant. “Did you ever think it might be nice, Mother, to ask me if I wanted to watch my little sister today? Because it feels like you’re assuming I have no life.”
“What?” She seems puzzled more than anything else. I have never complained about Abby before. “Look, I don’t have time to—”
“Then when will you have time?” I interject.
She shakes her head, baffled by the sudden appearance of Uncooperative-Ada. “What’s going on with you?”
I close my eyes against the image of the white robe. “Nothing. I’m just sick of you treating me like the hired help. Always me, of course, and not Afton.”
“Afton’s still asleep.” She’s not, though. She checked on me in the bathroom. But Mom obviously doesn’t know that.
“Let me guess: she was out late last night,” I say instead of correcting her. “You have no idea where, or what she was doing.”
“She’s eighteen,” Mom says. “She can do what she wants. She’s an adult.”
“Right. And I’m sixteen, so I’m a child, and I’m stuck doing child labor.”
Mom’s eyes flicker to Nick, who is attempting to inconspicuously edge his way over to the stairs. Me being a brat to my brilliant mother is making him uncomfortable. “Hello,” Mom says.
He freezes. “Hello, Dr. Bloom. Uh, nice day to—”
But she’s done with pleasantries. And also, apparently, with my sass. She shoves Abby’s hand into mine. “I don’t have time for you to decide to be a teenager right now. I won’t be back for lunch. Money’s on the bedside table. Don’t forget to reapply sunscreen every two hours. I don’t want you two getting burned.”
I nod numbly. “Yeah. Okay.”
Mom hurries away in the direction of the tram, looking at her phone the whole time, stepping carefully around the tourists.
“O-kay. I’ll see you later, Ada,” Nick says.
“I couldn’t be too compliant, could I?” I say by way of explanation.
He smiles, nods, but still ducks toward the stairs instead of the elevator.
I feel a tug on my arm. “Don’t you want to go swimming with me?” Abby asks in a small voice. “Don’t you like me?”
I kneel down next to her. “I love you, Abby-cakes. You know that. You are, by far, my favorite sister.”
“But you wanted to give me to Afton,” she says accusingly. Her bottom lip trembles. “And Afton always tries to give me away, too!”
“It’s not about you, sweetie,” I say. “I’m having a fight with Afton right now.”
“I know that. Duh.” Abby’s seen Afton and me fight a few times, over dumb, insignificant stuff, though, like who borrowed whose shoes and who has to mow which part of the lawn, but this is different. Even Abby can tell. “Are you and Afton ever going to be friends again?”
“Sure we are,” I say, because that’s what I’m supposed to say. I hug Abby. “You and me and Afton, we’re sisters. That’s an unbreakable bond, you know.”
At least it was, before.
“So nothing could ever, ever break it,” Abby says, brightening. “We’re sisters forever.”
“Sisters forever,” I say, putting out my pinkie finger to hook with hers. We shake solemnly. “Now let’s go do some slides.”