I lost my virginity two weeks ago today. I’m kind of a late bloomer. Most of the guys in my class lost theirs months ago, some longer. Those guys have been shaving since primary school though, probably not fair to compare myself to them. 

Anyway, fourteen isn’t too bad, you know? Right on the edge I think most people would agree.

    I guess I was starting to feel the pressure. I didn’t want to start GCSEs without having fucked someone. Once you’re past sixteen, you’re into weirdo territory, that’s what Tom Griffin says. Better to just get the first one out of the way so you can start racking up some serious numbers at uni. Danny Walsh’s brother Jeff is already in triple digits, Danny says. The girls at university must be real sluts if he can get those kinds of numbers already. You’d know what I mean if you’d met him.

    Out of my friend group, only Steve Brookes, Billy Gummerson and I still had our virginities. The others were starting to give us shit about it, mostly to Steve because he’s a pussy, but Gummy and I were starting to catch some of it too.

A few weeks ago, we were sharing rollies out in the woods whilst skipping RE. Gummy was frowning hard with each toke, holding it in then sighing as he exhaled.

“What?” I said.

He looked at his hands.

“People are starting to talk,” he said solemnly. 

“So what?” I said, taking the ciggie off him. “They’re all cunts anyway.”

Gummy looked me straight in the eye.

“You don’t get it,” he said. “They’re saying we’re gay.”

I coughed up smoke.

“What!? Who the fuck’s saying that?”

“Tamara Smith told me,” Gummy said, looking back at his hands. “She said all the girls are saying.”

This was a disaster. I couldn’t believe it. Sure, I had yet to so much as finger a girl, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t gay. I don’t even like porn where you can see the guy’s face. I skip the closeups altogether.

I told this to Gummy there in the trees. He nodded, agreed that he was also, in fact, definitely not gay.

“What are we gonna do?” I said, preparing another rollie. 

Gummy’s face lit up.

“I have a plan,” he said.

I stopped rolling.

“What’s the plan?”

Sarah Rogers. She was the plan. And as luck would have it, I sat next to her in Maths. She was kind of quiet but actually pretty hot. I had already wanked to her a few times. There was a heatwave last summer and the girls were allowed to wear skirts from home. Hers had ridden up as she took her seat, flashing me her pink thong for just a fraction of a second. Plenty long enough to sear the image into my brain.

Word was getting around about Sarah Rogers. Gummy said he had heard it from Pete Gandhi that Sandy Jones had told him that Sarah Rogers was well on her way to becoming a full-blown alcoholic. 

The story was that she was drunk more often than not. Gummy said most of the time the Hello Kitty thermos she brought to school was full of vodka.

It was true, I had seen her at a few of the bigger parties we had started going to around the lakes. She was usually pretty out of it, but then so was everyone. Her drunkenness had never stood out to me, though maybe that was because of my own.

Gummy assured me that her alcoholism was blossoming even as we spoke. He told me that the girls were saying her taste for alcohol was also making her a total whore. 

I already knew she wasn’t a virgin. George Sanders from the year above fucked her last summer, everyone knows that. But Gummy said this year she had been fucking all the guys from the year above and even the year above that. 

How had this gotten past me? The girls always have such delicate information on each other, it baffles me how they find it all out.

The older boys had found out that all they needed to do was buy Sarah, Saz to her friends, a bottle of vodka and she would let them fuck her. Gummy’s eyes gleamed as he told me this. 

The plan was set.

All we had to do to lose our wretched virginities and prove ourselves not-gay once and for all was to get Sarah Rogers to invite us and a bottle of vodka over to her house. Apparently her parents were drug addict hippies so she had the house to herself most of the time. The perfect place to fuck.

“So do we… go together?” I asked Gummy.

“No, you faggot,” he said. 

I made to punch him but he dodged me and scrambled up a tree.

“We take turns,” he said from his perch in the tree.

“Who goes first?”

He thought for a minute, staring at his hands.

“Well… you obviously,” he said. “You already have an in. You sit next to her in Maths.”

I nodded. 

So I would lose my virginity to Sarah Rogers. The thought was enough to get me hard there in the woods. I sat smoking with it hidden in my waistband, just in case Gummy saw it and thought I was gay after all.

*

The vodka was easy enough to come by. My parents always have some in the cabinet. If it went missing, they would just assume they had drunk it another night and buy a fresh bottle.

I figured the difficult part would be getting Sarah Rogers to invite me over. Girls are notoriously prudish when it comes to fucking. Even the sluts.

I had never felt nervous about Maths class before that day two and a half weeks ago. My palms were soft from sweat. I kept looking at the door, waiting for Sarah Rogers to come in. We had never even said hello to each other at that point.

She came through the door and a hard lump instantly shot into my throat. I coughed. Mercifully, she was wearing trousers. I looked away, put my arm over the back of my chair. Cool. She took her seat and I glanced over my arm at her, as if just noticing her for the first time.

“Oh, hey,” I said, nonchalant as I could be with a lump of gristle choking me.

She looked slightly confused, then her cheeks flushed bright red and she looked at her desk, then up to me.

“Hi,” she said in a small voice. She smiled at me.

My cheeks blazed.

She wasn’t just pretty hot, she was absolutely gorgeous. How had I not noticed before?

I willed myself to remain cool, tried with all my might to ignore the erection forming in my boxers.

 “Maths is fucking shit, hey.” I said, still looking over my arm.

“Yeah,” she said. “Mr. Stanley is such a pedo too.”

I laughed. A genuine laugh. She was right, he is a total pedo.

The lesson started and we pretended to listen. Every now and again I looked over and gave her a smile. She smiled back every time without fail. I had no idea getting girls was so easy! Sam Brickles was right, they really are all sluts!

The bell rang three times. Lesson over. Breaktime. It was now or never. As everyone else ran from Mr. Stanley’s pedo combover, Sarah Rogers was slowly zipping up her bag, holding back.

“Sarah, right?” I said.

She looked up and brushed a strand of blond hair from her eye.

“Yeah.”

I introduced myself, starting to feel silly. She had heard my name three times a week for the last year and a half during registration.

“You seem pretty cool,” I said to her. “Want to hang out sometime?”

I have never felt so naked caught there in her smile. For that moment I felt myself completely at her mercy, the realisation dawning she held the power to utterly humiliate me. My entire face burned.

“Sure,” she said, looking down. “When?”

“How about this weekend?”

“Cool OK. Wanna go for a walk somewhere?”

“Yeah OK,” I said. I needed more. “We could walk to yours.”

She laughed.

“Yeah OK,” she said. “I have a free house anyway.”

I could have yelled for joy.

“Cool,” I said instead.

“See you on Saturday then,” she said.

“Yeah, see ya.”

“Oh, you can call me Saz by the way.”

*

Gummy hollered when I told him that breaktime about my luck with Sarah. Saz. We spent IT and PE that afternoon in the trees, chain smoking his mum’s Marlboro Reds and running through potential scenarios. 

“What if she doesn’t want to drink?” I said.

“Don’t be a cunt, she’s an alchy!” said Gummy.

“She doesn’t seem like an alchy…”

“My auntie Marge doesn’t seem like one either, but Mum says she’s drunk half a bottle of gin every night since Uncle Derek topped himself,” Gummy said, lighting up another Red.

“Right,” I said. “If her parents come home?”

“You said she said they were out for sure, right?”

“Yeah, but what if they come down and go home early?”

“Tamara told me they’re always high. She lives three doors down from Sarah Rogers and she says they’re pothead coke addicts.”

“Yeah,” I said and shrugged, “they probably won’t even notice me even if they do come back.”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t want to admit it to Gummy, but I was bricking it. Everyone says your first fuck is shit, but Sarah Rogers was experienced, seasoned even, at taking dick. I thought of all the older boys she’d fucked. Jonathan Bridges had a nine-incher according to Rebecca Sloan from the year above. There was no way I could match that. I decided I would just have to make sure she got really fucked before I fucked her. That way, even if I was terrible, she’d have no idea anyway. 

During the evenings leading up to the weekend, I did some homework of my own. After I could hear my parents snoring from their room, I crept downstairs and into my dad’s office. His is the only computer in the house without child locks on the browser. I dragged the bookcase in front of the door, entered my dad’s password (the same one he uses for everything) then clicked on In Cognito mode and got to work.

The first night I sat from 11pm until 3am. The second night, until 4:30am. Video after video. I decided, if I was going to match up to Jonathan Bridges’ horse dick, I would need to take this seriously. 

I’d watched porn a lot before then, but I’d never really studied it.

It seems that sex should usually begin with a blowjob. I’m not certain if the girl always deepthroats or if it depends on the girl, but it definitely happens more often than not. Next generally comes three or four positions in the pussy, make sure to fuck as hard as possible the whole time. The girl will usually squirt when she cums. And scream. A lot. After that, sometimes, but not always, some anal fucking. I wasn’t sure if anal would be on the cards with Sarah Rogers, but if it was, two birds with one stone, I figured. I know the videos are edited and stuff, but it seems sex should last between 45 minutes and an hour. There are a few options for the guy when he cums; face, tits, in the mouth, inside the pussy, inside the asshole. I didn’t want to get her pregnant so inside the pussy was out, and probably inside the asshole too, just to be safe. Either face or in the mouth felt like a good compromise. 

I imagined myself in the place of the guys, tried to picture Sarah’s face over the twisted faces of the girls as they bounced up and down or thrashed around.

Once in the changing rooms after PE, I overheard James Tanner telling Ben Bowen that if you wank before sex, it makes you last longer. He said he’d been training himself, like an MMA fighter, wanking at every opportunity, trying to make each session longer and longer. Sound logic. I got to training.

After two or three hours, the videos lost all meaning to me. It was just meat slamming into meat. I realised sex doesn’t really mean anything at all. It’s just two people covered in each other’s juices pressing into and out of each other. 

During Sex Ed., they told us its primary purpose is to make babies. I had an awful conversation with my mum once where she told me it was something people who love each other do. 

Both of those viewpoints are clearly very narrow-minded. 

None of the other guys at school had done it to make a baby. I also don’t think any of them had been in love with the girl they fucked. Most of them didn’t even talk to the girls they’d done it with any more. Mostly they’d been drunk, just like I would be.

It was reassuring to realise it doesn’t matter, took the pressure off a bit, you know? I felt like, with that knowledge, I could do it. I could do anything I wanted.

*

Saturday morning came. It felt like my execution day. I guess it was kind of like a death; the death of my childhood, the birth of my manhood. Maybe that’s why I felt sad. My childhood was an alright one. For the most part. 

I called Gummy to re-establish my alibi. He was going to tell his mum he was meeting me at the river, then go for a long walk to complete the ruse. Meanwhile I would tell my mum I was cycling to the river to meet up with him. In fact, I would cycle the four miles to Sarah Rogers’ house and put the final stages of the plan into motion. Worst case scenario, one of my parents would see me cycling the opposite direction to the river. In that case, I would tell them Gummy had asked me to pick up his English textbook from Tamara Smith’s house. The beauty was, he had actually lent it to her on Friday just in case. 

In the end, my parents didn’t even ask where I was going. They were busy watching TV as I walked through the house with my bike. I almost told them just for the sake of making use of the plan, then decided against it. No need to over-complicate things.

I barely remember the ride over. The research I had done the previous two nights flooded my head, images of flesh pulsing when I closed my eyes.

I stopped at the end of her road. I felt like I was going to throw up. At least it wasn’t too late to go back home. It was a fucking retarded plan anyway, there was no point even meeting up.

I heard a voice call my name.

I turned and there she was coming down the lane, smiling at me. She was wearing the skirt I had spent last summer picturing, dark eye makeup and lip gloss. I suddenly looked like a complete idiot in my ripped jeans and navy blue polo shirt.

She came right up beside me and I smelled her body spray. It smelt like plastic flowers. She stood with her hands behind her back smiling at the road.

“Where do you want to go?” she said, eyeing the floor.

“Dunno,” I said. “Your parents are definitely out, right?”

She giggled.

“Yeah, my mum’s not really around much.”

“And your dad?”

“No,” she said and looked up the road.

“OK,” I said. “Where can I put my bike?”

We walked over the dead front lawn. The side gate had been kicked in and it hung on its hinges. Sarah tilted the door and moved it to one side.

“There’s a knack to it,” she said.

The grass in the back garden was somehow even deader than the front. Weeds grew between the cracks of the patio and up the side of the house. I leaned my bike next to the back door.

“My mum’s boyfriend keeps saying he needs to get this place sorted,” Sarah said, giving me a sideways smile. “He never has any time.”

“It’s nice,” I lied. “Like… natural.”

“Do you want to come in before we go for our walk?” Sarah said.

“OK.”

The inside was much tidier than the outside but still had a dead feeling. It felt like an attic. On the wall someone had painted the words Live, Laugh, Love. I thought about textbooks. Instructions. 

She asked if I wanted some food and I said I did so we went into the kitchen. The dishwasher lay open, showing off its contents; one plate, one glass, one set of cutlery, one frying pan.

She opened the freezer and took out a box of frozen mini pizzas.

“How many do you want?”

“One is fine.”

“OK.”

I was starting to feel weird. Kind of sad. But I decided now was not the time for emotion. Now was the time for love. I set my bag on the table. Time to go to phase two.

“Hey, so I was gonna share this with Gummy later,” I said, unzipping the bag. “You know Billy Gummerson, right?”

“Yeah, he sits next to you in Maths, right?”

“Yeah,” I said and pulled out the vodka.

Her eyes sparkled.

“How’d you get that?” she said.

I shrugged.

“Can I have some?”

BINGO.

I shrugged again as if the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.

“Sure, why not.”

Sarah went to the dishwasher and took out the lone glass. Then she went to the cupboard beside the fridge and took out a darkly stained mug. She set them down in front of me.

“Got any mixer?” she said.

I stared at her.

“Like orange juice or something,” she said after a moment.

“Oh,” I said. “No, I usually just drink it like this.”

Sarah made a face.

“You’re mental.”

My cheeks blazed. 

“I think there’s some Ribena in the cupboard, we can have it with that.”

We sat there and drank our 50/50 Ribena-and-vodkas and made small talk, mostly about kids at school. 

I’m not sure if it was the Ribena or the vodka that burned the back of my throat, but it forced me to drink slowly. Sarah didn’t seem to be having the same problem.

The microwave dinged but we just left it.

Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it.

“I really like you, Jordan,” she said.

It felt like she’d hit me across the face.

“Really?” I said. “Why?” A genuine question.

She giggled and shrugged.

“You’re always thinking,” she said. “You and Billy Gummerson are well funny in class too.”

I didn’t know what to say. Lucky for me I didn’t need to say anything. Sarah Rogers leaned in and kissed me. It wasn’t like any kiss I’d had before. Open mouth, her tongue sliding over mine. 

She pulled back and I had no idea what to do. I just sat there grinning. Sarah was grinning too. 

We sat in her kitchen, kissing and drinking our disgusting cocktails.

I had never felt anything like it before. It wasn’t like the erections I’d got over porn. It was like energy flowing around down there, pushing everything up and around. I realised I actually really liked her too. I didn’t want Gummy to have his turn and I hated the guys that had already fucked Sarah. Saz.

As we kissed, her head started to loll back and forth. 

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said in a strange voice. “I wanna lie down.”

She was practically falling over as we made our way down the hall. I had to hold onto her going up the stairs to make sure she didn’t fall back down them. She was laughing the whole way.

We got to her mum’s bedroom and she threw herself onto the double bed. Closed her eyes.

Her skirt had hiked up and I could see her thong. This one was blue. My cock throbbed in my pants, urging me onto the bed, begging me to fuck her.

Sarah’s mouth moved. She was talking. I leaned in.

“You can do what you want to me,” she whispered, then she lay back, mouth open, eyes closed.

I stood over her, the images from my research revolving in my head. Spread legs, smeared makeup. The thing in my pants pushing me towards her.

I stepped back. I didn’t want to fuck, I wanted to cry. So instead of fucking her brains out, I pulled the duvet out from under Saz and wrapped her up in it, wedged a pillow under her head. Then I went downstairs and ate the cold-again pizzas. 

I felt utterly ashamed of myself. It was there for me on a plate and I had chickened out like a baby. Maybe I was gay like everyone said.

I turned off the lights in the kitchen and cleaned up the glass and tea-stained mug, then I cycled to meet Gummy like we had planned. 

*

Gummy jumped up when he saw me cycling towards him. I could see his wide eyes as soon as I rounded the bend. 

“So?” he said as I hopped off my bike.

“So what?” I said, not looking at him.

“Fuck off!” he said. “Did you fuck her or not?”

I looked into his eyes. There was something there, something dark. I shrugged, cheeks ablaze. That was all the confirmation he needed. He whooped for joy, high-fived me, shook me by the shoulders.

He begged me to tell him everything, leave nothing out. So I did. Sure, I embellished a bit using my research to inform the lies, but most of it was true.

It spread around the school almost instantly. The first Monday back, it was like there was a different air around me, as if my classmates sensed the change. Guys from the years above have started acknowledging me in the hall. The girls give me these looks, like they’re sizing me up, trying to figure out if what they’ve heard is true. Sally Bennet actually said hi to me in the hall. Sally Bennet.

It kind of counts right? It’s like that saying; if everyone believes something is true, then it is true. My virginity was always just a kind of agreed on state anyway. It’s not like it means anything. None of it means anything. So what’s the big deal? 

Look, I’m sorry I lied to you earlier, OK? I thought I was going to tell you the same stuff everyone else thinks, but what’s the point? Someone has to know what a loser I am, that I couldn’t even fuck a girl when she asked me.

I still feel this weird sadness, like when I was in Sarah Rogers’ house. It feels dark, the kind of dark I saw in Gummy’s eyes at the river. I don’t know.

He’s even more excited than I was, Gummy that is. It’s his turn next and now he feels like it’s more of a sure thing than ever. He’s been bragging to the others how it was all his idea and how he’s gonna fuck Sarah Rogers, the positions.

I don’t want to speak to her again. She makes me feel sad. I wasn’t even the one who got wasted and embarrassed himself.

She doesn’t sit next to me in Maths anymore. She doesn’t even look at me.