• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Have you guys seen this play Harvey? It’s great.”

Abbie said, “I’m the star of it.”

I stumbled, “Well . . . then you’ve seen it a lot.”

They laughed, thinking I had planned the joke, but I really didn’t recognize Abbie from the play. She had played Veta Louise Simmons and her performance was so transformative that it was nothing like she was offstage. Onstage she was a meticulous know-it-all and offstage she was a cool, adorable girl who seemed to want to know me. A little.

So I fell for Abbie immediately. And I kept running into her on campus because I was following her. I would say, “Hey! We should hang out sometime like not by mistake” and she would say no, which was hot, because then I knew she was sensible.

But I wore her down. Well, I tricked her.

She had said no so many times that I threw an off-speed pitch. I said, “Hey, we should go to church sometime.” I hadn’t been to church much since I was a kid, but Georgetown had a really nice chapel on campus. “That way if the date doesn’t go well, maybe we’ll get something out of the homily?”

She laughed.

And we went to church on our first date.

She was pretty focused on the priest and I was pretty focused on her, and when the mass ended, it was raining. I had remembered to bring an umbrella, so I was able to walk her home in the rain. And as we walked home, she held on to my arm. It was the happiest I’d ever been.

Abbie lived off campus as she was a junior—I was a freshman—and when we got there, I didn’t want the date to end, so I told her about a ballroom dance class I had taken earlier that day, and I started showing her some of the moves. We didn’t kiss, but we did the cha-cha without music in her well-lit living room, which is somehow even sexier than kissing.

I walked home in the rain and I had all this energy. So I went to the computer lab in my dorm and I wrote an email to Joe, saying, “I just went out with the girl I’m going to marry.”

Abbie had to convince me to have sex for the first time. It was like a role reversal of the abusive boyfriend from the eighties high school movies where the girl says, “Devin, I can’t.” And Devin points out, “But you can.” Except she was Devin. And I was Molly Ringwald. I was always afraid of sex in high school. I was one of those kids who didn’t even understand the concept of sex. My nickname was “the math jockey.” And what’s sad about that is that I wasn’t even good at math, which means I was not the sex jockey.

Abbie and I decided that for our first time we would go to a bed and breakfast, because nothing alleviates the fear of having sex for the first time like a really elaborate plan. We went to this place called the Philip Smith House. It was run by these two gay men named David and Leon. They had a really cute partnership where David cooked breakfast and Leon fucked David. At least it seemed that way.

We drove Abbie’s mint-green Taurus to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We sang along with the radio. We arrived at the B&B and took out their bicycle built for two. We did everything you do on a romantic weekend away.

Except have sex.

At all costs we were both committed to using a condom. I wanted to because I was afraid of getting my girlfriend pregnant. Abbie wanted to because she was really afraid of getting pregnant. So we brought plenty of condoms and got started with the business at hand. It wasn’t a sexy turn of events. Somehow it felt like a medical operation where we were trying to insert parts of me into parts of her, and frankly it wasn’t working because every time we would get something started, we would go to put on a condom and realize one of the reasons people don’t use condoms is because they make you think about what you’re doing. I find that once you think about it, sometimes your parts lose their excitement for the project. We tried and failed about three times and finally she said, “Who cares about this? Let’s just go to the beach.”

So we went to the beach, thinking it would be soothing. You know that thing they say about sex and pizza: when it’s good it’s good; when it’s