or crabs, which were not actually crabs but lice—real live bugs!— having a party in your pubic hair, like they'd done to her exdancing partner, Jason.
“Oh, my friends used to tease me a lot,” JoAnn said. “They called me a prude and a Goody Two-Shoes. Well, you can bet they're not teasing me now.”
And there was one more thing. JoAnn was glad she'd never gone through what her friend Janice had, never had to pee on a stick to discover she was pregnant by some jerk she'd met at a frat party and would never have even spoken to if she hadn't been so drunk she could barely walk; never had to drive to an abortion clinic with this same jerk, who despised her as badly as she despised him; never had to lie there in a hospital gown while some creepy doctor did his business with a vacuum hose; never had to live with the responsibility of making a baby and then not allowing it to be born.
“I can sleep at night,” JoAnn declared, “and that's more than I can say for a lot of people I know. I can sleep because I don't have any regrets. I'm a strong, self-sufficient individual, and I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that my mind and my body are one hundred percent intact. They're mine and mine alone, and I'm proud of that.”
It was standard-issue Abstinence Ed, in other words—shameless fear-mongering, backed up by half-truths and bogus examples and inflammatory rhetoric—nothing Ruth hadn't been exposed to before, but this time, for some reason, it felt different. The way JoAnn presented this stuff, it came across as lived experience, and for a little while there—until she snapped out of her trance and saw with dismay how easily she'd been manipulated—even Ruth had fallen under her spell, wondering how she'd ever been so weak as to let herself be duped into thinking it might be pleasant or even necessary to allow herself to be touched or loved by another human being. Why would you, if all it was going to do was make you vulnerable to all those afflictions, all that regret?
After a short Q&A, JoAnn concluded her talk with a slide show. Instead of the gallery of diseased genitalia that Ruth had expected, though, Stonewood Heights High School was treated to a series of photographs of JoAnn and her boyfriend vacationing on a Caribbean island. If you didn't know better, you might have thought they were on their honeymoon—two happy, attractive young people frolicking in the ocean, drinking out of coconut shells by the pool, kissing beneath a palm tree, clearly reveling in each other's company (now that she'd gotten a glimpse of JoAnn's fearsome bikini cleavage, Ruth was convinced that her breasts had indeed benefited from cosmetic surgery). The final image showed the boyfriend alone—a buff, shirtless, all-American guy—standing by the water's edge in his swimming trunks, a surfboard tucked under his arm.
“As you might imagine,” JoAnn said, “it's not easy saying no to a superhot guy like Ed. But when it gets hard, I just remind myself of my wedding night, and how amazing it's going to be when I give myself to my husband with a pure heart, a clean conscience, and a perfectly intact body Because that's going to be my reward, and mark my words, people—it is going to be soooo good, oh my God, better than you can even imagine.”
The lights came on, and the students applauded enthusiastically, though Ruth wasn't quite sure if they were applauding for the hot sex JoAnn would have in the future or her commitment to avoiding it in the here and now. Either way, Ruth had to grudgingly admit to herself that she was impressed. JoAnn Marlow had somehow pulled off the neat feat of seeming sexy and puritanical at the same time, of impersonating a feminist while articulating a set of ideas that would have seemed retro in 1954, of making abstinence seem steamy and adventurous, a right-wing American variation on Tantric sex. It was a little scary.
But it was over. Or at least Ruth thought it was, until she walked out of the auditorium and saw Dr. Farmer and Principal Venuti and several members of the school board standing in the hallway, looking pleased and excited.
“Wasn't that extraordinary?” Dr. Farmer asked her. “What a great role model for the kids.”
“Informative, too,” said Venuti. “Lots of medical facts and whatnot.”
The board members—there were five of them, enough for a voting majority—nodded in enthusiastic agreement, and Ruth saw that it would be useless to quibble with JoAnn's facts or find fault with the way she'd presented them. The situation had clearly progressed beyond the point where facts were of any use to anyone, so she just nodded politely and went on her way.
At least this way she had a heads-up, and didn't feel ambushed a month later when the school board announced that the high school would be revamping its Sex Education curriculum over the summer, with the help of a dynamic nonprofit organization called Wise Choices for Teens. Later that same meeting, it was also announced that the McBride family had decided not to file a lawsuit against the Stonewood Heights School District after all.
A PALPABLE current of electricity moved through the classroom as Ruth perched herself on the edge of the metal desk, primly crossing her legs at the ankles. Tugging at the hem of her skirt, she found herself momentarily startled—it was something that happened a lot these days—by the sight of her calves, which had been transformed by all the running she'd done over the summer. They looked lovely and unfamiliar, almost as if she'd borrowed them from a woman half her age.
She'd started exercising in late spring, at the height of the scandal, on the suggestion of her ex-husband, who thought that a vigorous aerobic workout might alleviate the tension headaches and insomnia that had left her groggy and short-tempered, in no condition to function as a teacher or a parent. He reminded her of how riding a bicycle had gotten him through the darkest days of their divorce, when he missed their daughters so much he regularly cried himself to sleep at night.
“You can't brood,” he told her. “You gotta go out and do something positive.”
It was the best advice he ever gave her. She started small, half-walking, half-jogging a few laps around the middle-school track, but her body responded right away. In July, she was running three miles a day at a slow, steady clip; by mid-August, a brisk five-miler no longer made her feel like she was going to throw up or die of heatstroke. She ran a 10k race on Labor Day, finishing ninth in the Women Forty and Over category. In six months, she lost twenty pounds, streamlined her entire lower body, and realized, to her delight and amazement, that she looked thinner and healthier than she had in college, where she'd majored in Psychology and minored in Doritos. The only downside to this midlife physical transformation was that it made her that much more conscious of the absence of a man in her life—it seemed like such a waste, having a nice body again, and no one to appreciate it.
What the running mainly did, though—she could see it more clearly in retrospect than she'd been able to at the time—was provide her with a way of working through her anger and coming to some level of acceptance of the new regime. Because as much as she would have liked to stand up for what she believed in and resign in protest, where would she have been then? She was a divorced mother with two daughters who would soon be going to college, a tenured teacher with six years to go before she qualified for a full pension. It wouldn't be easy to find another district in the area willing to hire someone with her baggage. And besides, as Randall frequently reminded her, if she quit then they would win, the forces of shame and denial, the people who'd praise the Lord if they forced her out of the classroom and replaced her with someone more compliant. Wouldn't it be better to stay put and see what happened? The Abstinence curriculum was a pilot program, part of a two-year study funded by a federal grant. When it ended, who knew what would take its place?
All of these arguments had seemed perfectly plausible to Ruth as she'd jogged around Stonewood Lake at dusk, or huffed and puffed down the bike path at the first light of dawn. But right now, looking out on a classful of ninth graders, she wondered if she'd been betrayed by the endorphins, because all she wanted to do was apologize to her students for letting them down, for allowing it to come to this.
She
