“That sounds so good. Except I ate a whole tub of Ben and Jerry’s last night.”
She looked at me sympathetically. “Ouch. Who is the bastard?”
“I wish it was a guy.” I sighed. “Long story short, she is—or maybe was—my best friend from school who just decided to tell me everything she’s secretly disliked about me for years, out of the blue, after having sex with a guy I fancied in my bathtub while I slept obliviously in the next room.”
“Whoa, sounds like you’ve had a rough few days . . . Who was the guy? Was he fit? Because if he was, then surely the bathtub sex is excusable.”
“I guess so, yes. I mean, neither of us knew him. We just saw him in a club, fancied him, and he chose her.”
“And then went back to yours and your friend got it on with him in your bathtub? Classy girl,” she said, shaking her head with an admiring smile. “Babe, you could blame her for this, but I think what’s happened here is you’ve made the classic mistake of having a best friend who gets all the guys. You need to go out there and get a new best friend—preferably an uglier one.”
I snorted with laughter but she grinned at me and carried on.
“Okay, maybe that is a bit drastic. But, you know what? There are so many girls like this out there. Pretty girls who get all the guys without lifting a finger and then rub it in their friends’ faces. Bitches.”
I laughed. “Okay, I feel like we’re not talking about my friend anymore. Do you have direct experience of this, Emma Matthews?”
Emma rolled her eyes. “Do I? At school I was second to Alex, because she was blonder than me and had bigger boobs. That’s all the Portsmouth guys cared about, by the way—some cultural context for you. You’d do really well there,” she added, making me blush as she looked down at the cleavage I’d tried to hide with a high-cut top. “But anyway, then I realized that all those years of rejection and being second choice had taught me loads. Ten years later, I am now oblivious to rejection and I can proposition a man without really caring what he says back.”
I looked at her with unadulterated awe. “So, you ask men out?”
“I’ve been known to do so. And for the few who say no, the dozens who have said yes and given me some of the best nights of my life have made it worthwhile.”
“I’m officially impressed,” I said. “The closest I’ve ever come to asking someone out was when I asked a guy called James to take my virginity when I was seventeen and he said no.”
She burst out laughing. “Oh wow, that kind of rejection is enough to put anyone off. Seventeen, huh? That’s kind of late to lose your virginity. We all lost ours before fifteen, but then half of the girls in my year at school got pregnant before A-Levels. So I guess we aren’t really a fair reflection of the greater world.”
They all lost their virginity before fifteen? Oh God, I was a circus freak. A cable-TV channel was probably going to end up doing a documentary on me. The twenty-one-year-old virgin.
I forced a smile. “Ah, well, I don’t think anyone at my school has ever gotten pregnant before being respectably married to a doctor or lawyer, aside from Molly Hanson in 1984, who ran off with a teacher after he got her pregnant in senior year. Since then, the school hasn’t allowed male teachers under the age of forty unless they’re gay. They’re scared the girls will run off with them.”
“They have a point. I definitely would have run off with Mr. Branson if he’d asked. It’s only because he was so good-looking that I was motivated enough to get an A in physics. So anyway, when did you lose your virginity after the big rejection?” she asked, drawing out the last three words with dramatic pausing.
I flushed red. I didn’t want to lie to Emma because she was so open with me. But I couldn’t tell her I was a virgin . . . especially since she clearly didn’t know anyone who was still a virgin after tenth grade. But how would we ever have a proper friendship if she didn’t know the one defining detail about me?
I quickly blurted out the truth before I lost my courage. “Well, it never actually happened for me,” I admitted. Her face screwed up in confusion as her mind started to process what I said. She was judging me, and oh my God, I was freaking out. I rushed on. “Well, until a few months later when I got drunk and that was that.”
She grinned. “Ah, the classic drunken first time. Happens to us all.”
I plastered a bright smile on my face and hated myself for being too weak to stick to the truth. “Yup! Though I can’t say I’ve had many repeats of it, so I’ll have to live vicariously through you.”