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over these imagined, ridiculous answers to stupid questions.
    Hardly anyone at school ever dated. If you liked someone, you were supposed to hang out together with other people. But I had distinct memories of watching Rebecca get ready to go. out with her husband when they were dating. It seemed like a good idea to have someone for whom it was worth taking the trouble to look nice.
    "Well, why doesn't he just ask me, then?"
    "Because Ben, while a really nice guy, is also a world-class geek," Rebecca said. "He doesn't know how."
    I had already heard from her that most interesting men were geeks in high school. The more interesting the man, she said, the longer he had been a geek. And Ben, who collected maps, could take apart his father's computer, and wanted to be an architect, was the most interesting boy I knew. And the nicest. And, at the time, the most psycho.
    "You have to ask him, nicely, if he wants to ask you out," my sister said. "Make it very clear you will say yes."
    So I dutifully went off to tell Ben exactly what Rebecca had said, to which he replied,
Maybe I should ask
her
out.
But he settled for me and now everyone calls him my boyfriend and I suppose that fits; although I know he's something both more and less than that.
    "I know you loved her," I tell him now.
    "I kind of wish she'd been in a car wreck."
    "I guess," I say, vaguely aware he has said something no one else will, but not sure that a car wreck would make anything easier.
    Normally, Ben and I try to solve anything we think of as a problem together—that C in English, for example. Or when his mother got fired and didn't know how to tell his father. However, I'm not sure this qualifies as a problem. More to the point, I no longer want to solve problems with Ben.
    Exactly five days ago, Ben and I decided, after months of my not being sure, that we should, no, make that we wanted to, have sex. For obvious reasons, this was not a decision I made only with him. I'm sure I love Ben enough and I know how my body feels with him. It feels the way I do with cake: I want more. But in this, as with cake, I didn't think more was exactly right.
    And, so.
    I asked my mother. I trust her more than almost anyone else, and she has never lied to me. This time her answer was suspect.
    "When you definitely want to, you'll know," she said.
    "Doubt is your body's way of saying he's not the right one," she added. "Or that the time isn't right."
    If it was up to my body, I'd have done it by now. Something I did
not
tell her but that she must have guessed.
    "Honey, I'm not saying you're not ready," she said. "I just want you to honor your uncertainty."
    She then went on to remind me of all the precautions I should take when and if Ben and I (or as she put it,
you and whoever
) went ahead. I didn't think she was lying, exactly, or that she was against it. But how would anyone ever face the first time of
anything
without being unsure?
    A question I then took to Rebecca. This was back in August when Ben and I first started the
will we or not
talk. She laughed when I told her my mother's theory.
    "That's so very Elsa," she said. "But look, you won't know until you do it. And, listen, I am not advocating reckless, mindless sex here."
    I told her I'd already heard enough about preventing both pregnancy and disease.
    "Of course you have," Rebecca said. "What I meant is that Ben loves you and I think you're just scared. If after you do it, you still don't know what you want, then we'll have another talk."
    I thought that a kind of truth lay somewhere between my mother and Rebecca. I spent a few months hoping to find it, but on the day before Thanksgiving my body decided what my brain was incapable of sorting out. It was more unpleasant than I had hoped. Not because it hurt, which it did, although a lot less than everyone says. What I didn't like was being the sole focus of Ben's attention while also feeling ignored.
    This makes no sense, I know, but it's how it was. However, if it