Have a Little Faith in Me by Sonia Hartl

Author:Sonia Hartl [Hartl, Sonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Page Street Publishing
Published: 2019-09-02T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 15

After devotions, we had some free time where none of us were on breakfast duty. Mandy lay on her bed with a cold washcloth over her eyes, while Astrid wrote in her journal. Sarina dug around in her makeup kit, tossing empty tubes of glitter into the wastebasket by her bed. She kept shooting me furtive glances, like she would burst if she didn’t speak up, but she didn’t know how to phrase whatever was on her mind.

“I’m curious about something.” Sarina chewed on her thumb as she looked between me and Mandy. “I’m not sure if I should ask, though, because of everything that happened last night.”

“Just spit it out,” Astrid said.

“Okay.” Sarina stood and paced back and forth, her hands tucked under her chin. “Okay. I’m just going to ask. You’re not a virgin, CeCe?”

“I think that’s been pretty well established,” I said.

She clutched her flaming cheeks. “Whatwasitlike?”

“Huh?” She might as well have had marbles in her mouth. “I don’t think I caught that.”

“The sex,” she whispered. “What was it like?”

Astrid snapped her journal shut, then opened it again, like she was poised to take notes. Mandy sat straight up, her washcloth falling onto her lap. Nothing like an early morning question about sex to get everyone’s attention.

“Do you really want to know?” I asked.

“Yes,” the three of them said in unison.

“All right, I guess you do.” I laughed.

I didn’t want to lay all the awful, embarrassing details out there, but I wished someone had talked about sex with me. Not the kind of conversation I’d had with my mom about the birds and the bees, where she threw a handful of condoms at me and told me to be safe, but the ugly stuff. The awkward stuff. The stuff no one talked about because they thought they were alone. The kind of conversations Paul’s mom had with him.

“The truth is, it was … really bad,” I said.

“How so?” Mandy asked.

“Should we be discussing this?” Talking about sex with my ex-boyfriend’s even-more-recent ex-girlfriend felt all kinds of squicky. “It’s not very Christian.”

“Oh please.” Astrid rolled her eyes. “It’s a good thing you’re not a Christian then.”

“Fine.” This was normal. I could talk about this. “It hurt. A lot. And the second it started, I just wanted him to hurry up so it could be over.”

“That sounds awful,” Sarina said.

“It was, and sex is supposed to be great, right? Well, it wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t feel connected to him at all. I don’t think he even looked at me. He sort of stared at my shoulder, while his face was all twisted up, like he was the one in pain.”

“Just when I thought I couldn’t hate him more,” Astrid said.

Mandy stared at me with wide-eyed horror, as if she’d switched flights at the last minute and just heard the plane she was supposed to be on had crashed.

My worst insecurities bubbled to the surface. The stuff I couldn’t even talk to Paul about. “The whole time, I analyzed.

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