Virgin(32)

“Well, why don’t you just try a Brazilian wax for now?” she suggested. “I reckon that would be the easiest option, and they still leave a large-ish chunk of hair down the middle, so it doesn’t feel pre-teenage.”

“But it just seems so painful,” I moaned, wincing at the thought of a beautician ripping the hairs out of my bush.

“No pain, no gain, Ellie. Now, about this vlog of ours . . .”





 We sat on Emma’s zebra-print bed, surrounded by copies of Cosmo and educational pamphlets about sex she’d bulk-grabbed from the doctor’s office. I’d refused to go back in and had waited outside next to the bin where I’d chucked the brown envelope.

“So, shall we just call it a vlog?” asked Emma as she looked up from her notepad. “Like, vlog.com?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Yeah, why not? It’s a vaginal, virginal blog. A vlog. It doesn’t have many SEO words in the website, though—like, no one is ever going to Google the word vlog. Unless it means something weird in Czech.”

“SEO?” she asked blankly.

“Search engine optimization. It’s like, you want to have really Googleable words all over your site so people can find it when they search for it,” I explained.

“How do you know that?”

I flushed slightly. “What? Everyone knows that. I’m not some kind of tech geek.”

“Well, if you are, I’m fucking impressed. And definitely glad one of us knows something about setting up websites. So, what’s the vlog going to focus on?”

I lay back onto her mass of cushions and sighed. “I don’t know. It needs to be, like, a grown-up, modern, accessible and very graphic version of the problem pages from teenage magazines.”

“Oh my God, do you mean the ones that closed down?” she asked excitedly. “I loved those, like Mizz, Sugar, Just Seventeen and stuff.”

“Tell me about it. We used to read them out at lunchtime at school. They had the best agony aunt things and ‘confession’ series. We used to read aloud the problems people wrote in about and laugh at how cringeworthy they were—while secretly feeling glad whenever the agony aunt assured them they were normal. Or maybe I was the only one who secretly thought that,” I added as an afterthought. “Did you?”

She laughed. “Yes, obviously. I was always convinced I had a wizard’s sleeve.”

“A what?”

“It’s, like, a bucket vagina?” She looked at my blank face and sighed. “It’s basically where you have a ‘loose’ vagina and it’s not that tight. I thought my flap bits were too long as well.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I never thought of that.”

“Neither did I,” she admitted. “Until all the local boys started using the words as insults and it got round that Lucy Palmer had a wizard’s sleeve. Then I freaked out that I had one too. And honestly, I think maybe my flaps are bigger than most people’s.”

“Em, this is perfect,” I cried out.

“It really isn’t. Smaller ones look nicer,” she said.

“Noooo. I mean, this is great material for a blog post—or vlog post, sorry. We don’t want to make it just a blog for sexually confused virgins; we want to make it a vaginal blog, for anyone who’s ever panicked about the state of their vagina, or anything related to it. Stuff like this about the shape of it and other things to reassure people they’re normal and not alone.”

Her eyes lit up. “Yeah, definitely. And that line you just said about being panicked over your vag has got to be our tagline.”

“Ooh, it can go in our About Us.”

“Yeah! But, just to clarify, we can still do some posts about you being a virgin, right? I feel like all the other twenty-one-year-old virgins out there need to know they’re not alone.” Her face momentarily clouded with worry. “You don’t think the virgins in their late twenties will feel neglected, do you?”

“Nah, all the advice we’re going to give out is pretty universal, right? Like, when it comes to the shape of your vagina, age doesn’t really matter.”

“Okay, so does this mean you’ll do it? You’ll vlog about your virginity?”

I let out a dry laugh. “Who knew my virginity would become so in demand? But okay. I’ll do some virginity posts. Can we also do some on pubes though? And awkward body hair?”

“What a surprise that you want to do a post on pubes.” She grinned. “But yes, obviously. It’s funny, I always got a Brazilian and didn’t really think too much about it until I met you. But, you’re right, like, why am I getting a Brazilian? Did I naturally think, oh why don’t I just wax off my entire vagina and leave a thin strip in the middle? It’s not exactly natural, is it? It’s . . . well, it’s a bit porn star.”