Emma Rathbone: Losing It

I sat at my desk and stared at a calendar with a bunch of dancing tamales on it and played with a little piece of paper and thought about the fact that I was twenty-six and still a virgin. There was that, and then there was the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Chelsea Maitland. She was my first friend to lose her virginity. She was fifteen. She told me about it one afternoon on her parents’ remodeled back deck after school. The railings were made of a bright white vinyl material that hurt my eyes. It was when she’d gone to visit her sister at college, she said. They’d gone to a frat party, and there was a guy there who had been a counselor at a summer camp she’d gone to. She’d always had a crush on him, and they ended up getting drunk and walking to a lake together and one thing led to another.

“How did it feel?” I asked. I focused on a laid-back ceramic frog with an outdoor thermometer in it. We lived in San Antonio, that’s where I grew up, and fixtures like this were common. “I couldn’t say,” said Chelsea, with a little smile, her face folded and smug, like she was in possession of a secret I couldn’t possibly fathom, and she had to crowd around it and protect it. Chelsea Maitland of all people. We’d been friends for almost eight years, since we were kids, but the implication beneath our friendship had always been that I was the special one. That I would always be the one to get the thing.

—

The phone on my desk rang. It was my boss.

“Hi, Julia,” she said. “Can you meet me for a quick chat? Sorry, are you in the middle of anything?”

“Oh, no, no,” I said. And then, before I could stop myself, “I was just staring at a calendar with tamales on it. That someone left here. I think. It’s not mine.”

There was a pause. “See you in ten?”

“Sure!” I said.

I shoved the calendar into a drawer and brushed off my desk and picked up and stared into my pen jar and put it back and just kept sitting there like that.

—

Then there was Heidi Beasley. We all found out at a sleepover when we were sixteen, on a rare weekend I wasn’t away at a swim meet, that she had lost her virginity. What was it about her? I thought later, curled in my sleeping bag, staring at a wooden sign that read “Heidi’s Bistro” in their finished basement. I’d known her forever, too. I remembered one afternoon in the activity room of a church — this was when my parents were going through their Christian phase — she’d cried because she was trying to thread a bunch of jelly beans into a necklace and they’d all fallen apart. And now her face was always soft with daydreams and she would thoughtfully chew the end of a lock of hair and stare into the distance. I’m sixteen, I thought at the time. It wouldn’t be long before it was my turn.

—

I swiveled around and looked outside. I was on the twelfth floor of a glass building in a new development called Weston Corner in a nondescript suburb of Washington, D.C. I had a view of the plaza below where there was a fountain surrounded by large concrete planters, all deserted now because it was raining. A sandwich board fell over in the wind. In the distance was a half-completed hotel, and then beyond that, fields, nothing.

—

Danielle Crenshaw. She was on my high-school swim team and so we were at a lot of meets together. One afternoon we’re all lingering, taking longer than usual. She’s in purple leggings and a big floppy sweater and she’s doing her favorite thing, which is to show off her sex moves via a little hip-hop dance. “Ya gotta get down on it,” she said, rolling her chest forward and squatting. “Ya gotta get down on it.” Everybody shrieked with laughter, including me, but really I was marveling at her authority with the subject matter. To have gotten down on it so many times that you could confidently riff on it like that without being afraid anyone would doubt your experience.

—

“Julia, I’m glad you stopped by,” said my boss, Jodie. Her blond hair was pulled back into a burst of curls. Her desk was covered with papers and envelopes. She slammed her palm down as if they were all going to slide to the floor.

“Yup,” I said, sitting down across from her. “Well, you asked me to.” She shot me a look so I said, quickly, “I like it,” and pointed at a decorative chunk of quartz on her desk.

She rolled her eyes. “Not my idea. But thanks.”

Her phone rang. “Hold on,” she said, and answered it. Sometimes Jodie could seem so distracted it was like all her features were swimming away from one another. I stared at a lipstick-stained coffee mug. “Quartz Consulting,” it read in a casual handwriting font.

She put down the phone, laced her fingers together, and leaned forward. “The reason I asked you here — have you looked at Education Today lately?”

“Ha,” I said. “Yeah.” I thought she was joking. Education Today was the company’s blog, and it was my whole job to run it and update it. I was supposed to comb the Internet for articles on higher education and trends in online courses, and then re-post them with the author’s permission.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Have you looked at it? Like a casual viewer?”

“Yes.” I shifted in my seat. “Definitely, sure.”

“Because on Monday you posted an article extolling the benefits of one of our main competitors.”

“Oh my gosh!” I said, as if we were gossiping.

Her smile hardened.

“And I noticed the posts have been lagging,” she said. “You’ve only put up two things this week.”

“That’s right.” I cleared my throat. “It’s been sort of a slow week in education news, so I thought I’d kind of see what happened and catch up towards the end.”

“I guess I’m just wondering if there’s anything you need to work at a slightly faster clip.”

“Sure, yeah,” I said, nodding quickly. “No, I’m fine. Just a little behind.”

She leaned forward and rested her head on her palm and squinted at me. She smiled a searching smile.

I smiled, too, and raised my eyebrows, and recrossed my legs.

She stayed like that and held the silence and I was right about to point to a small decorative watering can on her desk when she finally said, “One more thing.”

“Sure!”

“How’s the Yacoma spreadsheet coming along?”

“It’s getting there,” I said.

“You must be, what, halfway through?” she said. “Three-quarters?”

“Yes,” I said.

The Yacoma spreadsheet was a mountainous data-entry project where I had to enter payment information for every one of our hundreds of authors, going back six years. I’d barely started it.

“Great,” she said. “Because Chris is going to be needing that pretty soon for the audit.”

“Right, of course,” I said.

“Glad you’re on it,” she said.

“Yup,” I said. “I am.”

“Good.”

Back at my desk I sat down and looked around. Everything had a matte gleam — my chair, my computer, the door, the desk, the building itself. Someone’s ringtone went off down the hall.

—

Senior year, there was Kimmy Fitzgerald. People liked Kimmy because she was nice to everyone. She always wore a winter coat that she allowed her grandmother to sew little bits of fabric onto, so that it made a kind of hideous patchwork, and she somehow got away with this due to a grave, dreamy manner that repelled criticism because you could tell on some innate level that she wouldn’t care what anyone said.