The Abstinence Teacher (20 page)

     
PART THREE
Coach Tim’s God

So Be It

LIKE ANY SEX EDUCATOR WORTH HER SALT, RUTH WAS A BIG FAN
of latex condoms. They were cheap, effective, easy to use, and widely available. In terms of the misery they’d spared humanity over the years—the unwanted pregnancies, the horrible diseases, the disrupted young lives—she would have happily placed the humble rubber right up there beside antibiotics and childhood vaccines in the pantheon of Public Health Marvels of the Modern World. For the average high-school student, moreover, condoms
were
birth control—there was really no viable alternative. Ruth used to joke, in simpler times, that the entire ninth-grade Sex Ed curriculum could be reduced to three words:
Condoms, Condoms, Condoms!

Which was why it was so galling to be “teaching” today’s prepackaged lesson, whose misleading and dangerous title she’d scribbled on the blackboard at the beginning of class with a shaky, self-loathing hand: “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SAFE SEX.” Well, of course there wasn’t, not if you defined safety as the impossibility of anything bad ever happening to anyone. There was no such thing as risk-free automobile travel, either, but we didn’t teach our kids to stay out of cars. We taught them defensive driving skills and told them a million times to wear their seat belts, because driving was an important part of life, and everyone needed to learn how to do it as safely as possible.

“The lesson plan calls for another role-playing exercise,” Ruth announced. “Any volunteers?”

To no one’s surprise, Dan Hayes’s and Courtney Brenner’s hands shot into the air. The class had done four of these skits in the past week, and Dan and Courtney had played the young lovers in all of them.

“How about someone new? Someone who hasn’t had a chance yet?”

Ruth wasn’t optimistic about this request; she had learned long ago that role playing and Sex Education didn’t mix that well. Most teenagers were hesitant to get up in front of their peers and enact scenarios that were either painfully close to their real lives or even more painfully distant. The ones who enjoyed it tended to be experienced thespians like Dan or shameless exhibitionists like Courtney.

“Come on, guys. This is a class. We all need to participate.” Ruth let several seconds go by, but no one took the bait. “All right, I guess it’s time for another episode of the Dan and Courtney Show.”

The two stars rose from their seats and headed to the front of the room, happily acknowledging the applause of their classmates, which, for the most part, wasn’t meant sarcastically. Aside from being thankful to Dan and Courtney for letting the rest of them off the hook, the other kids seemed genuinely entertained by their performances, and Ruth could at least see why they felt this way, even if she didn’t completely share the sentiment. As annoying as they could be, Dan and Courtney did have an odd, counterintuitive chemistry, and they threw themselves into their roles with an enthusiasm and lack of self-consciousness that was highly unusual in high-school freshmen.

Dan was small for his age, barely pubescent, a skinny, big-headed kid with a strangely commanding personality. He’d been acting since elementary school, not only in local and regional theater, but also on TV commercials. Ruth had seen him in an ad for the Olive Garden, shoveling a gigantic forkful of spaghetti into his mouth while a jolly waiter looked on, clapping a hand to his cheek in astonishment, and in
a spot for State Farm, in which he bounced on a trampoline in slow motion while his ersatz parents gazed at him with loving expressions, happy to know his future was secure.

Courtney was at least at head taller than her partner, and looked to be about a decade older, a young girl endowed with a woman’s body and an unnerving aura of sexual confidence. Her outfits just managed to obey the letter of the school dress code while violating its spirit at every turn; things she wore had a peculiar way of slipping down or creeping up or popping open. Ruth often saw her in the hall with older boys, junior and senior football players mostly, and it was the jocks who looked starstruck and grateful for the company, not Courtney.

“All right.” Ruth smiled wanly, trying to ignore the familiar heaviness in her chest. “Let me give you the setup. Courtney, you’re Gina, and Dan, you’re Ethan, and you two—”

“Wait,” said Courtney. “Could I be Heather instead?”

“There is no Heather,” Ruth told her. “The girl’s name is Gina.”

Courtney frowned. “Could I change it to Heather? I really don’t like the name Gina.”

“This is role playing,” Ruth reminded her. “It’s pretend.”

“I’m just not comfortable being Gina.”

“Fine, whatever. It doesn’t really matter.”

“It matters to me,” Courtney insisted. “I totally prefer Heather.”

“Could I be Skip?” Dan inquired. “I mean, if she gets to change her name—”

“Skip?” Courtney scoffed. “What kinda stupid name is that?”

“It’s cool,” Dan replied, but with less self-assurance than usual. “He’s like this laid-back preppy dude.”

“That’s pathetic,” Courtney informed him. “Nobody’s named Skip.”

As she said this, Courtney absentmindedly lifted the hem of her shirt above her navel, revealing a taut expanse of youthful midriff. The whole class seemed to freeze for a moment as she languorously rubbed her belly, like an old man who’d just eaten a big meal.

“Skip’s a good name,” she declared, pulling her shirt back into place. “For a dog!”

“Woof!” Blake Vizzoni called out from the back of the room. His lackeys responded with the usual chorus of servile chuckles.

“That’s enough,” Ruth told them. She turned back to Dan and Courtney. “Okay, so you’re Skip and Heather, two sixteen-year-olds who’ve been going steady for a year. It’s after school, and you’re alone in the rec room, with no adult supervision.”

“My house or hers?” asked Dan.

“Does it matter?”

“Kind of,” he said. “I like to be clear on the details.”

“Let’s just say it’s Skip’s house, okay? You guys are making out, and it’s getting hot and heavy. This is something that’s happened once or twice before, but you’ve managed to stop yourselves before things got out of hand. But today something’s different. Today, Skip’s got a condom in his wallet.”

Ruth was finished, but the actors just kept staring at her, as if awaiting further instruction. After a moment, she realized what she’d forgotten—it was something Dan insisted on—and halfheartedly clapped her hands.

“Action.”

The word was barely out of her mouth when the young lovers flung their arms around each other and began making out in a disturbingly realistic manner, with Dan all the way up on his tippytoes, his neck cranked back at an uncomfortable angle. Ruth didn’t think they were using their tongues, but it was hard to be sure—the way Courtney was stooping, her hair formed a kind of curtain around their faces. Meanwhile, Dan’s hands were roaming freely up and down the length of her back, making occasional forays into the northern precincts of the butt region, eliciting whoops of delight and cries of “Go for it!” from the peanut gallery, which couldn’t have been what JoAnn Marlow had in mind when she designed the exercise.

Happy as she was to see the new curriculum subverted in any and every way, Ruth also knew better than to assume that what happened in her classroom would stay in her classroom. She was particularly concerned about the loyalties of one student, a watchful girl named Robin LeFebvre, whose family supposedly belonged to the Tabernacle (Ruth had made inquiries). Robin took copious notes from one end of class to the other—she was scribbling away right now, her face pale and visibly shocked by the spectacle Dan and Courtney were making of themselves—and Ruth had a sneaking suspicion that she wasn’t doing it just to get a good grade on the end-of-unit test.

“All right,” she called out. “That’s enough. We get the point. Let’s move on.”

With what appeared to be genuine reluctance, Courtney unscrewed her face from Dan’s. She was blushing as she fixed her hair and tugged her clothes back into place; her voice was ragged, slightly breathless.

“Oh my God, Skip. You make me so hot. I just want to … you know …”

“What, Heather?” Dan spoke in a stage whisper that was clearly audible throughout the room. “I make you want to what?”

“To do it, Skip. To go all the way. Because I really, really love you.”

“I love you, too,” said Dan. “Now take off your pants.”

Courtney bit her lip in consternation, waiting for the laughter to die down.

“I want to take off my pants,” she said. “Oh God, Skip, you don’t know how badly I want to. But I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“You know. We’ve talked about this before. I’m scared of getting pregnant, or catching a disease.”

“Well, have no fear.” With a magician’s flourish, Dan pulled an imaginary wallet out of his pocket and mimed the act of withdrawing a condom from the billfold. “I came prepared.”

“Oh my God.” Courtney’s eyes got big. “Is that what I think it is?”

“It’s foolproof,” he told her. “I guarantee you won’t get pregnant, and you won’t catch any diseases. Not that I have any diseases.”

Courtney took her chin in hand and thought this over for a moment. Then her face broke into a big smile.

“Awesome!” she said. “Let’s get busy!”

There was a moment of startled silence in the classroom, followed by a sudden uproar. Half of the audience shouted its approval, while the other half howled in protest. A normally well-behaved boy named Donald Swift fell out of his chair and began banging his fist repeatedly against the floor to express his otherwise inexpressible delight.

“People!” Ruth called out. “Come on, now. Pipe down! Donald, get back in your seat. This isn’t kindergarten.”

Donald sheepishly complied. Shaking her head in weary exasperation, Ruth turned to Courtney, preparing to admonish her for ruining the exercise. But she checked herself when she saw the look of innocent confusion on the girl’s face.

“I don’t get it,” Courtney said. “Why’s that so funny?”

“I think you misunderstood,” Ruth told her. “Heather’s not supposed to say yes. She’s supposed to forcefully rebut Skip’s claim that condoms provide foolproof protection against pregnancy and disease.”

“They don’t?” Courtney looked alarmed. “I thought they did.”

“Not foolproof,” Ruth informed her. “Didn’t you read the assignment?”

“I meant to. I was kinda busy last night.”

Ruth asked if anyone could help her out. Vik Ramachandran raised his hand.

“Heather could tell Skip that condoms don’t protect against certain STDs, like HPV, which can cause genital warts.”

Several people groaned, and a few others made the retching sound that was the customary response to any mention of this particular affliction.

“Fair enough,” Ruth said. “You’re absolutely right that condoms don’t prevent transmission of HPV, though they do a good job preventing a number of other STDs, including gonorrhea, chlamydia, and HIV. Anyone else? What else could Heather tell Skip about condoms?”

“She could talk about failure rates,” Marsha Gewirtz suggested. “Didn’t the handout say that they have a 36 percent failure rate? So that’s like a one-in-three chance that Heather could get pregnant, even if Skip uses a condom, right?”

Ruth winced. “I know that’s what the handout said, but that’s a pretty dubious number. First of all, I’ve never seen another study that even comes close to 25 percent, and I’ve seen a couple that put failure rates as low as 3 percent. The usual number is somewhere around 10 percent, but you have to understand that that’s an
annual
rate, meaning that over the course of one full year, 10 percent of the couples using only condoms for their birth control might expect to have an unwanted pregnancy. The failure rate for any individual act of intercourse would of course be much, much lower.”

“What about on the test?” asked Susan Chang. “Do we say 36 percent failure, or 10 percent?”

“For this curriculum, I guess we’re required to say thirty-six,” Ruth told her. “But I do want you to be aware that that’s not a universally accepted number. If you’re looking for a more credible source of information about birth control, I suggest you check out the website for Planned Parenthood.” Ruth turned back to the actors. “All right, guys. Are we ready for Take Two?”

“It’s too late,” a lunkhead named Mike Petoski called out. “Skip already creamed his pants.”

This witticism inspired great mirth in the back two rows of the classroom, and a good deal of eye-rolling closer to the front.

“Enough,” Ruth snapped. “If you can’t control yourself, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“That’s what
she
said,” Blake Vizzoni muttered.

Ruth decided to ignore him. She was just about to say
Action
when she noticed Robin LeFebvre’s hand in the air.

“Yes, Robin?”

“I didn’t hear you before.” Robin kept her eyes glued on her notebook as she spoke. “What was the name of the website you mentioned?”

“Plannedparenthood.org,” Ruth replied. “All one word, no punctuation. Planned Parenthood is a highly respected national organization with a long history of defending women’s reproductive freedom. They’re an excellent resource for anyone who needs information about contraception or sexual health in general.”

Robin’s pen raced across the page with impressive speed. It looked like she was taking dictation, trying to record every word Ruth said for posterity, or at least the next school board meeting.

“Am I talking too fast?” Ruth asked her. “Do you want me to repeat anything?”

Robin looked up. She was a pretty girl, if you could get past the dowdy clothes and the scraped-back ponytail. But there was no sign of friendliness in her face, not the slightest effort to disguise the loathing she felt for her teacher.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I think I got the important stuff.”

IT WAS
a rainy afternoon, the low gray sky pressing down on the world like the lid of a box. A gusty wind scoured the treetops, stripping away the foliage with merciless efficiency. Fumbling for her car keys in the school parking lot at the end of the day, Ruth caught herself glancing anxiously over her shoulder as though it were late at night on a deserted street.