It’s not like Molly doesn’t know about sex.
She understands the mechanics, she paid attention during Family Life Education. And she talks about it all the time. The bible study girls, for instance, love to hold each other accountable. They brag about the boys they turn down, reciting “guard your heart” and “do not to awaken love before its time” like song lyrics, promises. At Fall Retreat, they had passed around a giant cookie cake, ripping pieces with their bare hands until their fingers were tacky with frosting. Once it had gone around, a smug senior had propped up the remains of the mangled cookie.
“This,” she had said, “is all that will be left for your future husband if you give yourself away.” Sugar crumbled to dust in Molly’s mouth. She forced herself to swallow.
Then there are Molly’s hallmates. She sits at their feet as they regale their escapades: how they’d seduced this boy at the mixer, this one in the woods, this one at the cereal station in the dining hall. They are not ruined cookies, these girls. They are sirens, sublimely embodied. They use their own object lessons, picking out their boyfriends from a jar of pickles, using grapefruits to illustrate how the film major made them crazy.
She understands from her friends’ stories the potential for pleasure, the potential for damage. She takes all of it to heart. Molly is cautious but she is trying to loosen up. So when Nick texted her their first week back to campus:
want to go on an adventure?
She had saidyes.
They had wandered the sleepy corners of the college town, cobblestones glowing like embers in the lamplight. They had walked and walked and walked before collapsing on a bench, the space between their shoulders thick with static. And when the Jeep roared past, called out, kiss her! Nick did before Molly even had the chance to blush.
Crossing the wet grass of DuPont lawn,
down the soft earthen path circling the lake,
upon the bones of the abandoned amphitheater, overgrown with ivy,
Molly’s mind didn’t have room for any stories other than the one unwinding within her, between her and Nick. Even if it did, all the stories in Molly’s canon— the cautionary tales, the thrilling exploits— were about sex-had or sex-not-had. There were no stories about sex-attempted-and-failed. There was nothing about pain, at least not pain like hers.
These are Molly’s object lessons:
Imagine your body is a body and there are scissors, cutting you open from the inside out.
Imagine your body is a body, and there’s a lit match, blackening and curling in on soft, incandescent skin.
Imagine your nerves weep like sirens, your muscles snap like a cornered animal.
Molly knows the bible study girls would recoil from her sin, her hallmates would shrink back from her shame, so instead she tells them stories in terms they will understand; how his face had crumbled like a cookie when she told him no, or how round and tart he was beneath her tongue.
It’s not like Molly doesn’t know about sex.
