Lori had moved from the West to the East side of the city. Despite only being a fifteen-minute drive from her old apartment, she was forced to change schools and she now found herself sitting on a corner table at lunch thinking that maybe in ten years' time, she would feel confident while dining alone.
Obviously that was not the case now, so she sat and munched on a sandwich, while switching from app to app on her phone on that corner table. She thought of how unfair it was that she was forced to go someplace new for her last year of high school, but the only other option would have been to do a long bureaucratic process with the district to let her go to a school twenty-minutes away, that is, her old school. Maybe if she had more initiative, she would have done so starting in May, but now she felt roped to her situation and would hate to hear this.
Lori had turned eighteen in August, about two weeks before the start of school. Her three friends had done a small celebration for her with her family and them. While it was a very sweet celebration, she had hoped for a more meaningful transition to adulthood, but she understood that it was not anyone's fault or responsibility to make that happen.
As she sat at the corner table, she was bombarded by an intrusive thought:
She had made it into adulthood innocent. Untouched, not even kissed for eighteen years.
And that simply was very uncool. She would hear girls talk about blowjobs in the bathroom, mention dental dams, the taste of dick, and whatnot.
Despite being quite "innocent," she knew a lot because every time she heard any of this type of talk. She would memorize each new word and look it up later. Her history was flooded with dirt, that is (sadly), her search history.
She rarely joined sexual conversations, though, and had only ever told very few people about her lack of experience. She had told Mary, one of her best friends, about it. Mary questioned the reason for her avoidance of sex.
"You've never even had one little kiss?"
No. The reason? She said it was because she wanted to wait for the "right person."
Lori thought the real reason was because she did not look like the other girls-- and NOT in a good way. She was very thin, supermodel thin, but she was flat-chested too. Often, people would confuse her for a thirteen-year-old. These comments sometimes made her cry at night.
She felt like an adult stuck in Neverland -- she wished guys would see something desirable in her, but guys would just treat her like a little sister.
Let's fast-forward. To summarize, age eighteen was a bummer. No sex, just boring old high school as a new girl. Okay, fast-forwarding. Age 19.
