“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s just . . . I haven’t done . . . that.” And then, like an idiot, thinking he didn’t understand her, she felt the need to explain further. “I’m still a virgin.”

He kissed her hair, her ear, her neck. “Yeah. I thought so,” he said, and she felt her heart sink, her lack of worldliness exposed.

Then he whispered softly into her ear, “Me too.”

James explained how he’d never had a serious girlfriend before. “Of course, my parents told me to wait until marriage, and there were years sitting in church, hearing about sin. Now I figure, I’ve waited this long, the first time should be special.” He leaned down and kissed her ear again. “With someone special. Like you.”

Karina’s reasons for remaining a virgin didn’t have much to do with morality. She certainly could have found a way to lose her virginity in high school at one of those weekend parties when her parents weren’t paying attention. Joanie Teager had been so desperate to “get it over with” that she lost her cherry in the back seat of her parents’ Lexus sedan. “Those leather seats were so annoyingly sticky,” she had said to Karina and Izzy later, leaving the impression that was the most lasting impact of the whole experience. “I mean, I had to peel my ass off of there afterwards.”

Now, Karina felt justified in waiting. All those awkward school dances when she didn’t have someone to hang on to, cute Kyle Derrick with his exploring hands at that party—something had held her back all those times, and she’d thought she was just a prude or self-conscious. But now she knew why she’d waited, and it was worth it.

* * *

On the Monday morning after that weekend, two months after James had first walked her home from the library, Karina made an appointment at the Student Health Center, from which she left with a nondescript paper bag containing her first four weeks of the birth control patch. In her dorm room, after showering, Karina stared at her naked figure in the mirror and contemplated where to apply the patch. It seemed like a monumental decision. Her only other such rite of passage had been starting her period at age thirteen, three months before Prem died.

Karina had been terrified when she’d first seen the blood on her panties in the school bathroom that day, then excited, then terrified again. She was uncomfortable all day, with a wad of toilet paper jammed between her legs. When Mom came home that evening, she sat with Karina on her bed and matter-of-factly showed her how to wrap the wings of a pad around a clean pair of aqua blue panties from her dresser. Mom whisked away the dirty panties and scrubbed them clean, then stocked the bathroom vanity with boxes of pads in various sizes. Karina returned to school the next day reassured, grateful for her mother.

The supply of liners and pads under the bathroom sink lasted six months. By then, her mother had retreated to Prem’s room for her daily prayer and meditation sessions, and she could not be reached for anything—not for something important, like where they would scatter Prem’s ashes, so certainly not for something as mundane as Karina’s dwindling supply of feminine products. By then, the casseroles and pies from neighbors and colleagues were depleted, and Karina and her dad were making weekly trips to the store on Sunday nights. They fell into the habit of stocking up for easy-to-prepare meals: cereal and milk for breakfast, turkey or peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, frozen lasagnas and pizzas for dinner.