The Wangs vs. the World(14)

“Is it because you think I’m a slut?”

“No! No, no, no. I don’t even like that word.”

“Stop being such a feminist, Andrew, it’s gay.”

“I’m not gay!”

Emma laughed. “I didn’t say you were. I know you’re not gay. Would this happen if you were?” She gripped him again, tugging him towards her, and he immediately sprang to attention. “See? Your body knows what you want. Aren’t you tired of being a virgin?”

Andrew turned away from her and put a hand over his penis, willing it to quiet down. He was tired of being a virgin, but that didn’t mean that he was just going to have sex with Emma without being in love with her first. Andrew just wished that love wasn’t so difficult to figure out. It had been simple with his first girlfriend, Eunice, whose Groucho Marx eyebrows had just made her even more beautiful. For the last two years of high school and the first year of college, they’d been in love—he’d felt buoyed by her very existence and fascinated by the smallest detail of her being—but they’d never once had sex because Eunice’s father was a minister and she loved Jesus just a little bit more than she loved Andrew. They’d done everything but—“But not everything butt,” he’d joked to his high school friends—and in a way he’d relished his relatively chaste devotion to her. It meant that he was nothing like his father, who didn’t even bother to hide his affairs from Andrew, though it seemed like Barbra and his sisters didn’t know about them.

“Em, have you ever been in love?”

“We’re in college. We have plenty of time to fall in love. And that’s got nothing to do with sex anyways.”

“But shouldn’t it?”

Emma was quiet for a moment. She sat and hugged her knees to her chest, not seeming to care that she was still nearly naked. Just as Andrew started to think that she might tell him she actually was in love with him, Emma made a gazelle leap over him, out of bed, and yanked her sundress off the closet door.

“Hey! No! Stop! Are you mad? Why are you getting dressed?”

“You have to pack. Don’t let me stop you.”

“It’ll take me twenty minutes. They’re just leaving L.A. now—we still have—”

“You know, I know where Bel-Air is. You could say that they’re leaving Bel-Air.”

“Well, but Bel-Air is in L.A.”

“Ha ha. Funny. You’re so funny. You should be a comedian.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“No, I mean it. It’ll be awesome. You can hang out with Long Duk Dong and Harold and Kumar. Have a good time. Make tiny-dick jokes. Oh, and Margaret Cho. Good thing she’s a lesbian. You won’t have to have sex with her.”

“Actually, I think she’s bisexual. She went out with Quentin Tarantino.”

“Are you f*cking kidding me?” Emma shrieked, hurling one of her lethal heels at him. It skidded against the stucco wall like a nail on a chalkboard and landed, innocent, on his pillow. What was wrong with her? Emma was usually so uncomplicated, so easy to be with. She didn’t confuse him like most girls. Why was she being so mean? And why did she care if Margaret Cho was bisexual?

“Whatever, Andrew,” said Emma, quiet again. “I’m not going to beg you to f*ck me. And you are the last hot guy I’m dating. My mom was right.” And then she turned and walked out, shoeless, slamming the dorm room door so hard that his Lenny Bruce mug shot poster slipped off its nail.

Andrew let himself fall back on the bed, his elbow narrowly missing Emma’s spike heel. Well, that was that then. Another breakup. At least Emma thought he was hot, too. But already this year there had been Jocelyn, and then the end of Jocelyn, a rekindled fling with Soo-Jin, and then the end of Soo-Jin, and now Emma and, very soon after, the end of Emma. And fall semester had just started.

It was really hard to fall in love when everyone kept breaking up with him. Eunice had broken up with him, too, because she’d met someone on a mission trip who was as devoted to purity as she. “It’ll be better this way,” she’d said over video chat, as he’d stared at his own face in the corner of the screen, willing himself not to cry as she enumerated all the reasons he should forget about her. Andrew thought that he’d spend his newfound singlehood on finally having sex already, but when the opportunity presented itself after a drunken make-out session with a cute nursing major at some fraternity’s ’70s party, it had all felt sordid and desperate and coercive in a way that it never would have with Eunice, and he’d left before either of them could fully disrobe, deciding then that he’d rather wait until he had something closer to love. Who knew it would take so long to find?

Andrew was just reaching for his phone to call Grace back—she’d sounded so wounded that he couldn’t talk—when Saina’s name flashed on the screen.

“Hey.”

“Angie, did you talk to Dad?”

“Saina! You can stop calling me that already.”

“Drewly?”

“This is serious.”

“Seriously serious.”

“It is.”

“God, I know. Did you ever think—”

“Let’s call Gracie.”

“Wait, Andrew, before we do. How do you think Dad is?”