She pressed the envelope into my hands with a knowing look. I stood up, clutching it. I could barely see past the bright green letters flashing in my head so I walked in an undiscerning daze back out through the waiting room. My throat felt parched and scratchy from mortification so I stopped off at the water cooler. As I poured myself a plastic cup of water, I felt something fall behind me.
I turned around in surprise and saw an upturned cardboard box lying in the middle of the room surrounded by small silver packets scattered all across the waiting room floor and under the waiting patients’ seats. Oh, God. My satchel must have knocked it off the shelf behind me.
I closed my eyes briefly in shame before forcing myself to bend down and pick the box up. The waiting patients in the room were staring so I pulled my jeans up, hoping my faded M&S knickers weren’t on show. Crouching on my knees and trying to pull my jumper down to hide my VPL, I started picking up the packets. I was half-finished shoving them carelessly back into the open box when it suddenly hit me. These weren’t just shiny silver packets that I was picking up from under people’s feet. They were condoms.
The irony was not lost on me as I fled the surgery, my eyes swimming in hot tears. I ran out into the street and chucked the brown envelope straight into the first bin I saw. My face burnt red-hot as I watched it sink in with the empty McDonald’s paper bags, taking my dignity down with it.
I was nothing but a twenty-one-year-old VIRGIN.
LIFE AS AN adult virgin is more complicated than you might think. Obviously it is normal, there are thousands of us, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Choosing when to have sex is a completely individual decision, and everyone is different. Some people choose to wait till marriage, and some just want to wait for the right person. Others are religious, and others are just too busy being successful in every other area of their lives to worry about something as minor as intercourse.
At least, that’s what the internet said when I looked it up the second I got home from the doctors’ surgery.
I knew Dr E Bowers hadn’t even believed I was a virgin to begin with, because clearly no average-looking third-year university student who drank ten-plus units a week could still be a virgin. Except me.
I buried my head in the duck-feather pillow I’d spent a week’s food budget on. I pulled my duvet over me to try to block out the six letters blinking over and over in my head: V I R G I N V I R G I N V I R G I N.
I hated the word. I hated it just as much as I hated the fact that I was one. It wasn’t fair—why did I have to be the only non-deformed, non-religious girl who got stuck with an untouched inner lotus at the age of twenty-one?
I sighed loudly and let my mind go over the familiar responses to the ‘Why am I still a v*****?’ question that visited me as regularly as my period.
1. It was my parents’ fault. They were education-obsessed immigrants who moved from Greece to Surrey and sent me to an all-girls school. Their plan was for me never to meet any boys so I wouldn’t be distracted from their one and only goal for me: Oxford University. Result? I didn’t get into Oxford and I didn’t meet any boys, either.
2. I was a very unfortunate-looking teenager. By the time I figured out how to make myself look passable and wear a bra that gave me enough support to show off my 36D assets, it was too late. All the boys from the school next door already had girlfriends, and to them I would always be the slightly unattractive and quiet girl with big boobs hidden behind massive jumpers, and long dark curly hair that was more horizontal than vertical. It didn’t help that all the other girls had figured out how to pluck their eyebrows and flirt while I was locked up in my bathroom with a bottle of bleach, battling my moustache. By the time I got to uni, I realised I had missed out on learning how to talk to boys. After a few minutes of my blunt humour and self-deprecation, they usually moved on to talk to real girls. Girls with minimal body hair, button noses and socially appropriate senses of humour.
3. My dysfunctional family. I was an only child, which meant most people assumed I had spent a spoilt, lavish upbringing pleading with my parents never to have another child so I could have all their attention. The reality was that I spent my whole childhood avoiding my mum and dad whenever they were in the same room, which meant most of my formative years were spent on the swing in the back of the garden with my imaginary older brother, or reading books under my duvet. Consequently, I moved up to the top reading set at school, developed an over-active imagination and became obsessed with my friends’ functional families. I couldn’t figure out how all this linked to the ‘why am I still a virgin’ question, but it had to have had some kind of psychological impact on me. My latest theory was that it gave me a pathological fear of men.
4. I was a late bloomer. I spent every lunchtime listening to my friends talk about their first kisses and boyfriends but their lives always seemed so far removed from mine. Over the years, they moved on to second base, third base, and when they were all finally losing their virginity, I was still the only girl who had never kissed anyone. I sat on the socially acceptable side of the sixth-form common room. I hung out with the cool people and eventually managed to wear the right clothes, but somehow I didn’t kiss a single boy until the ripe old age of seventeen. I didn’t stop there, either—I begged him to have sex with me. He said no.
5. The Bite Job. It happened just before the First Kiss refused to deflower me and it is the reason why I have a fear of penises (penii?), second base, third base, rejection, teeth and pubic hair. It is my worst memory.
We were at Lara’s eighteenth birthday and I was wearing a dress so low-cut you could see my bra. It was just like any other party, except this time, an actual boy came over to speak to me. James Martell. He was no Mark Tucker (Year Thirteen’s own Brad Pitt from the boys’ school) and his nose was, surprisingly, bigger than mine—but he was funny and had floppy blond hair. He took me upstairs to Lily’s older brother’s bedroom and drunkenly pushed me onto the bed.
We snogged. I mirrored what he was doing with his tongue and wondered why none of my girlfriends had ever mentioned how much saliva was involved. Then his hands started creeping into my pants. Any self-respecting girl who was having her first kiss would have yanked them back out, but not sexually starved Ellie. I let his fingers venture down into my VJ and let him poke away. I carried on shoving my tongue down his throat at full velocity and after a few minutes of discomfort in my sacred zone, he stopped. We went back downstairs holding hands and swapped email addresses.
We ended up chatting on the computer every night for two weeks until one Saturday evening when he invited me over. I was so nervous I ended up sitting on the loo excreting my nerves for an hour beforehand. After a second shower, I got the bus to his.
We sat in awkward silence for half an hour until he swooped in and started kissing me. We snogged on the sofa for a while before he put his hand down into my pants again. This time I was more prepared and didn’t wince in pain when he started waggling his fingers around. The next thing I knew, he was pulling my dress over my head and I was naked bar my pink polka-dot underwear.
He pulled his clothes off, undid my bra and slid my knickers off. He stared in shock. After a few seconds of total silence when I wanted to curl up in a ball and die, he threw his head back and howled with laughter.
I froze. Why was he laughing at my vagina? I stood, paralysed with humiliation, and waited for him to speak.
His laughter died down. ‘Wow, I knew you had some hair down there but I didn’t realise you had a full-on bush. You’re the first girl I’ve ever met with an unshaved vagina.’
I hadn’t shaved. Why hadn’t I shaved? Why hadn’t I known I was supposed to shave?
He didn’t seem to care very much because he carried on kissing me. Then he pulled his boxers off and I saw his naked penis staring at me. It was the first one I had ever seen