Chapter 3
By the time Nora shows up, we’ve already won three rounds of trivia and backed out of the fourth.
Jonathan insisted on giving another team a chance at the free drink tickets, the prize for the winners of a round.
Meg’s made great use of our collective earnings, and recently returned to the booth with another tequila shot.
I’ve lost track of exactly how many she’s thrown back, but that’s okay.
It’s good, actually. Meg spends so much time thinking about other people, it’s nice to see her let loose and enjoy herself, especially given her circumstances.
That being said, if Teacher Phoebe were on the clock, she’d be reminding Meg to use her indoor voice right about now.
After taking a few shots in solidarity, Jonathan and Nora sip their beers while Alex nurses his signature cosmopolitan with a lime wedge.
Jerry once confessed to me that it’s not technically a cosmo at all but actually Tito’s mixed with two packs of an off-brand cranberry Crystal Light.
No one’s had the heart to tell Alex that his Carrie Bradshaw–inspired cocktail is a knockoff vodka cran at best, and a one-way ticket to prediabetes at worst. While everyone else works on their buzz, I trace little hearts into the condensation building up on the glass of my school night Diet Coke.
I’ve learned the hard way that even the smallest of hangovers is lethal when you have no choice but to exist in a room full of four-year-olds all day.
My mind wanders to the letter in my dresser drawer while Nora fills the group in on her latest Hinge date, and I push the thought away before it gets the chance to ruin my night. Don’t think about the letter, I tell myself. Focus on Nora’s story.
I pivot my entire body toward her, hopeful that whatever she’s about to say is juicy enough to hold my attention. Knowing Nora, I’d say the odds are in my favor.
“He wasn’t as cute in person.” She pauses for a second to apply a thick layer of shimmery gloss to her full lips. “And he had a boring personality to match. We ended up staring at each other in silence until I had no choice but to whip out Meg’s ‘questions to ask on a date’ note.”
Meg claps. “Told you that would come in handy!”
“So I sat there conducting a formal interview until the check came, which we split.” Nora spits out the last word like she just tasted something bitter.
Gasps sound from around the table.
“Oh my god, that sounds terrible,” I say, hoping my face doesn’t betray the smidge of relief I’m feeling. I know I should find no pleasure in Nora’s misery, but I can’t help but be comforted by dating stories like this one. They make me feel like I’m not missing out on anything too great.
“It really was. And he’s terrible in bed.” Nora shudders.
Jonathan raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”
Nora closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.
While she never shies away from sharing the details of her latest hookups, I get the sense that she’s completely exhausted by the dating scene.
I want to reach across the table and shake her.
Don’t you know that I would trade places with you in an instant?
“The sex itself wasn’t even the worst part!” she continues. “When I was trying to get him to leave, he got himself a glass of water, placed it on my nightstand on my side of the bed, and tucked himself under the covers.”
“Oh god,” Alex says.
“It gets worse,” Nora goes on. “Right before he turned off my lamp, he asked if I”—she pulls out air quotes for this—“ ‘would mind keeping an eye on his breathing throughout the night.’ ”
“For any particular reason, or…?” Alex asks.
“He has sleep apnea or whatever it’s called and has to sleep with one of those giant machines.”
Jonathan chimes in. “There’s no way this story doesn’t end with him realizing he has to go back home to sleep with his robot, right?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Nora takes a big swig of her beer.
“Instead, he reached over, turned off the light, and asked me to wake him up if I noticed any ‘unusual breathing patterns or sounds.’ What am I, an EMT?” She’s joking, but deep down, I know Nora’s disappointed by her recent string of unsuccessful dates.
She’s remarkably sure of herself and fiercely independent, but at heart, she’s just a big softie who wants to find love as much as the rest of us.
Meg slams her empty shot glass down on the table.
“There’s no fucking way!” she exclaims, and every head in the bar turns toward the commotion in the center of the room. Meg raises her empty glass to the onlookers.
I give Nora my honest thoughts.
“Doesn’t it feel kind of nice that a man would risk dying in his sleep to spend the night with you?” I would go through this experience ten times over if it meant I’d be having sex in my twenties, and I’d do it with a smile on my face. I’d even buy one of those breathing robots to keep in my room.
“No,” they all say in unison.
“That is actually the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Jonathan says to Nora. Everyone chuckles in solidarity, seeming to agree with his sentiment.
“I woke him up at five a.m. to tell him I was late for Pilates,” Nora says.
“Why didn’t you tell me you started doing Pilates!”
“Because I didn’t start doing Pilates, Meg.”
“At least it makes a funny story?” Alex shrugs.
“It happens to the best of us,” Nora says as she turns to Jonathan. “Remember Angela from sophomore year?” she asks, and Jonathan groans in response.
“Was that the one you found hiding under your bed a week after you ended things with her?” Alex asks.
“No, that was Jen.”
And so begins the roundtable of dating horror stories.
I have protocols in place for when these types of conversations arise, which, considering we’re all supposed to be in our Sex and the City era, is pretty often.
Usually I navigate these situations by relocating to the Pac-Man machine outside the men’s restroom.
Sometimes Jonathan even brings loose cash for me just for this purpose.
But tonight is different. Tonight, I stay at the table. Tonight, I force myself to listen to everything I’m missing out on.
Alex recounts his recent hookup with the Postmates driver who delivered his chicken Caesar wrap.
Meg contemplates if she should accept her terrible boss’s offer to set her up on a blind date with his son.
Jonathan informs us that Raegan, an obsessive old flame whose number he ended up having to block, recently found his work email.
My mind starts to wander in the middle of Nora’s impassioned speech about her new idea for a dating app. Something about men needing a letter of recommendation from at least three women before being accepted.
“You okay, Pheebs?” Jonathan asks as Meg accepts a glass of red wine from Jerry.
I was thinking about the letter in my bedside drawer.
“Yes, sorry,” I tell him. “My mind’s a little all over the place.”
“What’s going on?” Alex asks, and the genuine concern in his eyes has me spilling my guts in an instant.
“I got a letter in the mail today,” I tell them with a sigh. “It was from myself; I wrote it when I was eighteen. For a school assignment.”
I cast my eyes down toward my lap, wishing my Rugrats tee had a hole I could pick at.
“How fun!” Meg exclaims, having lost her ability to read the room somewhere between the tequila and the wine.
Alex gives her leg a reassuring pat. “Well? What did it say?”
Through gritted teeth, I tell them. “ ‘Lose your virginity.’ Period. ‘That’s all I ask.’ Period.”
The table falls silent, and it’s the kind of silence that I’ve become all too familiar with over the years. The kind where no one knows what to say.
“Not the periods…” Jonathan tries to lighten the mood.
I put my head in my hands, and everything comes out muffled. “It’s like I knew back then that it was never going to happen. And I keep thinking about telling eighteen-year-old Phoebe that she’s still a virgin at almost thirty. She would hate me. And I don’t blame her. I hate me, too.”
“Hey.” Jonathan pulls my arms away from my face. “She wouldn’t hate—”
“And Sandy wants me to focus on all the positives in my life and make a list of all my accomplishments, as if that would help.”
“I think that’s a great ide—” Nora starts.
“It’s an insult to the art of list making.”
“I think that when you finally relax about the whole virginity thing, that’s when it’s gonna happen,” Alex says.
Meg nods in agreement. “You know what they say…” She pauses to think. Right when I’m starting to think she doesn’t actually know what they say, she gets there. Kind of. “A watched pot never blows up.” Alex slides her wine away from her when she’s not looking.
“Meg is right,” Jonathan says. “You’re too focused on it. You have to take a step back and let it play out the way it’s supposed to.”
I let his words sink in.
“And what if it never plays out?” I ask. “I can’t take a step back and wait for something that might never happen. There must be something I can do. Ideally within the next thirty days.”
Nora laughs to herself. “How to Lose Your Virginity in Thirty Days, starring Phoebe Berman,” she says. “Now, that’s a movie I’d pay good money to watch.”
I freeze, my eyes locked on Nora while the neurons in my brain start to fire at a rapid speed. “What did you just say?” I ask her.
Nora pales. “Too soon to joke? I’m sorry, Phoebe, I—”
I cut her off. “No, Nora, you’re a genius!”
I walk over to the other side of the table and kiss her on the mouth. My face-framing strands of hair get stuck in her lip gloss.
“I am?” she asks as I reach under the table to grab my bag. I dump the contents on the table, all the supplies I could possibly need spilling out in front of me. I reach for the unopened box of felt-tipped markers.
“Oh my god!” everyone cries in unison as I rip open the packaging.