Chapter 6
Has Anyone Seen My Cherry?
Our relationship progressed throughout the summer. By the end of the season, it was well past the point where we, as two consenting non-virgins, should have been having sex. But I couldn’t tell him that I was still in the V-club, so I continued to make excuses as to why I couldn’t spend the night in his cabin. I went home for a weekend, it was my time of the month, I had to make time for Shazzer, etc.
I couldn’t even confide in Babs and Shazz, my two closest camp friends, of my virgin status without losing face.
“So what are we doing for our last Friday?” Shazz asked as we walked up the hill.
“I’m not sure…”
“You know Jamie’s having a party and we weren’t invited, right?”
I stumbled as my flip-flops hit a rock. “What do you mean?”
“Babs told me. Katie’s going around saying how Joshua’s going, but Jamie didn’t want any under-agers drinking at her house.”
“Jamie’s underage.”
Shazz shrugged. “I guess she gets to call the shots since it’s her house. So, back to my original question,” she continued, as if her words hadn’t caused my world to turn upside down. “Do you want to go see a movie?”
In a few weeks I’d be 21, but by then camp would over, and so would Joshua’s and my relationship. I’d counted on this experience as a way to lose my virginity, but now that the deadline loomed, I had backed myself into a corner. I was too embarrassed to tell my new boyfriend that I lied about not being a virgin.
I saw the Jamie-thing as my last opportunity for an out, and consequently, at the last talent show, I once again avoided Joshua. “This is ridiculous,” I thought to myself. If he’s supposed to be my boyfriend, why do I keep ignoring him?
“You’re mad at me. Again.” Joshua’s words were a statement, not a question. He’d cornered me by the infamous punch table.
“It’s too hard, Joshua. I can’t do this.”
“Can’t do what?”
“I…” we never had the conversation of what would happen to our relationship at the end of the summer. And it was definitely not something I wanted to carry on during the talent show in front of everyone. Besides, his decision to go to Jamie’s party had made it clear enough.
He grabbed my hand. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” I told him, trying to keep my voice from wavering. “It’s too hard, Joshua. I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
I wanted to reply, be with you, but the words that came out were, “Why would you go to Jamie’s party without me?”
He dropped my hand. “Do you think I’d go to some girl’s party without you?”
I focused on his eyes, purposefully not looking at the black rope necklace that another “some girl” gave him. His brown eye was barely discernible in the dark, but his blue one looked cloudy.
“I was hoping you and I could spend some time together. But not for the last time for good—just our last time at camp. While everyone else is at the party.”
My heart started racing. Part of me—the part of me that didn’t want to admit I didn’t have any “wings” at all—wanted to continue this fight, but in reality, there was nothing left to fight about. Joshua had declared he wanted to be with me, and that was that. My insecurities were not his fault and I wasn’t going to be the girl to blame them on him.
“Deal?” Joshua asked.
I nodded.
“Here,” Shazzer said, tossing me a condom the next day as she packed up her side of the cabin. “You’ll get better use out of this than me.”
I picked up the tiny plastic square from off my sleeping bag. Besides the time that Jane and I had blanketed Vernie’s bike with condoms, I had never actually held one.
A few hours later, I sat upright in bed, fingering the ridged edge of the plastic wrapper. Tomorrow was my last night. Although Joshua, Ferg, and Ahrun were staying on campus around for another few weeks, camp was officially over and my parents were picking me up in two days so I could get ready for my senior year of college. As far as Joshua and I were concerned, it was time to Do or Die.
But did he have to know I was a virgin? I thought back to what Lizzie told me about her first time. “It hurt like hell and I bled all over his parents’ bed,” she had told me. Maybe if I didn’t bleed and didn’t show the pain, he wouldn’t catch on.
The bleeding, I knew, was from breaking the hymen. Is there a way to break my hymen without having sex? I heard a story about a girl who broke it by falling off a horse, but this wasn’t that type of camp.
I settled for doing it in complete darkness. We’d gone to the bar where Joshua snuck me drinks all night. I had drank enough to lose my inhibitions, and if our making love seemed especially clumsy, Joshua didn’t say anything. If Joshua could tell that I was completely inexperienced, he never said anything. We unzipped my childhood sleeping bag and I used it to cover my body as much as possible. I muffled my cries as he entered me by giving him little kisses on his neck. It only hurt a little.
Joshua woke me up early by kissing me. I returned it and then sat up, hoping he wasn’t wanting to go at it again. In the sober morning, I could feel soreness down there. I climbed out of the tangled mess of my sleeping bag carefully in case there was any telltale sign of blood on it or my underwear.
“Come back,” Joshua insisted, patting the space next to him.
“I can’t. My parents will be here any minute.” I folded up my bag. “I’m going to get cleaned up.” I had more to clean up than he probably guessed.
“Meet you at breakfast then?”
I nodded.
I’d smartly chosen red underwear the night before. I examined them back in my cabin, which was thankfully empty of anyone else. The bottom part was darker than the rest—it was the same with my sleeping bag—but I you couldn’t tell unless you looked really close. I think I got away with it. I’d finally lost my cherry, and no one would be the wiser that I lied about it before.
Joshua greeted me with a peck on the cheek when I sat at the table with him and Ahrun.
“How’s it going?” Ahrun asked cheerfully.
“Fine,” I said staring at the tabletop, wondering if Ahrun, the King of Determining Tammy’s Status on Viewing Penises, could detect a change in the forecast. Scratch that, I thought. It had been to dark see Joshua’s actual member.
I tried to meet Joshua’s eyes, but he was chewing his food and looking out the window.
Oh god. The left side of Joshua’s neck was covered with black-and-blue marks. I gasped out loud.
Ahrun glanced up to see what I was staring at. “Are those… hickeys?”
“What?” Joshua’s hand flew to his neck as I looked down at my lap.
“Well.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ahrun’s head swivel in my direction and then back toward Joshua. “Well,” he said again. “I guess congratulations are in order,” he said, slapping Joshua on the back. “You too, Tammy.” He was wiggling his eyebrows up and down.
Did I give it away? Was giving giant hickeys something only Virgins do their first time? Do they both know?
“Now you’ve got your Pyramid Wings and your Big Ben Wings,” Ahrun continued.
Guess not.
“Are you ready, Tamara?” Dad asked from the doorway of the cabin.
“Yeah.” I looked around the room one last time. “I think they’re having a final staff meeting to say goodbye to everyone. It shouldn’t take too long.”
“I hope not,” my mother said. “We should get back soon. Corrie and Kellen are going to a wedding and they wanted your father to drop them off and pick them up.”
“What?” My sleeping bag unraveled itself from the haphazard tie I’d put it in. “Who’s getting married?”
Mom replied, “One of Corrie’s sorority sisters.”
Kellen had been my best friend growing up. We did everything together until our junior year of high school when he got contacts and his braces came off. That’s when my ultra-cool twin sister Corrie realized how good-looking Kellen was. They’d been dating ever since, although somewhat tumultuously.
I hurriedly rolled up my sleeping bag again before they could see the stain. I’d harbored a crush on Kellen long before the junior-year makeover, and every time I heard his name paired with my twin’s, it severed my heart just a little more.
“Hello. You must be Mr. and Mrs. Tymes,” Joshua called from the pathway leading up to the cabin. I couldn’t help the smile that broke out on my face. I may not have ever had Kellen, but I had Joshua.
My mother started forward. “And you must be the Joshua we’ve heard so much about.” She stuck her arm out.
Joshua met her hand and Dad followed suit. As I joined them, I was relieved to barely see the bluish tint of Joshua’s hickeys. Dad’s gaze seemed more focused on his eyebrow piercing and giant tattoo on his shoulder than he was on his neck, anyway.
“How’d you cover those up?” I whispered to Joshua as we started down the hill.
“Jamie lent me her concealer. We used up half the bottle. I figured it was better than sporting a turtleneck in the middle of August.” Joshua grabbed the sleeping bag from my arms. The twinge of jealousy I would normally feel at the fact that my boyfriend had some other girl’s fingers on his neck didn’t appear. I told myself it was because I’d officially given it to Joshua.
As we climbed the hill, we could see most of the staff gathered into a circle underneath the flagpole the way we did every Friday when we said goodbye to that week’s group of kids. Only this time it was to say goodbye to each other.
“I’ll take that,” Dad said, hauling the sleeping bag from Joshua. I cringed just a bit inside, thinking about the dark splotches on the inside of the bag, as he said, “You kids go do what you have to do.”
“Take your time,” Mom said, one hand on Dad’s shoulder. “We’ll drop this stuff off and then give ourselves a tour.”
Joshua took my hand. “You ready?”
“Sure.”
Shazz and Babs ran up as Joshua and I joined the circle.
“Okay,” Denny said. “I think we’re all here. Who wants to start?”
“I will,” Katie said. “I want to thank everyone here for a great summer. I hope that we’ll all be back here next June.”
One by one we went around the circle and people said their goodbyes. I said a curt thank-you to everyone—long speeches were never my thing.
And then it was Joshua’s turn. “I’ve been a counselor here for three years, and I have to say that you guys are the best group yet. I’ve met some really cool people here. I hope to keep in touch. With everyone, of course, but there’s someone here that I never want to say goodbye to.” With that he squeezed my hand.
Most of the staff was gazing thoughtfully at Joshua, but both Shazzer and Alex were glowering in my direction. I focused my eyes straight ahead.
I didn’t hear what anyone else in the circle said after that. My own thoughts were running wild, but they kept coming back to a central theme: ‘What’s next?’ Shazz had emphasized that Joshua and I would be a casual fling. After all, I was returning to Florida in a few weeks, and eventually he’d go home to England, a distance of more than 4,000 miles. Nothing had ever worked out for me before in the way of relationships, and I really didn’t expect it to then. I got what I needed from Joshua: a way to lose the mentality that I was worthless at love. Now that I knew that someone could actually like me back, I was okay with him giving me up, but not for a few more months. Joshua was going to stay at camp until November working maintenance to winterize the cabins. We’d already worked out that he was going to spend next weekend—my birthday weekend—at my parents’ house.
Joshua held my hand through the rest of the circle’s mementos. “What should we do now?” he asked when the circle finally broke up.
“I need to find my parents. My dad’s going to be champing at the bit.”
“Can you just ask for a few more minutes?”
“My sister…”
“She can wait, can’t she?”
I glanced toward the parking lot. It was too far away to see anyone, but I could picture my dad in my mind’s eye, keys in the ignition, hand on the gear shift.
“Tammy, how long will it be before you go back to school?”
“Two weeks.”
“I can’t wait to spend your birthday with you.”
“I know. I’ll pick you up on Friday.”
“We’re going to the Tigers game, right?”
“Yep.” The Tigers were playing the Chicago White Sox in Detroit. My parents had bought tickets for themselves, us, and my brother and his friend.
“I’ve never been to an American baseball game before. And you’ll finally be twenty-one. I’m going to buy your first legal drink.”
I glanced up toward the parking lot. My father was standing there, looking down on Joshua and me. He caught my look and tapped his watch.
“I better go,” I told Joshua. “I guess it’s time to say goodbye.”
“No. This isn’t goodbye. Not yet.”
“You’re right,” I conceded, relieved.
“I’ll see you later?” he asked, his eyebrows raised.
“Soon.” I met his lips in a quick kiss before I hurried up the hill.
As I got in my parent’s car, I noticed Corrie had left a Cosmopolitan on the floor. I picked it up and put it in my lap.
“Everything go okay?” Mom asked.
“Yeah, you know… it’s always hard saying goodbye to everyone.”
“And Joshua?” she turned sideways in her seat to look at me.
“You know he’s going to the Tigers game with us.”
I could see Dad glance at me in the rearview mirror.
“Listen, Tammy,” my mother stated. “Corrie and Kellen want to come to the game, too.”
“No,” I replied immediately.
“Tammy—”
“Why would they feel the need to come to my birthday? Corrie has her own.” Although Corrie was my twin, she was born right before midnight, and I a few minutes later the next day. Therefore we’d always celebrated our birthdays individually.
“She is your sister and Kellen was your best friend.”
“Was being the operative word.” I hated sounding like an eight-year-old camper.
“I would like you to think on this,” Dad said, which always translated to ‘you should change your opinion to mine.’
Instead of replying, I flipped through the Cosmo. My face grew red when I came to a piece on sex positions. According to the article, Joshua and I had done it ‘missionary style.’ I wondered if the next time he and I would be able to try something different. Probably not when he came to visit my parents’ house. I flipped some more: I always liked when they caught celebrities doing normal things like grocery shopping. I landed on a pictorial article called, “Baby-body Bikinis: Hot or Not?” I fumbled with the magazine as they showed a few scantily clad stars with baby bumps.
I wrinkled my nose, deciding I was not in favor of pregnant women wearing bikinis. I’d probably not even feel comfortable going out in public if I got pregnant. The magazine dropped from my lap. I’d just had sex. I realized that I had now entered the realm were the possibility of getting pregnant was a real thing. Joshua and I had used protection, but I’d heard horror stories of condoms slipping. I recalled from health class that they were supposed to 97% effective, but that’s only if used correctly. Did we use it correctly? I had relied on Joshua for that aspect, and now I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t his life riding on the line. I frantically tried to recall the last time I had my period. Fourth of July? No, it was after that. I sat up in my seat, counting days on my hands. I crossed my fingers underneath my denim shorts, looking forward to the arrival of my period next week like never before. Not only would that mean I was in the clear, but also it’d be an excuse not to try any new bedroom moves when Joshua came to visit—not that the opportunity would present itself. I laid my head against the headrest, suddenly very tired. After all, I didn’t get much sleep the night before.