Notes from a Former Virgin Read online

  * * *

  Praise for Confessions of a High School Disaster

  * * *

  “Chloe Snow’s diary goes far beyond the expected awesomeness + angst of a freshman in high school, though it has both of those qualities in spades. But Chloe Snow, in all her hilarious brilliance, will also break your heart and make you bawl those ‘happy to be alive’ tears. Amazing.”

  —Lauren Myracle, New York Times bestselling author of The Infinite Moment of Us

  “Chastain captures a spot-on teen voice that would feel at home in an updated version of the film Mean Girls.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Recommended for fans of Louise Rennison or anyone who needs a good laugh.”

  —VOYA

  “Chloe is refreshingly honest and unfiltered.”

  —Booklist

  * * *

  Praise for The Year of Living Awkwardly

  * * *

  “Remarkably relatable. . . . There are few protagonists . . . as believable and endearing as Chloe Snow.”

  —Booklist

  “Spot-on teenage angst.”

  —School Library Journal

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  For my mother,

  Patricia Anne Chastain ,

  who is nothing like Veronica

  Thursday, August 10

  I’m not going to have sex with Grady. I’m dying to. But I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.

  Maybe if I write it down in my diary enough times, I’ll stick to my guns.

  Friday, August 11

  I can’t believe I’m even in this situation. Last summer I considered Grady the annoying younger brother I never wanted. When Mrs. Franco scheduled us to work together, we’d spend the whole shift bickering in the concession stand. Whenever Grady bumped into me—which was constantly, since our work space was about the size of a large shoe box—I’d shriek in irritation. We used to push each other into the pool, and not in a flirty way. And now look at me! I’m obsessed with the kid. I can’t understand why I ever thought he was annoying. He’s a brilliant artist. He’s funny. He’s interesting. He’s a lifeguard now, and he looks so freaking hot in his orange trunks. When we’re together, I stare at his cheekbones. When we’re apart, I scroll through pictures of him and reread our text messages, analyzing them for proof that he’s into me (or, if I’m in a worried mood, looking for signs that he’s not into me). We keep sneaking back into the pool after closing it down and messing around for four hours in a row. My chin is red and actually bleeding in some spots from rubbing against his stubble for so long. I like him so much it hurts (my heart, and also my face).

  Saturday, August 12

  Reasons I shouldn’t have sex with Grady:

  1. I’m only 16 (but isn’t that old enough?).

  2. He won’t even be 16 until September 14.

  3. TEEN MOM

  4. SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES AND INFECTIONS

  5. We haven’t said “I love you” yet . . .

  6. . . . because we started going out on July 31. That’s less than two weeks ago.

  7. You can’t lose your virginity after two weeks. You just can’t.

  8. Even though I haven’t said it out loud, I’m desperately in love with him, and what if DOING IT makes me fall even more in love with him, and I get clingy and pathetic, and he’s disgusted by this new post-sex version of me and dumps me?

  9. And what if he doesn’t even love me? Why WOULD he love me? See #6. Normal people don’t love other people they’ve been dating for 13 days.

  10. Reese would find out somehow, using her Popular Girl powers of intuition. It’s bad enough that I’m going out with her ex-boyfriend. If she knew we were having sex, she’d . . . I don’t even know what she’d do. Tie me to a cafeteria table and tattoo “SLUT” across my forehead while livestreaming the whole thing, probably.

  11. Wait. Did Reese and Grady have sex????? Oh God.

  Sunday, August 13

  I forced Tristan and Hannah to come over first thing in the morning. My dad was out somewhere, probably having a romantic brunch with Miss Murphy.

  “What’s the big emergency?” Tris said. He still had a pillow mark on his cheek.

  “It has to do with Grady,” I said.

  Hannah groaned and picked up her bike helmet. “I’m leaving. If I miss church now, I’ll have to go to late Mass.”

  “Wait!” I said. “I’ll make it quick. Do you think Grady and Reese had sex?”

  “Hmm,” Tris said. He looked thoughtful.

  “What’s ‘hmm’?” I said in a panic. “If you know something, tell me fast. Put me out of my misery.”

  “I’m thinking!” Tris said. “That was a ‘hmm’ of contemplation.”

  Hannah cleared her throat. “Well, I really should get going. Bye.”

  I wheeled around to look at her. I could tell from her voice that she had the answer. She’s been my best friend since kindergarten. She can’t fool me.

  “Hannah,” I said.

  “She told me in confidence!” she said. “I shouldn’t talk to you about this.”

  “That was before she stole your boyfriend and stopped being friends with you!” I said.

  Hannah fiddled with the clasp of her helmet. “Those things are unrelated to your question,” she said.

  “Blink twice if they had sex,” Tris said.

  “Both of you, stop it,” Hannah said.

  “I have to assume they did,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t look so nervous.”

  “They didn’t, OK?” she said. “He wanted to, but she wouldn’t.”

  As soon as she’d spilled the beans, I felt terrible for forcing her to.

  “I’m sorry, Hannah,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t even know if there’s confession after church today,” she said angrily.

  After she left, Tris and I made wincing faces at each other.

  “Was that really bad?” I asked him.

  “Kind of,” he said. “But are you relieved about Grady?”

  I was relieved. And scared. So he wants to have sex . . . and I want to have sex. What’s going to stop us from having sex?!

  Monday, August 14

  Grady wasn’t lifeguarding today, but he came to work anyway, to keep me company. We can’t make out when the pool’s open, but we can lightly run our fingers across each other’s thighs under the concession stand counter until we’re both hallucinating. And we can talk.

  Reese was there. Her strategy so far has been to broadcast how happy she is for us and how much she adores Zach. He picks her up every single day, and she leaps into his arms like he’s a combat veteran walking off a plane. I should be grateful she’s not turning Grady against me, or trying to win him back, or making up rumors about us, and I am grateful. It’s just that I don’t trust her not to do any of those things if her whim changes.

  Today she sat across the pool from us, periodically blowing us kisses. I smiled and waved at her. It’s important to stay on her good side. You don’t want to make an enemy of the class queen.

  Tuesday, August 15

  Grady was babysitting Bear, and I wasn’t working, so I rode my bike over to Noelle’s and sat in the bathroom with her while she dyed her roots.

/>   “I have to cut it all off soon,” she said. She was squeezing gel onto her head from an applicator bottle. “The bleach is making it brittle.”

  “Should you be smoking right now?” I said. “Won’t the chemicals catch on fire and blow us up?”

  “Calm down,” she said. “The window’s wide open.”

  “Doesn’t your mom yell at you when she smells cigarettes?”

  “Yes, she’s always on my ass, just like someone else I could mention.”

  “Fine.” I put my face next to the window screen, to get as close to the fresh air as I could.

  “How’s it going with Grady?” she said. Her eyes flicked over to me in the mirror, then went back to her scalp.

  “Good.”

  “Still into him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can tell me stuff. I won’t go running back to Reese.”

  “I know.”

  But I don’t. This is never going to work. I can’t be friends with Reese’s best friend. It’s like swimming in piranha-infested waters and hoping you won’t lose a toe.

  Wednesday, August 16

  Grady came over during adult swim to talk to me and have a snack.

  “I was reading this article,” he said, and bit into his Spider-Man ice cream bar. “It was about whether the world’s getting better or worse.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “Our democracy is crumbling before our eyes.”

  “But worldwide, literacy rates are way up, fewer people are living in poverty, and basically health and happiness are on the rise year after year.”

  “It doesn’t feel like that.”

  He ate Spider-Man’s left eye. “Because it’s more exciting for reporters to write about horrible events that are actually outliers.”

  “You’ll be singing a different tune when we’re doing nuclear war drills in the cafeteria in a few weeks.”

  “Our grandparents felt exactly like this in the ’50s. Worse!”

  “Our grandparents didn’t have to do tick checks every half hour. Did you notice we basically didn’t have a winter last year? Soon there won’t be any cooling season and we’ll all die of Lyme disease, if the droughts don’t get us first.”

  We kept arguing about it. I believed what I was saying, but at the same time my own pessimism felt slightly ridiculous, because there I was, wearing a bikini, eating caramel M&M’s, watching the sun throw light on the water, listening to “Three Little Birds” on a phone thanks to the Wi-Fi I take for granted to such an extent that I actually have the nerve to get irritated when it goes down, and most of all, hovering above myself, reveling in having an interesting discussion with my interesting boyfriend.

  Thursday, August 17

  Grady and I closed down the pool last night, texted our parents we were going to our friends’ houses (me to Hannah’s, Grady to Elliott’s), and then let ourselves back in and messed around on the grass for hours. He makes noise sometimes, and it’s not embarrassing. He sounds like he’s eating a delicious ice cream sundae. I’m ice cream!

  When we needed a break, we got in the pool and talked quietly. “Bear’s freaking out about pre-K,” he said. “Last night at dinner he was like, ‘I can’t do it. I’ll be all alone,’ and started crying. I feel so bad for the kid.”

  “Oh, Bear,” I said. “God, school is the worst. It never gets better. Don’t tell him that.”

  He raised his legs so his toes poked through the surface of the water. “You stop having a panic attack every time your mom drops you off at school, though.”

  “Yeah, but you start worrying about popularity and all that stuff.”

  “Not me,” said Grady, flicking a dead bug onto the pool deck.

  “Really!”

  “Nope. I don’t care about popularity. I just mind my own business and think about what will look good on my college applications.”

  “So you float above it all, like a cloud?”

  “Basically.”

  “Well, aren’t you special!”

  “Really special,” he said. “And really handsome.”

  “You forgot to mention well endowed.”

  He held his hands about a foot apart. “I mean, minimum.” He moved them a foot farther apart. “That’s more like it, right?”

  Then we splashed each other for a while, and he dunked me, and I whacked him on the side of the head with my pool noodle. Then we whisper-screamed, “SHUT UP!” “NO, YOU SHUT UP!” “THE NEIGHBORS ARE GOING TO CALL MRS. FRANCO!” and then we started hooking up, of course.

  Friday, August 18

  I GAVE GRADY A BLOW JOB! AND IT WAS WONDERFUL!

  It happened in the lifeguard shack two hours ago. We’d been fooling around forever, and all the grinding and pressing didn’t feel like enough. I pushed him against the table and pulled down his suit and he put his hands in my hair and came in, like, two minutes!

  I had recently read an article online about how to give a BJ. It’s terrible to live in a world where you can do that, I guess, but at the same time, it was full of helpful tips that made me feel like I knew what I was doing.

  Additional things I learned from real-world experience:

  1. It doesn’t seem like there’s enough room in your mouth for a penis, and there kind of isn’t.

  2. Spit gets everywhere, but that’s OK and even useful.

  3. You feel powerful doing it, because you’re making a boy you like (/love) moan and shake.

  4. Cum tastes like salty soup!

  After I finished, I stood up and smiled at Grady. We put our hands on each other’s shoulders and grinned and grinned.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Holy shit!” I agreed.

  Am I supposed to feel like a big slut now, according to society? Well, screw you, society! I don’t! I feel so happy!

  Saturday, August 19

  Went to the beach with my dad and Miss Murphy and was in agony the whole time. All I wanted to do was drive home, find Grady, and take his pants off. I lay on the towel thinking fast. What if I pretended to be sick? They’d have to take me home. But no. Then they’d expect me to lie in bed, not go to the pool. Could I somehow WALK back and explain later? No, absurd. Walking would take hours.

  Finally Dad suggested heading home. In the car, Miss Murphy tried to talk to me about summer reading, her struggle to settle on a musical, etc. She might as well have been speaking French. Her words could not penetrate the dense mental atmosphere of Grady.

  As soon as we got back, I raced over and caught him at the end of his shift. It turned out he’d agreed to babysit Bear in the evening, so we couldn’t hook up. Instead we stood in the shallow end, chatting.

  “How was your beach day with Murph?” he asked.

  “Good. Weird. I don’t know.”

  “Do she and your dad, like, snuggle in front of you?”

  “No! Do your mom and stepdad?”

  “Yes, constantly. It’s disgusting.”

  “If you liked him, you’d think it was cute.”

  He snorted. “That’s a big if.”

  I bent my knees and lowered myself until my chin touched the surface of the water. “My parents used to snuggle when they weren’t yelling at each other.”

  “Did you think it was cute?”

  “God, no!”

  “There you go, then.”

  He ducked under the water and did a headstand, like he was putting an exclamation point on his logical victory. While he was submerged, I thought about my parents kissing in the kitchen after they’d had a huge fight. It used to enrage me, seeing them being lovey-dovey when I was still petrified and jangly from their screaming. Was my mom brawling with Javi somewhere? Had she broken up with him? What was she doing right this minute, while I stared at my boyfriend’s upside-down shins?

  “You have to admit my form is amazing,” Grady said when he’d come up.

  “Do you think my mom’s dead?” I said.

  He didn’t bat an eyelash. “Seems unlikely.”

 
“It’s not like I care what she’s doing, but it’s weird not to know.”

  He nodded. He knows what it’s like. I mean, he doesn’t, because no one I’ve met can understand how it feels when your mother leaves you to move to Mexico. But he has a stepfather he can’t stand and a father he never sees. Close enough.

  Sunday, August 20

  Holy cats. Grady went down on me. I was worried about it, because what if I was too noisy, or not noisy enough, or what if my bathing suit area smelled weird? And even though he was the one kneeling in front of me in the lifeguard shack this time, I felt less in control than when I was the one kneeling. But then a few minutes passed, and I forgot all that stuff and my mind emptied out, and then it filled back up again with the most vivid image of a black sky churning like an ocean. Grady makes me dream while I’m awake.

  I don’t think I had an orgasm. Or maybe I did. I’m not 100% clear on what an orgasm is, and searching online for clarification mostly yields Pornhub results.

  Monday, August 21

  I chip off my nail polish, or pull my hair into a ponytail, or watch the breeze ruffling the summer leaves, or clip Snickers’s leash onto his collar, and it all makes me think about SEX SEX SEX. I feel like a maniac.

  Tuesday, August 22

  I need to calm down and approach this rationally. I’m only 16. I have plenty of time to lose my virginity. I don’t want to do something I’ll regret. And I want the first time to be special, not rushed and awkward.

  Wednesday, August 23

  WHEEEEEEE GRADY AND I HAD SEX AHHHH AHAHAHAHA

  Thursday, August 24