When we first started dating, I adored his marijuana-infused lethargy. Every night I would come over to his dorm room at midnight. We’d cuddle in smoggy darkness and watch the same movies over and over again. Things like “High Fidelity” and “Say Anything” and other John Cusack movies where a bumbling but sweet male protagonist makes good with the ladies, ladies who always seem to have much more on the ball than misguided, floppy John. The women in these movies are lawyers and scholars, and John, well, John just plugs along working in a record store or kickboxing with his nephew.

Since I was coming off a miserable, histrionic, losing my virginity and sort of regretting it later fiasco, my boyfriend’s Cusack-esque brand of sedation and comfort was ideal. The sex, of course, was initiated by me. And not just the first time, though the first time was indicative of the way it would always be. I planned it out, as usual. I went to CVS and perused the “family planning” aisle, which includes along with the customary condoms and lube, pregnancy tests and metal handcuffs that always seem to be out of stock. I bought my first box of condoms (instead of just stealing them from health services) and proudly walked back to my room with them.

Then I coordinated the perfect first-time sex with new boyfriend outfit, which consisted of hot pants and a black tank top. I called the boy to come over and watched him walk from his dorm to my own with his shoulders slack and his hair tousled.

The way I remember it, I had him pinned down on my bed and said, “Well, things are going really well with us, so I think we should have sex.”

He smiled his wide sleepy grin and said, “Sounds good to me.”

We moseyed along like this for months. I decided where we went out to dinner. I decided what movies we went to. And I decided when and where and how we’d have sex. It wasn’t that he didn’t have opinions; he just generally didn’t care about most things. I kept wondering when I’d stumble upon his hot spot, something that really irked him into passion. Eventually I found a few buttons to push: politics, pot and pop music.

Pop music wasn’t really a source of argument; we both enjoy the same brand of whiny indie complaint rock. What got to me first was the pot. At the beginning it didn’t bother me. We would joke that he had two girlfriends, Jess and Mary Jane, though I was always certain he spent more time and energy on Mary than he ever spent on me.

For some reason I’ve always dated potheads. I find the stupor induced by a good bong hit comforting, but after a while it wasn’t comforting, it was infuriating. When he was high, the boyfriend just wasn’t there. He was covered by a protective candy shell that very little could break through.

I’d get angry and yell and scream, and he’d just hold me and tell me the pot wasn’t a big deal and that it didn’t change who he was. I believed him, because essentially it was true. He was slow and distant with pot, and he was slow and distant without it.

It follows, then, that the first time he really yelled at me it was indirectly about Hillary Clinton. I had a party at my apartment, a summer party, with loud voices outside and cigarette butts stomped into the concrete slab we called our backyard. As things were winding down, my roommate broke out a bag of peanuts, which she shelled onto the floor. She then threw her hands up, drunkenly exclaiming, “Hot nuts! I have hot nuts!” scattering peanut shells from her mouth, cookie monster-style.

The party was teetering on the edge of disaster. We could all feel it. Everyone was a little too drunk, and a little too sweaty. There’s often a period at the end of a successful party that feels this way — either you go to sleep and avoid the fallout, or you stay up and watch the fireworks soar. The boyfriend and his roommate were having a heated political discussion about the relative merits of Sen. Clinton while I was puking my brains out in our tiny, dirty bathroom. I would hear snippets through the retching. “She’s an interloper! She’s not even from New York!” I leaned my head on our urine-splattered foam toilet seat, and even in my weakened state I was really angry.

Where the hell was he? Why wasn’t he holding back my hair and fetching tall, cool glasses of water? I pushed myself off the grimy tiles and stood against the door frame. I stared at the boyfriend from my slumped vantage point and scowled. I stared at him for a good five minutes until he noticed I existed. Instead of coming to my immediate support, he narrowed his green eyes and twisted his usually soft mouth into a sneer.

“What, Jess, what? What the hell do you want? Just come out and say it; don’t just stand there and stare at me. If you need me, fucking say something. I’m not a mind reader.”

I had never heard this tone. This tone was new, and scary, and I was sick and drunk and exhausted and the only recourse I had was to cry. Huge, gulping sobs in front of a handful of my friends who of course cleared out immediately. I was actually terrified of this very sweet, normally calm man. He even threw his shoes. Not at me, but in my presence, and while usually I would have laughed at this boyish expression of frustration, instead my hysterics increased to keening levels.

But my tears always worked on him, even in manipulative girlish ways, and soon enough we crumpled onto my bed and he held me until I caught my breath. The storm across his face had calmed as quickly as it had risen.

The next morning, as I walked into our kitchen with puffy eyes and shuffled around in peanut shells, I was almost glad. Scratch that, not almost glad, actually glad. I had finally inspired some kind of palpable emotion in him. Sure, it wasn’t exactly the emotion I had wanted (I would have preferred adoration), but at least it was something.

It was only a brief spurt of passion, though, rarely to be seen again.

This past semester he’s been in Australia. Walking around a pond near my house in January, trudging through snowbanks, we calmly made the decision to have an “open relationship” with a stringent don’t ask, don’t tell policy. I cried for days after he left the country, but always in my little concrete cell of a dorm room. I wrote him pretend letters that I never sent about how his absence raped my soul and other faux poetic nonsense. After the shit I put my friends through with my last boyfriend, I didn’t want them to think I was a complete sad sack. And the worst kind of sad sack — a sucker for boys.

“We’re so proud of you!” my friends would say. “You’re handling this really well. We were worried you’d go completely insane again! Good for you.”

I couldn’t tell them that I wasn’t OK. That my consistent smiling and hyper laughter were just a mask because I was hurting so bad.

But he never cried. Never cried, and rarely talked to me. If I called or e-mailed, sure, he’d talk to me, but if I didn’t put in any effort, I didn’t hear about his koala corn-holing exploits. Sometimes I’d get a brief missive about how drunk he was all the time, but otherwise it was a complete blackout.

And so I found somebody else because I guess I always do. When I called the boyfriend to tell him it was over, to tell him that I was seeing someone else and to yell at him for putting little or no effort into our relationship, he didn’t even react. It was a non-breakup breakup.

I told him in a quavering voice, “I just can’t do this anymore, it hurts too much.” He said he understood, and then started to tell me about watching “Crocodile Dundee” in his Australian film class.

“Wait a minute. I just broke up with you and told you I’m screwing someone else and you don’t seem to care. Did the past year and a half mean nothing?”

“It’s not that,” he said. “I’m just not one for reacting.”

I always think I’m going to die during takeoff. I order a coffee because it’s my lifeblood and the bitterness of the cheap airline fare makes my lips pucker. And this is how it’s going to end. It’s a half-hearted fear. I know almost certainly I will survive, but reels of all the hackneyed plane-crash movies run through my head. So I catalog my sins to entertain myself: the impression I’ll leave when I die. The good deeds are never as fun as the naughty bits. And because I’m with Kate, the sins that come to mind first are the sexual ones. They will search my room when I die and my mother will find my bondage tape. She won’t realize that the bondage tape was never opened, and I only bought it because after four inquisitive trips to Miko’s Exotic Wear I was sick of the leather-clad salesgirls laughing at me when I stared at the wall of vibrators, mouth agape. I’ll be embarrassed, but it won’t really matter because I’ll be dead.

My lips are parched and my mouth tastes of coffee and stale air, and I have to confess to Kate. The bondage tape is a matter of interpretation, but lying is just wrong. My heightened pulse and massive sweating will only be appeased by the truth. I smile at Kate next to me. She’s already asleep, and the blanket is wrapped around her head, hobo style. I wonder if she’s still breathing.

“Kate. Kate. KATE!!!”

“What the fuck, I’m trying to sleep.”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Does it have to be right this second? Can’t it wait till we get to Phoenix?”

“No.”

“All right, if you’re gonna be a petulant child about it, go ‘head.”

“Ummm, remember when I told you I lost my virginity to John at his senior prom?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, that was a lie. I didn’t lose my virginity until the artist, freshman year.”

We’re all sprawled around the big brown room in the white clapboard house. It’s the end of June, and 30 sets of stubbled pale legs stick out from every angle, jockeying for space. Girls are curled up against tables and behind cushions on the floor. But she is occupying her own love seat, her legs folded underneath her. That’s the first time I see Kate. We’re 17. Her square tortoiseshell glasses perch on the tip of her nose, bovine brown eyes staring intently down at the sets of dreadlocks and pierced noses beneath her.

They force us to play one of those getting-to-know-you drills — tell us something about you that’s unique. Everything, nothing, but we’re all going to say things like we have a pet mouse named Baryshnikov, or a penchant for Belle and Sebastian. I say that when I raise my eyebrows, one goes higher than the other. Then they make me demonstrate — my expression going from surprise to sedate and back again. Kate is next. She says that she only eats meat, then scowls at all the granola-crunching vegetarians who gasp at her with narrowed eyes.

I laugh out loud. I have been at Bennington for about three hours at this point. My father has driven me up from Westchester to this arts program, because I am a writer, a very important writer. I write poems that have sentences about “charred mammal flesh” and use the word “arrive” to mean orgasm. My suburban high school teachers squeal at my use of imagery and symbolism — it’s just so avant-garde! They marvel at my ability to find time for writing during my busy cheerleading schedule. I write about my heels banging staccato against city streets at night, though I’m only allowed in New York City before dusk.

Wearing carefully chosen khakis I walk down the hill with my dad, sweat already pouring down the small of my back. The hills surround Bennington, green and rising so slowly. He stays with me through registration with a woman who has as many piercings as she has orifices. Dad deposits me in the shuttered white cottage that is my “dorm” and books it out. So, I’m sitting amid the multiply tattooed and tie-dyed and wondering just what I have gotten my Abercrombie-clad ass into.

That night I cry myself to sleep. My roommate is already passed out in a crumpled mountain on her mattress, the bed not even properly made. She seems nice enough, my roommate, but I blush when she fingers her nose ring obsessively and laments the raves she’s missing back home. She keeps a stash of E in her top drawer and that night I harbor dreams of DEA agents breaking down our door at dawn.

I finally get the courage to talk to Kate. I knock lightly on her door.

“Come in!”

Lizzie, Kate’s roommate, is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a mirror. Her gargantuan breasts flop over the towel wrapped lightly around her waist. Brown orbs are coming at me from all angles; her breasts multiplied and refracted by the mirror and the windows surround the room.

“Oh God. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize …”

“Realize what? Don’t worry about it. Nakedness is no big thing.”

So I sit on the edge of their beds, which they had already put together, and try not to look at Lizzie’s omnipresent tits. I have never been so close to another girl’s breasts before. In the locker room before field hockey we always went through great gymnastic feats so that we could take our bras off underneath our shirts. The girls who dropped trow without a care were always snickered about behind their backs. Even though I hadn’t seen them, I was sure girls from Irvington didn’t have breasts like Lizzie’s.

I watch Kate and Lizzie as we chat. Kate stretches languid across the two beds and Lizzie fiddles with her hair. I almost expect them to pick lint off each other’s shoulders, or eyelashes off each other’s cheeks — some terribly intimate gesture that only I would be privy to. But Kate mentions a boy she is seeing back home, so I assume the beds pushed together is only for convenience, or for some ambiguous cuddling.

“Do you have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend?” Lizzie asks.

“No. I mean, I used to, a boyfriend that is, but umm, he’s going to college in the fall and I’m away this summer, so it’s over. Do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or whatever?

“She doesn’t, but Lizzie had an orgy in a field on her first day at boarding school.”

A pillow flies with brute force across the room and bounces off the top of Kate’s head.

“Kaaaaaaaate! Don’t tell her that. It’ll freak her out. We did just meet her.”

“Oh, um, no worries, I’m not freaked out or anything, that’s kind of cool, I guess.”

I take my open jaw and try to twist it into a knowing smile.

We only have three hours of class a day, so the rest of our time is spent finding free air conditioning and talking about our sex lives or lack thereof. Sure, I’d made out with many a boy. I’d made out with one the first day of Bennington. I’d even rounded third base with one or two. How could I begin to compete with Lizzie “orgy in a field” Parker? She had done every drug in the book and participated in sex acts I had never even heard of. Kate is more on my level, but she still scoffs at virginity like it’s old hat.

Kate and I walk through the aisles at the Price Chopper. For her film class, she’s shooting the water that turns on to spray the vegetables every five minutes. “It’s about cycles.” She tells me. “Like the moon, it grows and shrinks. Like your period. Circles. Pretty deep, huh?” I nod my head and giggle to myself. She had filmed me spinning around the main quad the day before. Circles. I’d even let her film my naked chest. Circles.

“You need to open up more about your sex life. You’re so silent about it. Tell me about your first time.”

I stammer and try to pay attention to the eggplants and sprouts. I can’t tell Kate about my first time because it hadn’t happened yet. Instead I say the first thing that comes to mind.

I tell her that I had sex with my prom date John. Although in truth, I turned him down on his basement floor while we were watching “ESPN Sports Center.” I didn’t want my first time to be witnessed by Charles Barkley. And it wasn’t just that. There are rules. In Westchester, you should be dating a boy for at least six months, and then maybe, maybe, you can give it up. Otherwise, you are a slut and should be branded as such for the rest of your high school career and, clearly, the rest of your life.

But then Kate asks for details. She always asks for details.

“Ummm, I only have two words to describe my first time: flailing elbows.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Just think about it.”

As I watch her perplexed face trying to figure out the placement of our appendages, I realize I have her fooled.

That fall, when Kate and I decide to go to the same university, instead of being pleased, my first instinct is, oh goddamnit. Now I’m going to have to keep this lie going forever.

Then I meet the artist, and I don’t have to lie about being a virgin anymore. He has sparse, manicured facial hair and takes me on my first real date — one that includes him driving me to dinner and a movie and paying for it — instead of just making out in some boy’s basement and then going to Burger King, like I did in high school. He’s older, a sophomore, and he goes to art school, two things that give him immediate hipster credibility (even though at art school he’s an industrial design major and takes classes called Kitchen Appliances). We go to see “A Clockwork Orange” on our first date, which probably should tip me off to his sadistic leanings. But I am blinded by his car (the fact that he has one) and his confidence and his tattoos that he designs himself.

And then there is the meteor cruise. Every November, the earth enters clouds of particles that seem to shoot out from the constellation Leo, and there is a cruise around Narragansett Bay at 1 a.m. to watch the dust soar. It’s lame and cheesy and of course, it makes me feel all fuzzy inside. Even before the celestial pyrotechnics, I know I will sleep with the artist. It’s just time. I build it up in my head enough so that all my prick teasing in high school is justified. This is meaningful — this is love. The meteor cruise just makes it a good story and gives me an excuse to hold him even closer because night is so cold on the ocean.

I outline a plan for my loss of virginity. I allow the artist to go one base further each week, so that within a month I will be rid of the dreaded V-card. At this point, I know it’s true: If you don’t have sex, it means you aren’t normal. It means you’re frigid and childish and inexperienced. You don’t have any fun stories to tell. I blame those stupid “American Pie” kids for making me think it. And Kate and Lizzie. And everything else. I must be an ugly, heinous freak to still be a virgin and a college student.

I am honest, though — with the artist. We’re lying in bed, having a terribly important conversation, naked, that I no longer remember when I blurt it out.

“I’m a virgin, you know.”

“You’re kidding.”

He sits straight upright in bed, looking down at me.

“Nope, I’m completely serious. Why?”

“I don’t know, I guess you just seemed confident … with stuff.”

“Well, I mean, it’s not like I haven’t done other stuff, you know, I’m not like, religious or something.”

“Yeah … I mean, no, right, of course not.”

There is a dead, pregnant silence. Then he whispers in my ear.

“How would you like to do something that you’ve never done before?”

I make him promise. I make him promise that he’ll take my virginity seriously and that he really does care about me and that he won’t just ditch me after I let him do it. You exact these kinds of promises knowing deep down they’ll be broken. I mean, unless we had ended up getting married and had ten thousand babies, it would have ended, there would have been betrayals totted up along the way and blame placed and unhappiness. And it all meant ten times more to me because he was the one.

Then I break my ankle, and the artist does not call me while I’m in the hospital. He’s busy, he says. He is too busy with the blender designing that fuels his soul. For four days I sail on my morphine drip, and it’s OK. Then I come home from the hospital, and it’s not OK.

The artist dumps me a few weeks later.

“There’s too much going on in my life right now. I can’t be bothered with a girlfriend. I need to focus on my art.”

So I pretend to understand his existential crisis and worship at the altar of the true artist. I stop going to classes and hobble around the icy streets of Providence, walking past every restaurant we’d gone to and sighing.

Kate can’t understand why I am so upset. “You were only dating for like, four months. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.” And I still can’t tell her the truth. I feel too foolish and naive and like I’d made a huge mistake. It was too much to explain.

Instead, Kate just thinks I’m completely insane. She jokes that I am going to get a tattoo of a fridge as a nod to his industrial designing and cry every time I see it. At first, she’s caring. She takes my broken ankle and my broken heart and tries to soothe me with strokes of my hair and hugs and food. But then she tires of me. I’m just too much work.

“Just be your own fucking person. I’m always my own person. I’d never let some guy do this to me,” Kate screams.

I continue to sleep with the artist, believing that it will help me to get over him, give me a sense of closure. Instead, it gives me a pregnancy scare and a series of yeast infections.

Kate won’t listen to me talk about the artist anymore. But I don’t care. We pull apart, but again, I don’t care. I need to convince myself that I’m not a slut, that I didn’t just have sex to have sex, that being with the artist is true.

And then there’s the real truth: that he is an asshole, and though Kate is self-absorbed and a bitch 50 percent of the time, she loves me and he doesn’t.

At the beginning of sophomore year, I crawl back to Kate. I get into a better relationship with a non-artist non-asshole. I start mooning Kate and our other friends just to get a laugh, I tell the truth about masturbating and use words like “cooter” without blushing because I’m not embarrassed anymore. It’s just my body; it’s just us.

Over the next two years, I could have told Kate at any time. She and I talk exclusively of sex and bowel movements and anyway, most of my friends at college know the truth. It never seemed right to just blurt out: so, I took the biggest poop this morning, and by the way, remember that “I lost my virginity in high school” story? Well, the thing about that is…

So we’re cruising over even grids with neatly formed crop circles and I’m heady from exhaust fumes and tired from travel and if I’m going to die like this, stinking of coffee with pasty Midwesterners, at least I’ll die with a clean conscience.

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Next week: I date the slowest person on earth