“How We Stay Good Girls,” a short story by alumna Christine Fadden, appears online at Painted Bride Quarterly.
I told my stepmother I was spending the night at Carla’s house and Carla told her parents she was spending the night at mine. Then we went with the boys up the mountain.
The boys were brothers and—for a while—Carla and I were like sisters. Neither of us wanted to have sex, which is contrary to every parent-of-a-teenager’s first assumption. It’s an assumption that says a lot about parents, and its wrongness became the impetus to our lie. If we went up the mountain with the boys and did not behave badly, our mission would prove we were good girls. We would deserve merits—possibly in the form of more freedom! We knew if we got caught we’d get punished, but we fantasized about telling our parents: “You see! We faced and resisted temptation.” Of course, there was no way we could win.
Before we took off for the mountain, Carla and I made a pact: neither would stick the other with the boy she didn’t want to mess around with. It would be she with the younger brother and me with the older one—or Backgammon.
