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I just hope he’s right. But when has Marcus been wrong about anything?

Except me.

the nineteenth

A SPECIAL BIRTHDAY SONG

(SUNG TO THE MELODY OF THE TRADITIONAL BIRTHDAY SONG)

Happy Birthday to me,

I just turned eighteen,

I’m a virgin no more,

Thanks to Len Levy.

Gotcha! I’m kidding. I am totally still a virgin. I asked Len for a double devirginization and he gave me a triple set of DVDs instead.

Not that I don’t appreciate his present. He put together a little John Cusack box set. The combination of obvious (Say Anything) and not-so-obvious (The Sure Thing) and not-obvious-at-all (Hot Pursuit ) selections made the overall gift perfect. Just perfect. I am so relieved that his birthday was in August, before I was his girlfriend, because the pressure to live up to his excellent gift-giving is just too much for me to bear.

Still, I did think that maybe I had a shot at having sex with him tonight, which is sick. How did I become the sort of girl who dreams about losing her virginity on landmark days like New Year’s Eve and her birthday? I don’t know how I became the sort of girl who obsesses about losing her virginity at all. I guess this is what I get for deciding to date the only eighteen-year-old boy on the planet who is saving himself for marriage.

The thing is, it’s not just about losing my virginity. If it was just about losing my virginity, I would stop “denying what we have” and jump on Scotty. That’s about as sexy as earwax.

So it’s not just about sex. It’s about sex that means something.

This is probably where I’m going wrong. I mean, it doesn’t seem to mean anything to Manda, Sara, or Call Me Chantalle. What makes me think it will be any different for me?

Anyway, sex was a nonissue tonight since we watched the movies at his house and his mom treated me like a drug-addled skank despite my carefully chosen Gap khakis and Ralph Lauren turtleneck. Could you get more All-American than that?

“Hi, Mrs. Levy!” I gushed as wholesomely and overachievingly as I could. To help my cause, I had actually applied make-up to fake the face of apple-cheeked, bright-eyed innocence. It didn’t work.

“Oh, it’s you.”

“It’s. Um. Jess’s birthday today.”

“I’m eighteen,” I chirped. I cocked my head to the side, hoping that my bob would bounce with freshly-shampooed purity.

“You better watch yourself, then,” she said coolly. “Now you can be tried as an adult for your crimes. Heh-heh-heh.”

Len said she was just joking, but I knew better. She wasn’t joking then, or on the phone, or ever. She ends all her sentences with eerie, cheerless laughter, especially when she is completely unamused.

She made me feel humiliated, horrified, and totally unhorny. It’s no wonder Len and I barely touched each other tonight. I didn’t even get turned on during Say Anything in the scene where John and Ione are devirginizing each other in the car and they’re shivering and in love.

Len had never seen Say Anything before, which I simply couldn’t believe. Not even the edited TNT version. When it was over, I asked him what he thought.

“Um. It was okay.”

“Okay? Just okay?”

“Kind of. Um. Unrealistic, don’t you think?”

“How so?”

“They barely knew each other. And they call that love?”

I chalked his comment up to his logician’s mind-set and left it at that.

Later that night, when I was on the floor in my room, twisting myself into my nighttime asanas, I started to think deeply about Len.

He got the second best SAT scores in our class. He wants to go to Cornell because that’s where his dad went. He wants to be a cardiac surgeon because that’s what his dad was. That’s all I know about his dead dad because that’s all Len will say about him. He gets along well with his brother, who is a miniature version of Len, which means he’s a mini-mini version of their dead dad. He has an unnaturally close relationship with his psycho mother, who hates my skanky drug-addled guts. He had a debilitating stutter as a kid, and speech therapy taught him to blather or splutter but not how to do anything