The girls sat at stools saddled up to kitchen counter, wielding scented pens and colored construction paper. They giggled and snickered over their glasses of wine as they wrote down the names of each and every boy they had had sex with over the course of their lives. An x-rated afterschool project.
1. Jared Franklin 1. Roderick 1. Paul Romero
Hana was obviously the most experienced, conquering men like she conquered the stacks of books in her apartment. She lived voraciously and passionately and often thought too much. Actually, all three of these girls thought too much, which was the hazard of being a girl. The actions of boys were analyzed, compartmentalized, scrutinized so that sense could be made out of their actions. In truth, men and boys were far less complicated than these women would lead themselves to believe. The night before, Jasmine, the girl at the kitchen counter with the least impressive numbers, was told by her friend Mark that all men needed in the world was a sandwich and a blow job. Admittedly, they were not complex beasts.
Jasmine struggled to remember the names of all of the boys she had had sex with, which was mildly disturbing. Some were replaced with pet names like “Cokehead 1” and “Cokehead 2.” The names she did remember, however, she remembered with a visceral clarity, recalling the last names as well as the first. She remembered where she met them and where they had first had sex. She remembered where they had sex the time after that as well, if, of course, they did not qualify one-night stands.
Lori stared at her piece of paper filled with strange names. The boys – and most of them were, in fact, boys – had unfamiliar, foreign names. European, Australian, South American. Florian, Rikko, Juan. This was the benefit of living in New York for six years: there was heavy traffic in the Exotic Man Department. Jasmine’s names were more of the corn-fed, American variety, as she had just moved here a few months previous. Names like John and Michael. Biblical names. Hana’s own possessed the straightforward dignity of a man named before 1975. Names that went unabbreviated.
Jasmine and Hana had a fair share of celebrities on their respective lists, having been pretty-enough-girls who had lived in Los Angeles for a time before New York. The men weren’t A-Listers, but they were surely recognizable names, Google-able at the very least. Part of the reason Jasmine had moved from that city was she was tired of being able to IMBD anyone she had ever gone out with. She had girlfriends out there who only dated men they could find on the Internet Movie Database. Writers, directors, skeezball “producers.” Still, there was some perverse enjoyment in seeing the few that she had laid some years back making it big on the pages of US Weekly these days.
Lori dedicated a special portion of her list to an “Honorable Mention” category, referring to the gentlemen she had bestowed blowjobs upon. Jasmine and Hana cringed as they watched the increasing number of names being scrawled at the bottom of the page.
“Seriously?” Hana asked.
“What?” Lori asked, her voice filled with the assumption that every girl in the world should have at least twenty names in the Honorable Mention category.
“Oh, I can’t do that,” Jasmine followed. “I’d rather just have sex.”
“Me, too,” chimed Hana. Lori looked over at Hana’s list of names, which had spilled over the front of her purple sheet of paper and onto the backside.
“Obviously,” Lori said, tapping Hana’s sheet with a strawberry-scented pen.
The girls extinguished the bottle of red wine and kept going, racking their brains for the missing pieces. By the time each girl got to the number ten, their fingers were covered in stitches of ink. Blue, purple, orange, pink. Each different color denoted a different category of man: best in bed, most emotionally significant, one-night stands, which ones they were friends with on Facebook. The girls continued to laugh, drawing hearts and circles next to the names and numbers; it read like a graduation ceremony pamphlet denoting extracurricular activities and honor roles.
“There has to be more than eleven,” Jasmine mused out loud. She did the math in her head: she had been having sex since she was fifteen and she was currently twenty-five; her average was roughly one boy a year. How was that even possible? She subtracted the five years she had dated Luke, and then the two years she had dated David, though there was some overlap there – Jasmine was a horrible cheat. But, for the sake of convenience, Jasmine assessed that she had had sex with the remaining nine men over the course of three available years. Three a year seemed acceptable, though still relatively depressing. She needed to ramp up her drinking if she expected to keep up with the New York average.
Fun as it was to relive these conquests in hindsight, there was an underlying sadness to it all. These boys were all gone, one way or another. In between the names and numbers, there existed undeniable heartbreak: nights spent crying into pillows, phone calls to friends in other states, sleeping with more boys to get over the one that really destroyed them. Time had provided the psychological distance to make all of this entertaining, but as each girl went home with their silly little document, they wondered how they had routinely gotten all of this so very wrong, this love thing.
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