I Met Cassie At The Sex Camp

A/N: Look, I can write one serious story a year tops before I descend into parody and/or self parody. As always, I didn’t MEAN to be long winded, and I’m open to whatever criticism you’d like to offer.

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This was going to be phenomenally, incredibly, unbearably awkward. Oh sure, it sounded great in theory. Just like every other stupid social idea in human history. Theory worked well because theory is clean. When you put real people into the mix… things get messy.

My parents were, if not hippies, then at least hippy-adjacent. They thought with enough love and happiness, we could fix this world. I, on the other hand, am a ruthless pragmatist. I’m also shy, so I prefer to do the whole love thing from a nice safe distance. Or, failing that, I like to do it secretly.

Which is to say, despite having hippy-adjacent parents who’d be more than happy if I was going around having sex all the time, I’m done my junior year of high school, and still a virgin. I’m not bitter about it, I don’t hate women or think they’re bitches for not sleeping with me. I’ve never failed to reach any goal I’ve set my mind to. Losing my virginity just never made it high enough on my priority list to become a goal.

But I do like to keep my parents happy, and my parents thought it was weird that I wasn’t having sex. So when they told me about this hippy sex camp thing, I wearily accepted the offer. I know, I know. I’m a teenage boy. I’m supposed to jump at an offer like this. But seriously, have you ever given any thought to just how awkward it would be? I mean just think for a second about what type of people go to a camp to lose their virginity.

Sorry for the image.

* * *

The bus to camp contained more nervousness than I’ve ever seen in one place. It was so thick I expected it to condense out of the air as some sort of exotic, hitherto unknown liquid. To be on this bus, you needed to have a) parents who were totally cool with you having sex, and b) never had sex. If I had dice, I could have ran a D&D game. If I had a gun, I would have hijacked the bus and brought us to a sci-fi convention. I’d have been roundly thanked.

We were all nerds, geeks, and losers. No one made eye contact.

It was an utterly silent forty-five minutes, punctuated only by coughing. I wonder what the bus driver was thinking. I wonder if he’d have to get drunk to forget about us.

The funny thing was, we’d all agreed to this. We’d all read though quite a few forms, and given our consent, and went through interviews to make sure we weren’t violent psychopaths, and stated our preferred gender and all that jazz.

People think that parents like ours don’t have many expectations of their kids. They’re wrong, they’re just expectations that most people wouldn’t even notice. It makes falling short of those expectations even harder. I mean, do you know how much of a loser you feel like when you don’t do drugs like your parents expect you too?

When you hear the word nerd, you get a certain body type in mind. Or maybe you think of one of two body types. You have thin nerds like me, and then you have the chubby nerds. But here’s the thing: those stereotypes don’t tell the whole picture. They may predominate, but they only account for maybe one standard deviation of population each. That leaves something like 32% of us to look nothing like what you’d expect. One girl, for example had bright blue hair. One of the other boys was built like a young Schwarzenegger.

There were all types of girls on the bus. One in particular struck my eye. She was coltish, all legs and arms, and mostly flat chested. She had glasses and long dirty blond hair. A long nose. Look, I’m not doing a good job selling her here, because despite my comparison, she’s a person, not a horse. The thing about nerds is that we don’t do so well when you describe our components. When we’re attractive, it’s in a gestalt sense. I can list her attributes, but if you couldn’t see her eyes, alive, calculating, and twinkling with irony, you wouldn’t understand my attraction. She caught me looking. We both blushed. See what I mean about awkward?

* * *

We arrive after I’d calculated the probability that I’d be paired with a girl I found attractive (63%), but before I’d been able to calculate the average attractiveness of girls on the bus on a scale of 1-10. This was probably for the best, because if I’d completed that calculation, I’d have moved on to estimating error bars based on the sample size.

Look, how many times do I have to tell you I’m a nerd?

The adults running the camp were a mix of earnest, professionally dressed educator types, and tie-dye hippy types. I felt right at home, although I hoped that their screening was really good. One creep among the adults could do a lot of damage.

We were all ushered into an auditorium, along with several other busloads of similar children. I counted 58 boys, and 52 girls.

What followed was an excruciating presentation on the mechanics and etiquette of sex, protection, and relationships. The adults presenting were uniformly enthusiastic and serious. I wondered what sort of drug cocktails they were using to get that effect. Or were they always like this? Us kids were the only ones who saw the ridiculousness of this whole thing, and we were too busy being awkward and terrified to point it out.

I won’t bore you with the details. We all know that hymens are external (not halfway into the vagina), and rarely need to be broken, that the penis should never hit the cervix, that bleeding is mostly avoidable, and NOT a good thing, and that condoms are a great idea, right?

There was lots of coughing. I hoped that it wasn’t from actual viral infections, as I anticipated there being significant fluid exchange amongst all the participants here pretty soon.

Finally, it came time to draw lots. We made four lines (I felt sorry for the queer kids, the shortness of their lines meant it had to be a lot more awkward for them, especially because they were standing next to potential partners).

Their agony was foreshortened by the simple virtue of them going first. Within two minutes, all ten of them had their assigned partners, and were led off by helpful adults to the private rooms where the actual deed would take place.

I ended up in the middle of the line of straight boys. No one really wanted to be first, but no one was quite ready to run and hide at the back. We were more of an awkward teardrop shaped blob than a line. The girls, across from us, were no better.

They used the worst possible method to assign us. We were each given a ball at random (they had those bingo ball things, which must have come with the auditorium; I wondered how often geriatrics used this place for bingo, and if they knew awkward teens came here to be divested of their awkward virginity). I got 27 (3 cubed, my mind supplied automatically).

Then the agony began. Walk up to a girl, or bump into a girl, or be approached by a girl. Mumble my number, ask what their number was, or mutely show my number to them. It seemed an endless repetitive horror. I did feel sorry for those who found each other early and had to stand around awkwardly waiting for the rest of us.