Upstairs, Sienna lets out a moan loud enough to make a porn-star roll her eyes. I guess Archer is really living up to her expectations — and vice versa, since the mattress squeaks start coming faster and faster, a shrieking harmony to the pounding bass of my own frantic pulse.
Just finish, already,I want to scream at my best friend, feeling my heart contract in a surprising amount of pain.Aren’t virgins supposed to last, like, thirty seconds? Are you trying to set some sort of record up there?
I pull a pillow over my head to muffle the sounds of them together, wishing for the hundredth time that I had some way out of this hellish scenario. If I’d known this was how my night would play out, I’d never have agreed to come. I certainly never would’ve allowed Archer to drive us, leaving me without a viable mode of escape.
“Oh,Archer!” Sienna screams, her voice breathy with desire. “Yes! Yes!Yes!”
I tell myself to get up. To walk out of this room, back to the party, where the crappy pop music they’re blasting would overpower even Sienna’s most bombastic fake moan. But I’m paralyzed. Stunned immobile as a statue. Even more horrifically… there’s an unexpected, unwelcome pressure gathering behind my eyes.
Why the hell am I crying?
If I’m honest with myself, maybe in the back of my mind… some delusional part of me thought Archer and I might lose our virginity together someday. Just as we’ve done basically everything else in our lives together, from swimming lessons at five to sailing races at ten to our first contraband beers at fourteen to getting our learners’ permits at sixteen.
Given the three-point-five minutes of humpin-and-bumpin happening overhead, it seems my bestie would rather cash in his own V-card with the head cheerleader. It would be upsetting if it weren’t so utterly predictable.
Okay.
Fine.
It’s pretty damn upsetting. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a cliché cut straight out of some eighties movie riddled with high school stereotypes.
Former wimp locates testosterone summer before junior year, makes varsity baseball roster, becomes chiseled heartthrob, wins affection of high school Queen B.
No, not bee.
B, as inbitch, which is what Sienna Sullivan has been since age nine, when she not-so-gently suggested I quit our youth-soccer team because my periodic asthma attacks were putting her chance at a plastic league trophy in jeopardy.
Gasp!
(Literally. Someone please pass my inhaler, would you? That last offensive play really knocked the wind out of me.)
I hear a groan through the floorboards. Deep-throated. Masculine. I’d know it was Archer even if I hadn’t seen Sienna lead him into that bedroom. I know all his sounds. That little break in his laugh when he finds something really funny,actuallyfunny, not when he’s just trying to be polite in front of my parents. That half-sigh he does when I’m exasperating. The catch in his throat when he’s worked up, battling back the slight stammer he had as a little kid.
Pressing the pillow harder over my face, I scream into it — a good, long one — until I run out of air. People are always doing that in movies and TV shows, as if it somehow releases the rage and pain pent-up inside. All it does is make me feel like I’m suffocating.
I can’t quite explain why I’m in so much agony. It’s not like I didn’t know this would happen eventually. What did I expect? That he’d stay a virgin forever? Join a monastery? Become a priest? Abuse his right hand until he got tendonitis from excessive self-gratification?
Obviously, at some point, Archer was going to make that much-lauded thrust from boydom to manhood. Most seventeen-year-old boys on the baseball team are already well on their way to a half-dozen conquests — if not more. It’s all they talk about. Which girls they’ve alreadyscrewed, the ones they still want tonail, how hard they’llhammerthem when they get the chance.
Who knew so much carpentry was involved in copulation?
My point is, everyone (myself most definitely excluded) is doing it. It’s only natural Archer would do it, too. I just didn’t know it would be tonight. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t have time to steel myself against this new reality. That’s the only reason I’m so upset.
Right?
I should be glad Archer is getting some action. A best friend would be happy for him. Punch him lightly on the arm with a slyatta boyand roll my eyes as he relays the gory details.Listen with the attentiveness of a good pal.
His bestie.
His buddy.
His BFF.
But as I lay here blinking back tears, hands bunched into fists, heart pounding twice its normal speed… all I know is, if they carry on much longer, I think my ribs might crack under the strain.
“God! Yes! Oh,Archer!”
Squeak.