by: Julie Sunday

DIARY, 12/18/96
“I wanted to fuck him so bad today. I didn’t have a condom, but I still maintain that I will not lose my virginity here. He told me “You call the shots.” I made him talk dirty to me. I had him describe in intimate detail what’s going to happen in Toronto. I went nuts! He predicted my condom keychain condom would be green. Then the 5 minute bell fucking rang. Tomorrow…I hope he tells me that story again…it was great and quite arousing. Boarding school is torturous for couples. You have to sit and dream and fantasize all the goddamn time. I am so excited to have sex. I hope it’s good. I know it will be.”

At 9:30 PM, when study hall ends, the bell rings up and down Main Hall and students emerge like cockroaches from their dorm rooms, classrooms, and from the library for 25 minutes of social time before another bell sends us to our dorms for the night. Curtis meets me on the benches by the senior stairs and, arm in arm, we walk towards the girls’ tower bathroom, which also serves as the day student locker room. Looking cockily at the freshman who have gathered by the tower stairs, I enter and sweep the room, making sure nobody is there. The locker room is inside the bathroom and is one of the only rooms on campus with a door that locks from within. The room is empty. I poke my head out the door at Curtis and wink at my friend Sally’s cousin Brian, a freshman who I know has a crush on me. Curtis follows me into the locker room and I unceremoniously lock the door behind us.

When the 5 minute bell rings, Curtis’ head is still between my legs.  I beg him to finish before I run up the stairs just as the 10 o'clock bell sounds. If Teacher Buffy is on duty, I know she’ll give me a lateness. Bitch.

DIARY, 1/2/97
“I have to quit smoking by Sunday b/c of the PILL. I can’t wait for Toronto. Sex is now less than a month away…28 days to be exact. I am tres very excited. I have not masturbated in like 3 or 4 days—I won’t for the rest of vacation. I want to be really frustrated when I get back to school. I can’t wait to see Curtis. I think that I may give him head occasionally. He gets off on it so much and I LOVE to watch him while I do it.”

In December of my junior year, I call my mother and inform her of my intention to commence having sex with my boyfriend, Curtis. I have a date set—February’s long winter weekend, our winter trimester break. I ask her to make me an appointment to see the gynecologist so I can get a prescription for the birth control pill. I intend to be the very model of the modern teenage girl who is having sex responsibly.

She makes the appointment, and I go home for the weekend. Sharon, a midwife, not a gynecologist, delivered my younger brother at home when I was 2 and a half. She is a 70’s style “do-it-yourself” women’s health activist, and I like that. She writes me a prescription for Ortho Cyclen, which comes in a pink plastic clamshell package that I ostentatiously carry around in my backpack, so I can have it with me at noon, the decidedly un-subtle time at which I decide to take my pill.

I had read Our Bodies, Ourselves cover to cover.  I know to be the most responsible I possibly can, I need to use condoms in addition to the pill -- condoms with spermicide, because this is even more reponsible. Somewhere I pick up a keychain with a silver-foil wrapped, colored, nonoxynol-9 lubricated Lifestyles condom. Unlike most colored condoms, it isn’t visible through the package so my friends and I make bets over what color the deflowering condom will be.

DIARY, 1/12/97
“John Asshole Tibbett walked in on us on Tuesday and turned us in to Fred. Curtis and I wanted to and almost did have sex yesterday. I wanted to so bad! I really want to wait until Toronto so at least we won’t get expelled and so we can have sex in a bed (or a bathtub, or the floor, or the kitchen…wherever).”

Before we go to Toronto, Curtis and I find ourselves in the eighth grade science lab one night before study hall, and though I notice the tan leather briefcase sitting on the lab desk when we walk in, I pay it no mind.  We lie behind the desk and make out. I have no shirt on and Curtis has no pants on when the fluorescent lights flicker to life and John Tibbett, the school’s middle school science teacher-cum-varsity baseball coach, and a renown asshole, walks in to retrieve his briefcase.  We freeze behind the desk, but he sees us. When he does, he says “You’re caught, guys. Put your clothes back on.” 

A few days later, Fred, the Dean of Students summons Curtis and me to his office. We know he won’t suspend us, because we have not actually engaged in any prohibited behavior.  But, because no one we know has actually been turned into the dean, we aren’t sure what the protocol is for people who are caught.

We meet in Fred’s office, and it is pretty dark. He stumbles over comments about “being careful.”  I assure him that we haven’t even had sex yet and that I am already on the pill. So responsible. He lets us go with a few more awkward comments. I am confident that we are the most responsible soon-to-be sexually active students to have ever made out in the hallowed halls of Feverton School.

DIARY, 1/26/97
“I think that I’m not going to tell anyone that I’m planning on having sex—or if/when I do. Nobody needs to know that stuff. It’ll all get back to Jenn anyway and I just don’t want to deal with her.”

At our school, almost everyone has sex by junior year—it is part of the culture. Couples whose relationships last a certain duration have their own quietly designated “spots” that are reserved for their use; one couple has the German classroom on the top floor of Material Hall that is lit by a sexy red “Exit” sign.  Another uses the third piano practice room on the right side of the Art Center basement hallway. Whenever a couple walks out of a room, be it a classroom, a bathroom, or a tucked-away closet in the library, it is a likely that that is their spot.

Though I have hooked up with guys before, I haven’t had sex and I insist that I not lose my virginity on a wood, linoleum or, worse, carpeted floor. A girlfriend of mine, who famously lost her virginity on the floor of the physics lab, later showed off her rug burns at swim practice. Luckily, they were left uncovered by her Speedo and the chlorinated water did them good. That isn’t for me.  I want my sex life to be private. At least, I want everyone to know that my sex life is private. None of their business, thank you very much.

DIARY, 1/27/97
“Um…sex is rapidly approaching. It’s kind of weird to think about it. I’m pretty sure I want to do it. It’s just totally different to think about it rationally and then when I’m actually in a position to have sex. The two feelings don’t always agree.”

My cousin Jerry drives Curtis and me to the train station in Philadelphia. We board a train to New York and, once we reach Penn Station, we wait for another train headed to the Canadian border. During the layover we venture into the streets around the station in search of a drugstore, so we can get more condoms as we are sure we will need more than the one I carry on my keychain. We find a Duane Reade nearby and buy a box of Trojan Ultra Thins with spermicide. The train to Canada is slow. A bus finally takes us to Toronto and we arrive in the middle of the night.

Curtis’ grandmother picks us up in a taxi and takes us home. Her apartment is luxurious, something that is foreign to me. Marble floors, antiques, expensive sheets. I have always assumed that rich people live in houses. She has a cat named Daisy, who is so fat she becomes totally round when she lays on the floor.

Curtis’ grandmother is rich because her late husband owned the Toronto Maple Leafs during the sixties when they won the Stanley Cup a bunch of times. The family doesn’t own the team anymore, but they are still kind of famous around town. There is even a hockey trophy named after the grandfather.

On the night the deflowering is set to occur, we have tickets to a Maple Leafs game. We get ridiculously overdressed and go to the Hot Stove Club, a members-only restaurant in the stadium that is frequented by players and management. The menu is disproportionately populated with steak entrees—they have eight ounce, twelve ounce, fourteen ounce, and eighteen ounce steak options. I don’t eat red meat, so I order the chicken. A few minutes later the waiter returns to the table to inform me that they don’t actually have chicken. So I eat steak. And a potato.

I am wearing my roommate’s floorlength, black satin dress and my Persian lamb coat and new chunky heels; Curtis looks deeply sexy in a navy pinstripe suit with his tousled brown hair and bright blue eyes. We expect to sit in the gold section, the place where the Very Important People sit, but we end up in the bleachers. Everyone else in the stands is wearing Leafs Starter jackets, jeans, and hats. In my excitement, I have dressed so that everyone will know that I am a Very Important People; but I have forgotten that ice rinks are cold.

Afterwards, we take a taxi home and spirit two Labatt Blues, each, from Grandmother’s fridge.

DIARY, 2/2/97
“I am on my way back to Philadelphia after a fun weekend in Toronto…Yes, I did wipe that silly V off my forehead, but the experience was not one to scream about. It hurt a lot at first and then it got good but then Curtis went soft and I got really scared that his grandmother was going to walk in. It happened in a bed, though. I’m happy about that.”

I go to bed under the pretense of actually going to sleep (and tricking Grandmother, assuming she wasn’t passed out from booze).  Curtis joins me soon after in the four-poster mahogany bed. I am wearing my silk bathrobe under the covers and after he joins me, he gently unties the belt.

With some ceremony, I open the Lifestyles condom—it is blue. I put it on him and he puts it in me; I only feel pain for a minute. As soon as it starts to feel good I suddenly feel nothing—he can’t stay hard. He apologizes profusely and explains that he is nervous about hurting me. After several attempts to bring him back to life, we call it quits. All that planning and I am not even at risk for pregnancy.

DIARY, 2/2/97 (15 minutes later)
"We just had sex again, in the handicapped bathroom. He went soft again. It was fun, though.”

Ever since I saw Risky Business when I was home sick from school in the 3rd grade, I have harbored a fantasy about having sex on a “real train.” As such, I am determined to have another go at it on the Amtrak ride home. Unlike the ultimately empty car that Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay fuck in as they roll around Chicago, the train back to New York is crowded and the seats are not really usable for sex in any discreet way. The car we ride in has a large, wheelchair-accessible bathroom which seems like the obvious place to give it a shot.

The bathroom is so gross. It smells like urine, the floor is sticky, and we are both terrified of being busted—boarding school socialization does that to you. Really, what could happen? Could they kick us off the train? But we are freaked.

This time we use one of the Trojan UltraThins, with spermicide, and it smells terrible. We can’t finish.

DIARY, 2/9/97
“I had sex here today. In the locker room today. A small room off the boys’ showers in the gym. Curtis went soft again, but we got him back up. I came twice. It was actually really good once we got the hang of it. We bought condoms at Condom Kingdom today. We got 2 gold coins and a box of 12 Trojans—4 ribbed, 4 thin, 4 regular. I got a carrying case, too.”

Back at school, I resolve to have a successful sexual encounter but am insistent that we not use a space that other couples are likely to discover. One Saturday afternoon we set about exploring the field house, and find a bathroom that neither one of us has ever seen.  It has a door that locks—a crucial luxury for boarding school sex. The bathroom is hot—our school has old-fashioned steam heat and some rooms are frigid while others hold steady well above 80 degrees—so the tile floor at least isn’t cold.

We unwrap another Trojan and try to ignore the smell. There, on the hard floor, deep in the recesses of the field house, in the only space we can find that feels private, after traveling 1000 miles to another country only to come back to school disappointed, we successfully have sex. He stays hard and it feels good, finally.