The Dating Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

my boyfriend and I were fooling around and the condom broke. I finally got my period two weeks later but the whole two weeks I took a pregnancy test every day even though it was too early to tell.”
    Wow, Holly thought. She’s only fourteen. That is scary. I didn’t realize anyone in our school had already been through something like that
.
    She paged through a few questionnaires that seemed honest—guys and girls who admitted to being virgins, who hadn’t done much more than kiss, if even that. It helped balance out the wild ones, but she had to admit the truth wasn’t as much fun to read.
    “Describe your most exciting experience: One time I threw a party but for some reason none of my guy friends showed up. The only people who came were all the cutest girls in school. So we partied by the pool in my backyard and pretty soon all the girls took off their clothes and jumped in…”
    It got worse from there. Holly checked the age on the questionnaire.
Thirteen? I don’t think so. Nice try, Hotpants
.
    What was going on here? Were the kids at her school really having as much sex as they said? Holly knew they weren’t, no matter what Mads thought. But why were they exaggerating about it—on an anonymous survey?
    What if I had to answer these questions?
Holly wondered.
What would I say?
    I’d tell the truth
, she thought.
Why not? It wasn’t so bad
.
    Boys had always liked her, even in kindergarten. But in spite of all the rumors, she’d only had sex with one boy, Andy Rufford. Last summer in Idaho.
    She’d gone to a lake in Idaho the summer before with her mother and her cousins, who had a house there. Andy was from Seattle. Holly didn’t give him much thought at first. He was friends with her cousins, and they all hung out together, and sometimes he was funny. Like the time he put Krazy Glue on the lifeguard’s whistle. That was sort of funny.
    As the weeks went by, she started to notice that he was cute. Really cute. And he must have noticed her, too, because by August things were heating up between them. Instead of waiting for the rest of the kids, they sneaked out at night to go swimming by themselves. Holly hardly knew how it happened, but soon they were a couple.
    They went skinny-dipping. They made out all the time. They moved from second base to third. One night, about a week before the end of the summer, Andy pulled out a condom. He didn’t say anything, just showed it to her with a question mark in his eyes. Her heart caught in her throat. This was it. Was she ready? She didn’t know, but she decided to go for it.
    They fumbled around and it hurt. She had a feeling it was his first time, too, because he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. She was so nervous she hardly remembered it, but when it was over she started laughing, and Andy laughed, too. They were like buddies playing a game. That made it less scary.
    Later that night she lay in bed alone and thought,
I’m not a virgin anymore
. Was she supposed to feel different somehow? Her heart was beating fast and her face felt hot. But that was about it. She couldn’t remember how she’d expected to feel, but she thought it would be a bigger deal than this.
    They did it a couple more times. It didn’t hurt so much now, and afterward Holly didn’t lay awake counting her heartbeats anymore. But there wasn’t anything that great about it. Maybe it was because she wasn’t deeply in love with Andy. She just liked him a lot. Or maybe they needed more practice to get good at it.
    When summer was over, Holly couldn’t wait to get home and tell Mads and Lina. But when she tried to explain, she suddenly felt shy. They wanted to know every detail, but she was afraid they wouldn’t understand. They seemed to hear the story through a haze of romance. Especially Mads. To her, this was a classic summer love story, and the fact that Holly’s first time having sex was awkward, uncomfortable, and not particularly romantic never registered.
    Holly scanned