One Last Thing Before I Go

world is simply moving too fast for him to keep up. It’s pretty much how he’s looked at her ever since puberty, like, once an ice-cream cone won’t do the trick, he’s out of his depth. She assumes it’s a look her mother got to know pretty well in the years before they divorced, although they’ve never really talked about that. As much as she despises Silver, she doesn’t let her mother talk shit about him anymore, not because she feels any loyalty to him, but because her mother is on a lifelong mission to exonerate herself with regard to the fucktrap of her first marriage, and that’s a bone Casey is just not ready to throw her. Even though she’s pretty sure her mother is right.
    Case in point: After she gets the waterworks under control, she looks up at Silver, this man she’s come to in her moment of need, in defiance of all conventional wisdom. And Silver, he runs his fingers through his long, messy hair, rubs his jowls thoughtfully, and then says, “You want to get some ice cream?”
    * * *
    If being the valedictorian and the only girl in her grade to get into an Ivy League school isn’t irony enough, there’s this: Up until three weeks ago, Casey was a virgin. She didn’t even have a boyfriend.
    She had one earlier in the year, the somewhat implausibly named Jake Prudence, but he broke up with her in March for a needlessly complex network of reasons that could all be summarily boiled down to the fact that she wouldn’t have sex with him. They’d get naked in his Jeep, or his bed when his parents were out, and he’d stick his fingers in her even though she’d hinted repeatedly that on worked better than in. Then he’d lie between her legs, grinding on her, and just as she began to feel the hot stirrings of something, he’d moan and she’d feel the sticky wetness explode across her belly, and that would be that.
    “Did you have one?” he would say afterward.
    “No,” she’d answer as she cleaned off her stomach with a baby wipe, the smell of his semen reminding her of the indoor pools where she’d spent so much of her free time over the last few years competing on the swim team.
    And Jake would flash her this wounded look that said he wished she’d just be a sport and fake it once in a while. “You would have if I was inside you,” he would declare.
    Somehow, she suspected that would be even less satisfying, if that were possible. In any case, she didn’t feel like surrendering her virginity to find out.
    It was in these supposedly intimate moments that Casey found she liked him least. Jake was funny and honest and had a softness to him that she found endearing. But once they’d progressed to naked petting, their entire relationship seemed to become colored by his campaign to deflower her, and she found herself cast in the role of the reluctant prude, which seemed grossly unfair considering his lectures on the topic often came while she held his throbbing dick in her hand.
    At some point, it became an unspoken ultimatum, and Casey opted out. Two weeks later Jake was with Lucy Grayson, who’d been a JCPenney model when she was younger, and who’d been with so many guys in their grade she was practically a rite of passage.
    But somehow, despite holding the line with Jake, Casey still managed the trick of being, as far as she knew, the only valedictorian in the history of Washington Irving High School to deliver her speech not quite twenty minutes after peeing on a stick in the girls’ locker room. And two pages into her speech, she realized that she was still clutching the EPT stick in her hand up at the podium. And every time she looked down at her text, there they were, those two pink lines that laced everything she said with a secret irony. “And as we head out into the world, the only certainty is uncertainty. . . . Ultimately, we will become the sum of our choices, and our mistakes. . . . We can already see this life we hold so dear fading behind us, to be rediscovered one day as a memory to share with our own children. . . . Blah, blah, blah . . . the friendships made, the lessons learned, the experiences shared . . .” et cetera, ad nauseam.
    And all the while, that stick of doom in her sweaty hand, tapping the podium as she turned the pages, and the thing inside her, that convergence of lust, apathy, and biology that even now must have been splitting and multiplying in her uterus like there was no tomorrow. She fantasized about tossing her prepared remarks, holding