Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 94903 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94903 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
“I understand what you’re feeling,” I say softly. “I understand why you feel that way.”
“I know they love me. How could I not? They practically love me to death.” She grins. “But I feel like I’m stuck in a toddler’s life, and they refuse to let me … I don’t know—breathe. And no matter what I do or what happens, they feel this stupid guilt like it’s their fault. Like, ‘Oh, Kennedy got detention again. How did we screw her up?’ They never think, ‘Oh, maybe Mrs. Falconbury is just a twat and says rude things to Kennedy, so instead of dealing with it, sometimes Kennedy just avoids it.’ It never occurs to them, ‘Well, Kennedy couldn’t tell us about the party because we wouldn’t even have considered it, so she had to sneak out.’”
“Okay, I see your point. But sneaking out isn’t safe. Don’t do that, okay?”
“I’m not ignorant, Megan. I know Dad tries to protect me from getting hurt, and I appreciate that. I love him. Some of my friend’s parents don’t care, and I’d rather have Dad going berserk over me sneaking out than not caring. But can’t there be something in the middle?”
I sigh. “I’m not your parent, so I feel uncomfortable discussing what can and can’t be possible. But I think that your dad can be a rational person.”
“With you, maybe.” She laughs. “Can you imagine me telling my dad that I want to be on birth control?”
Oh, I can imagine, and it’s not pretty.
“Are you having sex?” I ask her.
She shakes her head.
“I know you think I will snitch you out to Chase, but this is important. This isn’t whether you wear makeup at school or not.”
“You don’t care about that?”
“In the grand scheme of things, no. I don’t. But I’m not your parent.”
“Unfortunately.”
I laugh. “But sex is a different thing, Ken. If you’re having sex, there are conversations and precautions that you need to take. Woman to woman, this is nothing to play around with.”
“So are you giving me your consent to have sex?”
“No, I am not.”
“Don’t you say it’s because I’m fourteen.”
“Kennedy, you’re fourteen.”
She glares at me. “That’s not a reason. That’s an excuse to give me more rules.”
I sigh, twisting in my seat to face her directly. God, help me. I have no idea what I’m doing here. “Look, I don’t know how to talk to you about this, and there are a few reasons maybe I shouldn’t do it in the first place.”
“Talk to me about this, Megan. I can’t even breathe the word sex in front of Dad, and if I say it to Gram, she’ll probably douse me with holy water.”
I smile. “I doubt that.”
“Then you don’t know her.”
“Okay,” I say, exhaling. “Ultimately, it is your choice when you have sex. No one can stop you. Your dad, Gram, me—we can all tell you that you should wait until you’re older. But the truth is that you will do it if you want to.”
Kennedy smiles smugly.
“But let’s back up a second,” I say. “It should be your choice when you do it. If someone is pressuring you at all—if they’re telling you some bullshit like if you love them, you’d do it, or all the girls are doing it, or if they threaten you that someone else will if you won’t—do not have sex with that person. They don’t want to have sex with you. They want to control you. They’re forcing you to give them something you can never get back. That’s not the person you want to have sex with, okay?”
She considers this. “Okay, fair. No one has ever said it like that to me.”
Thank God. “Next is that having sex isn’t like piercing your ears. You can’t just wake up one day and think you’d like to make this decision, and then that’s it. It stops there. Because sometimes it doesn’t.”
“Like if you get pregnant.”
“Or an STD. Or many things. Sometimes you don’t find out until years later, so you can’t just trust people or be careless about it.”
“Again, fair.”
“Also,” I say … I groan. How do I do this? “You shouldn’t feel like sex is dirty. Or shameful. Or that something is wrong with you because you’re thinking about it, okay?”
“Wow. You are so not my dad.”
I cover my face with my hands. “And he might kill me if he heard this.”
“Well, let him know—not really, don’t tell him I asked you about this—that you’re making much more sense to me than he would.”
I smile at her. “Sex can be a great thing. It should be a great thing. And if it’s not great, if you aren’t safe and consenting, you shouldn’t be doing it.”
“Got it. Sex should be great.”
Please don’t repeat that to your dad.
We sit and stare at each other. The longer we sit, the harder it is to keep a straight face. Then finally, we both start laughing.