Emma Rathbone

Julia Greenfield is twenty-six years old and still a virgin... and something's got to change. She travels to spend the summer with her mysterious aunt Vivienne in North Carolina, and unearths a confounding secret: her 58 year old aunt is a virgin too. Julia becomes fixated on puzzling out what could have lead to Viv's appalling condition, all while trying to avoid the same fate.

Losing it

jil ★彡

And that was the problem — to want something so badly was to jam yourself into the wrong places, gum up the works, send clanging vibrations into the cosmos. But how can you step back and affect nonchalance?

There was the time we were in his small sunlit kitchen with our homework spread out in front of us on the table. We reached a kind of lull, or resting point, in the conversation and he does this thing, I sort of see it from the corner of my eye and then look over, and through some glint of intuition I know that he wants me to see as he tosses his pen up into a flip and then expertly catches it. He looks at me with eyes as hopeful and pliable as a baby bird's, but there's also a gleam of pride there. This all happened very quickly but so much occurred to me in that moment that he had been practicing this move and waiting for a chance to perform it when it would seem most offhand and casual, like he just had this facility with the world, this capability that he wanted me to see. And in that moment he needed my approval so much that it was embarrassing, and instead of doing what I should have done, which was to just 

 by some flicker of awe or grin of admiration, I ignored him. And he saw me deciding to ignore him. And I guess you could say that it wasn’t a big deal, but a part of me knew that it was in the small transactions that unkindness could be most felling. I would have given anything to go back.

Losing it quotes

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