“I thought I could do that, but I got angry again right afterward. Today they wanted me to go for a ride with them. They were taking him out for the first time, at the doctor’s suggestion.”
“Oh. Might have helped.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to see you right now.”
“But for sure next weekend, I bet.”
“You’re not going to tell me not to cut off my nose to spite my face or anything, are you? Everyone is running about spewing proverbs in my house. I feel like it’s feeding time at the chicken coop, and I’m the only chicken there.”
He laughed and fell backward to look up at the sky. I gazed down at him. What are you so worried about, Clara Sue? I asked myself. You’re going to lose your virginity someday, aren’t you? Isn’t Aaron the boy you’d really like to lose it to? You don’t have to have a ring on your finger first, do you? Boys don’t think like that. Why should girls?
It was like I was in the girls’ locker room listening to the great debate, only this one was happening in my head. Aaron must have been listening in, I thought.
“What would you have done if we weren’t in Audrey’s bedroom?”
“Done?”
“You know, if we were almost where we were when we were in Audrey’s bedroom.”
“I don’t know. You’re just going to have to wait to find out.”
He braced himself on his elbow. “What about now?”
“Now?” I looked around. We were far from any road, far from any house, and there was no one walking below beside the creek.
“What’s better than here? It’s like the Garden of Eden or something,” he said. “We’re like the only people on earth.”
“Like Romeo and Juliet? I told you, that didn’t end well, either,” I said, and he laughed.
He took off his jacket and laid it behind me, bunching it up into something of a pillow. I looked back at it and then at him. His eyes were electric with excitement. Was it too late to slow him down? Or myself, for that matter?
“Lila called me last night and told me that Audrey and Sandra actually inspected her bed after we left. Now they’re spreading stories about me not having been a virgin.”
“So let’s prove them right,” he said, and leaned in to kiss me. I didn’t kiss him back. “What’s wrong?”
“It feels funny out here like this. I feel like I did on the boat.”
“Taking a chance of being seen makes it even more exciting, don’t you think? A rabbit might see us and get ideas,” he said.
My mind reeled with words of refusal, of caution and reluctance, words I thought every girl my age certainly should have not only memorized but embedded in their brains. I’m too young. We haven’t been going together long enough. What if he breaks up with me a week later? How would I feel then? What if he tells his friends, and I end up with a reputation as bad as someone like Sandra Roth? What if my grandfather and Myra somehow find out?
Why hadn’t I thought of all these things when we were in Audrey’s bedroom? Was the embarrassment of losing my virginity the only reason I escaped from his advances and my own driving passion? Was that just a handy excuse helping me to avoid all these questions, an excuse I couldn’t use now?
He leaned in to kiss me again. “I’ve never felt about any girl like I feel about you, Clara Sue,” he said. Wasn’t that something he was supposed to say?
Once, when Lila and I were talking about such things, she told me she had heard that there was actually an instruction book boys could get, and it had a list of things they should say to get a girl to stop resisting.
But I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted to believe Aaron. I wanted to be closer to him than I had been with any other boy. For that matter, closer to him than with any other person since I had lost my parents and now Willie. He would be my lover and my family all at once, I thought. He wanted me even with all my baggage. I might never meet another boy like him. The other girls couldn’t be right about him.
Just knowing that my grandfather, Myra, and especially My Faith would be upset over my promiscuity also encouraged me. I’m on my own now, I told myself. I have no one but myself. I have to be in charge of myself. I have to be my own person.
I kissed him before he could try to kiss me again. It seemed to open the gate for both of us.
But then I heard laughter, and I sat up quickly. It was the laughter of young girls. It was coming from off to our left, and then they suddenly appeared, a group of about ten Brownies and their guide. They paused when they saw us.
Aaron groaned. “Great. That’s Mrs. Elliot. She was my third-grade teacher,” he said. “She once put me in the cloakroom for an hour because I threw a spit ball.”
Mrs. Elliot saw us, too, and quickly herded the troop in another direction. I recognized Mindy Cooper’s little sister when she turned back to flash a smile at us before they disappeared over the hill.