blinked again. ‘But you are sexually active?’
Um. Does one failed attempt at a blow job and a few fingers jabbing into my vagina count as being sexually active?
‘I don’t know,’ I replied miserably. ‘I mean, I’ve never had sex but I’ve kind of been to third base.’
She sighed. ‘Ms Kolstakis, are you sexually active or not? This is a confidential space. I just need to know whether or not to give you a chlamydia test.’
My stomach plummeted straight down into my five-quid plimsolls, taking my jaw with it. My own doctor didn’t believe I was a virgin. ‘No! I’m telling the truth, honestly. I’ve never had sex. I don’t need a chlamydia test.’
She squinted at me as though she was looking for any traces of a post-coital glow on my face. ‘Do you have a boyfriend at the moment?’ she finally asked.
I lowered my eyes in shame. What kind of student was I, who had never had a boyfriend and was unable to answer a single question about sex when I was in my sexual prime?
‘No,’ I mumbled.
She turned to her screen and scrolled up without warning. I started in panic as the six letters emerged on the monitor. I threw my hands up to my face, shielding my eyes from the V-word.
She sat looking at the screen for twenty-seven seconds before she clicked it away and turned back towards me. Slowly, I lowered my hands from my flushed face.
She looked at me with something resembling pity. ‘Right, then, Ms Kolstakis, I’m going to give you this chlamydia test to do at home. It is self-explanatory, but essentially you just use the cotton bud to swab your vagina and post it to the address in the pack. You should hear within a couple of weeks. Is that all right?’
I stared at her with my mouth gaping open. ‘I … What?! I just told you that I’ve never had sex—why do I need a test?’ I cried out.
‘We offer free chlamydia tests for everyone over the age of twenty-one who is sexually active or has been in close contact with someone else’s genitalia.’
‘But you know I’m not actually sexually active.’ I blushed furiously. ‘I have never been, well … penetrated.’ I stumbled over the last word.
Dr E Bowers raised her eyeballs to the ceiling. ‘Ms Kolstakis,’ she said, ‘I am now well aware that you are a virgin. However, I advise that you take this free test I am offering you to ensure that you do not have chlamydia. It is still possible—though very rare—to catch it in other ways.’
‘But what other ways? Surely fingers can’t give you chlamydia?’ I blurted out.
‘No, they cannot. However, you can catch it from oral sex or if a penis has been around your vagina, even without penetration.’
How Dr E Bowers knew that James Martell’s penis had touched my VJ but never actually gone in, I will never know. I stared at her mutely, impressed for the first time by her medical abilities.
She pressed the envelope into my hands with a knowing look. I stood up, clutching it. I could barely see past the bright green letters flashing in my head so I walked in an undiscerning daze back out through the waiting room. My throat felt parched and scratchy from mortification so I stopped off at the water cooler. As I poured myself a plastic cup of water, I felt something fall behind me.
I turned around in surprise and saw an upturned cardboard box lying in the middle of the room surrounded by small silver packets scattered all across the waiting room floor and under the waiting patients’ seats. Oh, God. My satchel must have knocked it off the shelf behind me.
I closed my eyes briefly in shame before forcing myself to bend down and pick the box up. The waiting patients in the room were staring so I pulled my jeans up, hoping my faded M&S knickers weren’t on show. Crouching on my knees and trying to pull my jumper down to hide my VPL, I started picking up the packets. I was half-finished shoving them carelessly back into the open box when it suddenly hit me. These weren’t just shiny silver packets that I was picking up from under people’s feet. They were condoms.
The irony was not lost on me as I fled the surgery, my eyes swimming in hot tears. I ran out into the street and chucked the brown envelope straight into the first bin I saw. My face burnt red-hot as I watched it sink in with the empty McDonald’s paper bags, taking my dignity down with it.
I was nothing but a twenty-one-year-old VIRGIN.
LIFE AS AN adult virgin is more complicated than you might think. Obviously it is normal, there are thousands of us, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Choosing when to have sex is a completely individual decision, and everyone is different. Some people choose to wait till marriage, and some just want to wait for the right person. Others are religious, and others are just too busy being successful in every other area of their lives to worry about something as minor as intercourse.
At least, that’s what the internet said when I looked it up the second I got home from the doctors’ surgery.
I knew Dr E Bowers hadn’t even believed I was a virgin to begin with, because clearly no average-looking third-year university student who drank ten-plus units a week could still be a virgin. Except me.
I buried my head in the duck-feather pillow I’d spent a week’s food budget on. I pulled my duvet over me to try to block out the six letters blinking over and over in my head: V I R G I N V I R G I N V I R G I N.
I hated the word. I hated it just as much as I hated the fact that I was one. It wasn’t fair—why did I have to be the only non-deformed, non-religious girl who got stuck with an untouched inner lotus at the age of twenty-one?
I sighed loudly and let my mind go over the familiar responses to the ‘Why am I still a v*****?’ question that visited me as regularly as my period.
1. It was my parents’ fault. They were education-obsessed immigrants who moved from Greece to Surrey and sent me to an all-girls school. Their plan was for me never to meet any boys so I wouldn’t be distracted from their one and only goal for me: Oxford University. Result? I didn’t get into Oxford and I didn’t meet any boys, either.
2. I was a very unfortunate-looking teenager. By the time I figured out how to make myself look passable and wear a bra that gave me enough support to show off my 36D assets, it was too late. All the boys from the school next door already had girlfriends, and to them I would always be the slightly unattractive and quiet girl with big boobs hidden behind massive jumpers, and long dark curly hair that was more horizontal than vertical. It didn’t help that all the other girls had figured out how to pluck their eyebrows and flirt while I was locked up in my bathroom with a bottle of bleach, battling my moustache. By the time I got to uni, I realised I had missed out on learning how to talk to boys. After a few minutes of my blunt humour and self-deprecation, they usually moved on to talk to real girls. Girls with minimal body hair, button noses and socially appropriate senses of humour.
3. My dysfunctional family. I was an only child, which meant most people assumed I had spent a spoilt, lavish upbringing pleading with my parents never to have another child so I could have all their attention. The reality was that I spent my whole childhood avoiding my mum and dad whenever they
