His shoulders sagged then, maybe with relief, maybe with defeat.
“Right,” I said. “My mother wouldn’t believe that, either. She’s the one who suggested I get on the pill. She was worried I would embarrass the family further and she wouldn’t be around to stop me. She made sure I took precautions.”
Sam pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his shorts, wiped his palms, blotted his forehead, and stuffed the cloth back in his pocket before he told me, “I’m a virgin, too.”
“You’re a virgin? What about the twenty-six girlfriends?”
His dark eyes widened at me again, then slid toward the door. I felt my face flush, expecting my granddad to burst onto the porch to inform us that young people did not mention the V-word in his day.
After several tense moments with no telltale footsteps across the creaking wooden floor inside, Sam cleared his throat and said quietly, “Yes, I’m a virgin, despite the twenty-six girlfriends. It takes more than two weeks for me to make my move.”
“Ha.” My short syllable carried a huge amount of relief. I’d told myself I didn’t care how serious he’d gotten with how many girls, but obviously I did.
“I’m sorry I made you admit that,” he said. “I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I just worry sometimes. Last year I was in counseling for worrying.”
I winced. “You were?” Sam was so candid about his dark side, and it always took me by surprise. It was so easy to forget when he sang, and when he smiled. When he’d told me his whole family had been in counseling because of his dad’s problems, I’d assumed that was long ago, not last year.
“Yeah. It was a group of sad and depressed teenagers. That’s how I knew there was something wrong with you as soon as I met you at the mall. You act like those girls sometimes. It’s like you want to laugh, but it gets caught here.” He touched my chin. “Or maybe here.” He touched the back of my head. Then, because of the way I was looking at him, he slowly put his hand down.
“Are you still in counseling?” I ventured.
“No, I got kicked out. I asked a girl on a date.” He laughed. “We weren’t supposed to do that. They said they’d told us that up front, but I never read the fine print. What kind of crazy group is it if there are girls in it but you can’t date them?”
“The world has gone mad,” I said.
He pointed at me. “That’s what I told them!” He gestured down the steps through the yard, toward his truck parked at the bottom of the hill. “So, I’m driving you to your appointment.”
“Oh.” I wrinkled my nose. “You’re not going into the exam room with me.”
“Oh, God, no!” he exclaimed. “I would pass out.”
“Well, the doctor isn’t going to—”
“No,” he cut me off. “I’ll just be there for you in the waiting room.” Walking down the steps in front of me, he hugged himself tightly.
“You don’t have to go, Sam,” I protested. “You look so uncomfortable right now.”
“I like doing things that make me uncomfortable. I try not to have a comfort zone.” He stopped on the stairs. “You know what? It might get late, and we need to leave early enough to make it to Chattanooga even if there’s traffic. We can’t be late to a gig. Why don’t you go ahead and get your bathing suit?”
“Bathing suit!” I exclaimed.
“It’s a pool party!” he reminded me, exasperated. He leaned in and whispered, “And get your fiddle.”
I galloped back inside, tossing to my granddad that Sam was taking me to a pool party. Technically, not a lie. I stuffed my bikini and a towel and my fiddle case into my beach bag together and ran down the steps to Sam’s truck before my granddad could get suspicious.
No, I was the one suspicious. After I explained where my doctor’s office was and Sam started down the tree-lined street, I said, “I have a theory.”
“What’s your theory?” Sam asked gamely.
“You don’t really have a burning desire to go with me to the doctor’s office. Boys are afraid of anything having to do with the inner workings of girl parts. I’ve seen them go out of their way to avoid touching brand-new, unopened boxes of tampons. You just want an excuse to hang out with me until the gig tonight.”
He gave me a devilish grin. “That’s a good theory.”
“And it’s not because you like me. It’s because you’re deathly afraid I’ll change my mind and I won’t show up. You’ve got better stuff to do than hang out with me, but the gig is worth it.”
His face fell. “Bailey. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a l—Well, I take that back. I guess I am a liar.” He turned to look at me across the truck cab, sunlight filtering through the leaves of the trees overhead and playing across his face as he drove. “But not to you.”
A song popped into my head about that, along with the perfect melody and even an unusual chord structure for the chorus. He was a liar but not to me, or so he said, and that made me feel special. But Toby had lied to me about the drugs he was doing and the girls he was messing around with on the side. I knew I had my flaws, but I didn’t make a habit of lying. I was no match for a flat-out liar.
That was the message of the song. The words kept changing, and I worked through them in my head. During the rest of the drive and wait in the doctor’s office, Sam kept asking me what was wrong. Every time he spoke, I lost a piece of my song. Finally I asked, “Don’t you ever feel the need to practice guitar in your head?” That gave me an excuse to finger the imaginary notes in my lap. Connecting them to my imaginary fiddle helped me remember them.
The nurse called me into the examining room. In the pause between taking off my clothes and talking to the doctor, I snatched my notebook out of my purse, my paper gown crackling on top of me, and managed to dump the whole song onto the staffs. By the time the doctor came in, which usually stressed me out because I didn’t want to be touched, I was so relieved and relaxed that I could have taken a nap.
The exam went almost exactly like the first time. The difference was that instead of prescribing the pill, the doctor asked me how I felt on it. But just as before, she made a studied point of not letting her eyes linger on my heavy makeup or punky hair. Cheerfully she examined me and then felt me up. She asked me if I was sexually active—I said no, but she hardly waited for my answer, like she didn’t believe me anyway—and she made me promise promise promise that if I did become sexually active, I would make my partner use a condom to protect us both from STDs because that’s not what the pill was for.