Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin (2 page)

I
t was a whopping 72 degrees the next day.

“Nah, I don’t want to go for a swim,” I said when John got Mandy Grogan to ring and ask if I’d meet him at the beach at 12:00. Truth was, my period had arrived, and I hadn’t made the transition from pads to tampons. I’d tried a few times, lying on the floor of the bathroom, eyes closed (too hard), squeezing at a space that simply did not exist.

“Anyways, I need to work on my mother,” I told Mandy.

So instead of swimming, which would have meant harboring a monstrous cotton surfboard in the pants of my swimsuit which in turn would have swelled and disintegrated in the water, I spent the morning fencing. This did not involve cool silver outfits and a long weapon, but kneeling in the mud hammering nails into the wooden poles that kept our sheep in their waterlogged paddocks. Mum bought the sheep for her “hobby farm,” a euphemism for the fact that she was unemployed and bored out of her mind since moving north.

Our farm consisted of two large paddocks that swept down from our ancient white house to the ocean. People from London would probably pay thousands of pounds to come here for Hogmanay—which is how we celebrate New Year’s Eve here—and marvel at our thatched roof and light our wood fire and walk over our paddocks. They’d call it beautiful and quaint and full of history and mystery. I call it shitesville.

By the time I came in for lunch (roast lamb on white bread—the poor buggers always ended up in my sandwiches), I was wheezing.

“You’re wheezing,” Mum said.

“No I’m not.”

“You need to go to bed for a while.”

“No I don’t. I’m fine.”

In my room, I read the leaflet in my tampon packet again, unwrapped one of the offending items, and said to myself,
Right, this is stupid. You can do anything you set your mind to. You can do this. Even Mandy can do this, and she got D for History.

I wobbled my head from side to side and breathed out (two three) then placed one leg on a chair and breathed out (two three) again, and then, realizing no amount of breathing out (two three) and body wobbling would actually relax me, I placed the white object in the general direction (I hoped) of its
target, closed my eyes, scrunched my face, and pushed with all my might. I sometimes watched those television shows about surgery—scalpels cutting and gloved hands going places they best not—and this felt the same to me. I had entered a space that was blood and gutsy. I retrieved my tamponless finger and perched myself on the edge of my bed. The thing had only gone in half way, perhaps due to my eye-scrunching-body-tension. And when I finally gathered the courage to stand up I felt like I’d pushed Mandy’s horse Dusty inside me. It was so obviously
there
, like someone had shoved a conker up my nostril. But there was a space, which was a relief, because if there hadn’t been one, I’d have been a properly weird female. So I tried to ignore it, moving one leg around the other towards my bedroom door and out.

I waddled down our driveway, across the road, and onto the beach. There are tourist pictures of the beaches on our island. Smiling women in bikinis lie in uncomfortably flattering poses on soft white sand, basking in the sun, spectacular mountains behind, a bright blue sea before, beckoning you to swim in me, swim in me, now. Truth is, Scottish beaches are like polar bears—they both look nice in photographs. Pat a polar bear, it’ll kill you. Stand on a Scottish beach, you’ll realize how shit it is. There’s only one beach on the island that looks a bit like
the one in the brochures, and I have never seen anyone swim in it. It’s freezing. And the water is kind of gray, like the sky is most of the time. And the wind is always howling. And that’s only one beach. The rest of them are like the one across the road from my farm, which is a perfect teenage meeting place in that it is the kind of beach that no adult in their right mind would want to go to. Most of Ross beach (I named it that) is black and rocky. Mossy grass stops where the volcanic gunge starts, and this ends with water that is not only freezing but laden with jaggy rocks that make a paddling experience one of pain and inevitable scabs.

Just ignore it, ignore it
, I said, as I shuffled along the black rocky strip.
There is no conker inside me. Breathe
. I could spot Mandy’s bikini a mile away. It was bright red with yellow dots, one of the numbers Mandy got on her biannual shopping spree in Glasgow.

Mandy had been my best friend since I’d arrived. We had nothing in common; Mandy believed in god, loved the island, hated schoolwork, and wanted to be a hairdresser—but she was a very relaxing, uncomplicated person to be around. She was short and cute, with curly blonde hair and a constant smile, and was the most fashionable girl within miles. We never fought, despite spending an incredible amount of time together, riding
our bikes, riding her horse, drinking tea like old ladies, giggling, and reading (her: magazines; me: textbooks). I loved her.

As I got closer to Mandy, I noticed her red with yellow dots were entwined with some blue board shorts. In the latter was Mandy’s boyfriend, Andrew: an incomer with a huge house on the south of the island. Being the new boy in town, all the girls had their eyes on him, but Mandy nabbed him with her nearly-C cups and her willingness. About a week after they got together, Mandy started wearing jumpers with huge floppy turtlenecks.

“Nice jumper,” I’d lied. It wasn’t very nice at all.

“It’s my concealer,” she’d said, taking me into her bedroom and lowering the neck. Underneath was an almighty love-bite. Looked like he’d sucked so hard her subclavian artery had erupted.

It had faded a bit since then, but clad only in bikinis, stripped bare of her turtleneck concealer, her neck still looked damaged. She and Andrew were snogging furiously, half-sitting, half-lying on a big green towel.

John was lying face down on a towel beside them.

“So are you ready yet?” he asked, sitting up.

John was the same age as me—sixteen. He was five-ten, with shoulder length blonde hair, unusually tanned skin, sparkly
blue eyes, long dark eyelashes, and crooked teeth. We’d met at school. His family was full of media types who worked from home and traveled a lot, and he was going to be an actor. Like all the boys in our school, he wanted to go out with Mandy, but she was already with Andrew, and I didn’t mind being second choice when he’d expressed interest at the village dance. Boys weren’t high on my agenda. In fact, I thought John would be better off with someone sillier and taller, like Grace (the butcher’s daughter), who never said the wrong thing to boys and was apparently gagging for it. But if he wanted me, then what the hell?

Our first snog was
so
not romantic. The power in the village hall had gone down due to high winds. Mandy’s candle flickered my way and she told me John asked her to ask me if I wanted to go out with him…and I told her to say yes and he asked her to ask me if I would do a bit more than just snog him and I asked her to tell him I didn’t know if I was ready to do that yet…but he told her to tell me yes anyway and then he came over to me and this is what he said:

“Like they say in the films”—he pronounced it
fillems
— “this is very romantic.” And I winced ’cause it was a terrible, nausea-inducing line, but I snogged him anyways in the corner of the hall, and his tongue was so dry it shredded bits of mine
off—and before I knew it, he was sucking on my neck as if a serial killer was chasing his car and he’d run out of petrol north of Ullapool (or somewhere equally godforsaken), and he’d come across an abandoned truck with a full, unlocked tank of it, and for the life of him he had to suck the petrol out or he’d die, DIE. And then he stopped sucking just in time to save my internal organs from combusting, not-spontaneously, and I know I made that word up, but I made it up ’cause it’s totally what I would have done if he hadn’t stopped, which is what he did when the lights came back on.

And that was that. We were a couple. And for a month, he’d meet me at the beach and say, “So, are you ready yet?” and I’d say no, and he’d insert his huge sandpaper tongue into my mouth then suck my neck like there was no tomorrow, and then try to do more anyways and I’d say, “No!” Which is exactly what I said this time, taking off my shorts and T-shirt and doing the unthinkable and running uncomfortably into the icy water.

Oh dear, something was happening down there. The thing was expanding, probably because it wasn’t all in. I could feel it filling with water and growing.

“When will you know?” John asked, having followed me into the ocean.

We were both shivering. The water had stolen the nerve endings in our lower bodies.

But I could feel something. The
thing
. It was getting larger and larger. I wondered, would it expand until I exploded, or would my legs end up in the splits-position, an enormous mountain of wet red cotton my inflatable raft?

I couldn’t speak. I wanted him to go away before the climax of this terrible tampon tragedy.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. But no, I wasn’t. It was gigantic and fleeing. Unplugging. Only in about a millimeter, I reckoned.

“It can only lead to one thing,” I explained, trying to press my legs together.

I’d been aware I wasn’t ready for sex for some time. The idea made me feel terrified. Like letting someone read my diary or watch me on the toilet. It conjured the same feelings as bungee jumping and touching huge hairy spiders. If the tampon was anything to go by, I was right to be scared.

“Well then you’re chucked,” John said, turning and walking out of the water.

“What?”

“You’re chucked!” He grabbed his towel and walked away.

Mandy was still snogging Andrew. I could see her tongue
going into his cheek and pushing it like he was saying “Dah!”

I was chucked. I had a stray rat-size-plug in my bikini bottoms.

And the skies were opening and cracking and banging and letting loose the wrong amount of rain.

• • •

My mother said, “Where have you been?”

“Just hanging around with Mandy,” I said through juddering teeth.

“You don’t look well,” my mother said.

“I’m fine.”

I wasn’t. The perfect recipe for my usual flu-asthma fanfare. Warm weather followed by torrential rain and an immediate drop in temperature of ten degrees.

Since I was nine, I’d had an asthma attack approximately once a year. Always in summer. Always resulting in hospitalization, which I hated, hated, hated.

I raced to the bathroom to unleash my enormous tailed rat, went to bed with a pad, a definite wheeze, a bit of a sore tummy, and a bit of a headache. Within an hour I had a raging headache, a raging temperature, and a raging sore tummy. Two hours later, I couldn’t breathe at all. Perched on the edge of my bed, I made breathing-like noises, but no air was going in and
my face was bright red and I couldn’t even yell for my mother, who did not like to have her private times interrupted, who did not like daughters creeping in and maybe seeing something she shouldn’t—like that time when I was nine and I caught my mother having a bath when she shouldn’t have been.

So even if I could stand up and walk into my mother and my father’s bedroom, I wouldn’t. Too risky. Not allowed.

Instead, I crawled over to the window and opened it. The rain had stopped. Outside smelled of mud. I put my head out and tried to scrape in some air, but it was hard. My shoulders were stiff, held high. My hands were clenched. My body was no longer my own. It was out of control. Bleeding one end. Unable to breathe the other. Hot, tight, frantic everywhere in between. I was crying. Scrape, scrape. I slid down the wall under the window. Well, not slid. It was stiffer than slid. I bashed down the wall under the window in stages, like a puppet made of rocks.

Thud.

“Rachel, Rachel!”

My mother was angry with me. I should have asked for help. If I had gone to their room and knocked on the door and asked for help, then I may have gotten to the doctor in time. I wouldn’t need an injection of adrenaline, or need ten days in hospital with a mask over my face, or need to smell of marmite
and drink at least one jug of water a day, or need to long for afternoon visits and meat pies with baked beans.

Have I mentioned I hate hospitals? Nurses scare me. Doctors scare me. Patients scare me. I spend the whole time wondering if I’ll ever be allowed out again, waiting for the doctor to do his rounds and say, “Rachel Ross? Ah, yes…”—looking at his notes—“this is the one who will never get out again, who will spend the rest of her life in this bed, with this mask on her face, with a view of an incongruous housing estate overlooking a black wind-swept ocean.”

I’d spend my days dreading the doctor’s words (“No, Rachel, we’d like to keep a wee eye on you for a bit longer”); dreading the nurse’s checks (“You need to drink this entire jug of water or you’ll be on a drip, Rachel!”); dreading the arrival or removal of other patients (“She died last night, Rachel.”—Right there beside me!); and waiting for my mother and my father to visit, which they always did, religiously, like everything else they did.

It was probably this fear that made me decide to be a doctor.

Inside, I felt destined to spend my life in hospital. So, I figured, let me be the one with the coat. Or, if I’m the one in the bed, let me know and understand what’s happening to me. Let me have some control. I liked to be in control.

But I wasn’t this time. I was lying in bed, clueless, powerless.

My mother attempted to hug me and was like, “You’re all elbows, Rachel.” Apparently I wasn’t much of a hugger. All stiff and bony.

“Pray to the lord for common sense,” she said.

To the power of infinity. Amen.

• • •

There was an old lady in my ward. Her name was Joan and she smiled all the time.

“I think you have common sense,” she said after my mother left the ward. “I think you’re a very lovely girl. And you’re going to get better really soon.”

She died the following day. Not in her sleep, like the one who carked it last time, but noisily, behind the curtains, yelling
No! No! Please help me!
then making noises like someone was strangling her. The curtains opened an hour later. I closed my eyes while they took her away.