His Favorite Student

Chapter 1

JESSIE

I know three things for certain about myself.

One: I am going to be a doctor someday and have the best color-coded notes that I write out by hand.

Two: I make the world’s best carrot cake muffins from scratch. There’s no recipe, just the memories of my grandmother when she showed me how to make them when I was seven. I never forget anything anyone has ever bothered to teach me.

Three: I have no clue what my friends are shrieking about right now.

“Jessie!” Becca is gawking at me like I just told her I’m an alien from Planet Washkatarian. “You’ve got to be joking. Say that again.”

“I…I’ve never used one,” I reply, my cheeks heating up as I look down at the object in her hand. It’s pink and shaped like an architecturally designed zucchini. I look back at her frowning face. “Is that bad?”

Everyone goes quiet.

And not just the regular pause-in-the-conversation quiet. The kind of quiet that falls over a crowd when some drunk person at a wedding just said something completely inappropriate.

Becca, Dani, and Lourdes are staring at me with their jaws on the floor. The overly-sexy techno song blaring from the Bluetooth speaker seems suddenly extremely loud and inappropriate for the gravity of this moment.

We’re having a girls’ night out. It was Dani’s idea, which means there’s Boba tea and wine that she stole from her older sister.

We’re sitting on the floor in a pile of blankets.

It’s the kind of night I usually love because I love Boba, and I love my friends.

I’m eighteen, so I shouldn’t technically be drinking, but it’s Friday, and school’s just started. No exams in the near future.

“Jessie,” Lourdes says very slowly, the way you talk to someone who has just told their family they think the Earth is flat. “Do you…know what this is?”

In a desperate attempt to save face, I shrug. “It’s a personal massager.” That is technically correct. It said that on the packaging when Becca pulled it out of the box.

More silence.

“A personal…” Dani laughs, unable to finish the sentence. She flops over sideways onto the couch, one hand pressed against her chest like she’s having a heart attack. “Oh my God. There’s no way.”

“Be nice!” Becca scolds her.

“What?” I ask. “What did I say?!”

Becca scoots closer and takes a seat on the coffee table, looking down at me the way moms do when they’re ready to have a serious conversation. She sets the pink zucchini-like object beside her.

“Jessie,” she says slowly. “Sweetie, I need you to tell me something. And I need you to be completely honest with me.”

“Sure, Becks.” I smile awkwardly. “I’m almost always honest with you.”

She takes a deep breath, then glances at the other girls and back at me. “Have you ever…” She pauses, blinks, and restarts. “Have you ever…explored…your…body…?”

She looks to Lourdes for help. She jumps right in. “Have you ever had an orgasm!?” she blurts out. Lourdes is from Miami and has no patience.

My eyes go wide at her question. I think genuinely and watch as Dani sits up from her couch collapse and looks at me with an expression that could only be described as grief.

“I mean—I know what one is,” I reply finally. “But I don’t think I’ve ever had one. I’d know it if I did, right?”

“Yes,” all three of them say at the exact same time. Embarrassed, I pull my blanket up a little.

“Oh. Then no.”

Dani slams her face into a throw pillow and lets out a long scream of terrible anguish.

Lourdes hops up, grabs her hair, and starts pacing the length of the room like a lawyer getting ready for the trial of the century.

And Becca—she leans in, grabs both of my hands, and looks at me like I’ve just emerged from solitary confinement where I’ve been the last ten years.

“Jessie,” she says. “You are beautiful.”

“Um, thanks?”

“No, like, objectively. You’re beautiful,” she repeats. “You know that guys trip over themselves when you walk by, right? Like literally yesterday on the quad, that frat guy walked right into a lamppost because he was checking out your ass.”

My cheeks prickle as I start blushing. “I just thought he was looking at his phone.”

“He was looking at you,” she says, squeezing my hands. “And your big brown eyes, your gorgeous hair, and your body, Jessica. You have a body—”

“I know I have a body, Becks,” I laugh. “I’m pre-med.”

Dani screams louder into her pillow. Becca takes a deep breath.

“That’s not what I meant. What I’m trying to say is that you are gorgeous. You’re a beautiful girl, but you’re eighteen years old, and you’ve never—not even once…?”

“Well, I’ve never had a boyfriend. You know that.” It’s the sad but honest truth. I’m a busy girl. Between the muffins that take the better part of a Sunday morning and all the work I did in school so I could get into a great college, I’ve led a pretty sheltered life.

Not to mention growing up in a small town where the most exciting thing to ever happen to me was getting a participation trophy for soccer when I was twelve.

My mom was always pleased with me. Always said I was doing everything right.

But apparently, I’ve missed out on something…

“What about yourself?” Lourdes asks, stopping her pacing. “You’ve never…on your own?”

These may be my friends, but I’m starting to feel a little awkward now. Like an alien species being examined at the museum.

“I mean…I tried once or twice,” I say, trying to be forthcoming. “I didn’t really know what I was doing, and then Mom knocked on the door asking if I wanted pizza or pasta, and that was the end of that.”

Dani has given up screaming into the pillow and is simply lying face-down on the carpet looking defeated.

“Okay,” Lourdes says with the expression of a woman who’s just made a decision. “This is fixable. Totally fixable. We just get you a vibrator, we show you how it works, and—”

“A vibrator?” I ask, pointing to the pink thing. “Is that what that is?”

Dani groans like she’s been kicked in the ribs.

“That’s what that is, yes,” Becca replies.

I shrug. “Okay, well, I have anatomy textbooks. I can figure it out.”

Becca blinks twice. “That is the most Jessie sentence that I’ve ever heard.”

Lourdes laughs.

I don’t know what to do, so I just smile and reach for my Boba tea. I’m running low, so my straw makes an awkward slurping sound as I suck up the tiny, delicious balls.

My friends turn to each other, excluding me from a vigorous conversation that I only catch bits and pieces of. Then they turn back to me, showing me diagrams on their phones and possible products on websites I would never in my life visit.

How do they even know all this stuff?

They ask me questions that should embarrass me—anatomical questions—but I answer them honestly. I mean, it’s just the human body. What’s there to be ashamed about?

It’s almost ten o’clock when Lourdes presses the buy-button on something that looks a lot more mechanical and a lot less sleek than the pink zucchini sitting on the coffee table.

“Express shipping,” Becca insists. “Do they have first-day-air?”

“Geez, it’s not an emergency or something,” I protest.

Dani puts a hand on my shoulder. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

Lourdes nods in agreement. “It’s going to change your life.”

“You all keep saying that—”

“Because it’s true!”

I take a sip of my cheap wine and try to process this the way I do most things—carefully, from multiple angles, and with genuine curiosity. My body is just a body. It has systems and processes and…an orgasm is just another one of them.

One nobody ever took the time to explain to me properly.

What I need isn’t a friend telling me what I’ve been missing out on. What I need is a teacher.