The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  Dan was small for his age, barely pubescent, a skinny, big-headed kid with a strangely commanding personality. He’d been acting since elementary school, not only in local and regional theater, but also on TV commercials. Ruth had seen him in an ad for the Olive Garden, shoveling a gigantic forkful of spaghetti into his mouth while a jolly waiter looked on, clapping a hand to his cheek in astonishment, and in a spot for State Farm, in which he bounced on a trampoline in slow motion while his ersatz parents gazed at him with loving expressions, happy to know his future was secure.

  Courtney was at least at head taller than her partner, and looked to be about a decade older, a young girl endowed with a woman’s body and an unnerving aura of sexual confidence. Her outfits just managed to obey the letter of the school dress code while violating its spirit at every turn; things she wore had a peculiar way of slipping down or creeping up or popping open. Ruth often saw her in the hall with older boys, junior and senior football players mostly, and it was the jocks who looked starstruck and grateful for the company, not Courtney.

  “All right.” Ruth smiled wanly, trying to ignore the familiar heaviness in her chest. “Let me give you the setup. Courtney, you’re Gina, and Dan, you’re Ethan, and you two—”

  “Wait,” said Courtney. “Could I be Heather instead?”

  “There is no Heather,” Ruth told her. “The girl’s name is Gina.”

  Courtney frowned. “Could I change it to Heather? I really don’t like the name Gina.”

  “This is role playing,” Ruth reminded her. “It’s pretend.”

  “I’m just not comfortable being Gina.”

  “Fine, whatever. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “It matters to me,” Courtney insisted. “I totally prefer Heather.”

  “Could I be Skip?” Dan inquired. “I mean, if she gets to change her name—”

  “Skip?” Courtney scoffed. “What kinda stupid name is that?”

  “It’s cool,” Dan replied, but with less self-assurance than usual. “He’s like this laid-back preppy dude.”

  “That’s pathetic,” Courtney informed him. “Nobody’s named Skip.”

  As she said this, Courtney absentmindedly lifted the hem of her shirt above her navel, revealing a taut expanse of youthful midriff. The whole class seemed to freeze for a moment as she languorously rubbed her belly, like an old man who’d just eaten a big meal.

  “Skip’s a good name,” she declared, pulling her shirt back into place. “For a dog!”

  “Woof!” Blake Vizzoni called out from the back of the room. His lackeys responded with the usual chorus of servile chuckles.

  “That’s enough,” Ruth told them. She turned back to Dan and Courtney. “Okay, so you’re Skip and Heather, two sixteen-year-olds who’ve been going steady for a year. It’s after school, and you’re alone in the rec room, with no adult supervision.”

  “My house or hers?” asked Dan.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “I like to be clear on the details.”

  “Let’s just say it’s Skip’s house, okay? You guys are making out, and it’s getting hot and heavy. This is something that’s happened once or twice before, but you’ve managed to stop yourselves before things got out of hand. But today something’s different. Today, Skip’s got a condom in his wallet.”

  Ruth was finished, but the actors just kept staring at her, as if awaiting further instruction. After a moment, she realized what she’d forgotten—it was something Dan insisted on—and halfheartedly clapped her hands.

  “Action.”

  The word was barely out of her mouth when the young lovers flung their arms around each other and began making out in a disturbingly realistic manner, with Dan all the way up on his tippytoes, his neck cranked back at an uncomfortable angle. Ruth didn’t think they were using their tongues, but it was hard to be sure—the way Courtney was stooping, her hair formed a kind of curtain around their faces. Meanwhile, Dan’s hands were roaming freely up and down the length of her back, making occasional forays into the northern precincts of the butt region, eliciting whoops of delight and cries of “Go for it!” from the peanut gallery, which couldn’t have been what JoAnn Marlow had in mind when she designed the exercise.

  Happy as she was to see the new curriculum subverted in any and every way, Ruth also knew better than to assume that what happened in her classroom would stay in her classroom. She was particularly concerned about the loyalties of one student, a watchful girl named Robin LeFebvre, whose family supposedly belonged to the Tabernacle (Ruth had made inquiries). Robin took copious notes from one end of class to the other—she was scribbling away right now, her face pale and visibly shocked by the spectacle Dan and Courtney were making of themselves—and Ruth had a sneaking suspicion that she wasn’t doing it just to get a good grade on the end-of-unit test.

  “All right,” she called out. “That’s enough. We get the point. Let’s move on.”

  With what appeared to be genuine reluctance, Courtney unscrewed her face from Dan’s. She was blushing as she fixed her hair and tugged her clothes back into place; her voice was ragged, slightly breathless.

  “Oh my God, Skip. You make me so hot. I just want to … you know …”

  “What, Heather?” Dan spoke in a stage whisper that was clearly audible throughout the room. “I make you want to what?”

  “To do it, Skip. To go all the way. Because I really, really love you.”

  “I love you, too,” said Dan. “Now take off your pants.”

  Courtney bit her lip in consternation, waiting for the laughter to die down.

  “I want to take off my pants,” she said. “Oh God, Skip, you don’t know how badly I want to. But I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “You know. We’ve talked about this before. I’m scared of getting pregnant, or catching a disease.”

  “Well, have no fear.” With a magician’s flourish, Dan pulled an imaginary wallet out of his pocket and mimed the act of withdrawing a condom from the billfold. “I came prepared.”

  “Oh my God.” Courtney’s eyes got big. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It’s foolproof,” he told her. “I guarantee you won’t get pregnant, and you won’t catch any diseases. Not that I have any diseases.”

  Courtney took her chin in hand and thought this over for a moment. Then her face broke into a big smile.

  “Awesome!” she said. “Let’s get busy!”

  There was a moment of startled silence in the classroom, followed by a sudden uproar. Half of the audience shouted its approval, while the other half howled in protest. A normally well-behaved boy named Donald Swift fell out of his chair and began banging his fist repeatedly against the floor to express his otherwise inexpressible delight.

  “People!” Ruth called out. “Come on, now. Pipe down! Donald, get back in your seat. This isn’t kindergarten.”

  Donald sheepishly complied. Shaking her head in weary exasperation, Ruth turned to Courtney, preparing to admonish her for ruining the exercise. But she checked herself when she saw the look of innocent confusion on the girl’s face.

  “I don’t get it,” Courtney said. “Why’s that so funny?”

  “I think you misunderstood,” Ruth told her. “Heather’s not supposed to say yes. She’s supposed to forcefully rebut Skip’s claim that condoms provide foolproof protection against pregnancy and disease.”

  “They don’t?” Courtney looked alarmed. “I thought they did.”

  “Not foolproof,” Ruth informed her. “Didn’t you read the assignment?”

  “I meant to. I was kinda busy last night.”

  Ruth asked if anyone could help her out. Vik Ramachandran raised his hand.

  “Heather could tell Skip that condoms don’t protect against certain STDs, like HPV, which can cause genital warts.”

  Several people groaned, and a few others made the retching sound that was the customary response to any mention of this particular affli
ction.

  “Fair enough,” Ruth said. “You’re absolutely right that condoms don’t prevent transmission of HPV, though they do a good job preventing a number of other STDs, including gonorrhea, chlamydia, and HIV. Anyone else? What else could Heather tell Skip about condoms?”

  “She could talk about failure rates,” Marsha Gewirtz suggested. “Didn’t the handout say that they have a 36 percent failure rate? So that’s like a one-in-three chance that Heather could get pregnant, even if Skip uses a condom, right?”

  Ruth winced. “I know that’s what the handout said, but that’s a pretty dubious number. First of all, I’ve never seen another study that even comes close to 25 percent, and I’ve seen a couple that put failure rates as low as 3 percent. The usual number is somewhere around 10 percent, but you have to understand that that’s an annual rate, meaning that over the course of one full year, 10 percent of the couples using only condoms for their birth control might expect to have an unwanted pregnancy. The failure rate for any individual act of intercourse would of course be much, much lower.”

  “What about on the test?” asked Susan Chang. “Do we say 36 percent failure, or 10 percent?”

  “For this curriculum, I guess we’re required to say thirty-six,” Ruth told her. “But I do want you to be aware that that’s not a universally accepted number. If you’re looking for a more credible source of information about birth control, I suggest you check out the website for Planned Parenthood.” Ruth turned back to the actors. “All right, guys. Are we ready for Take Two?”

  “It’s too late,” a lunkhead named Mike Petoski called out. “Skip already creamed his pants.”

  This witticism inspired great mirth in the back two rows of the classroom, and a good deal of eye-rolling closer to the front.

  “Enough,” Ruth snapped. “If you can’t control yourself, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “That’s what she said,” Blake Vizzoni muttered.

  Ruth decided to ignore him. She was just about to say Action when she noticed Robin LeFebvre’s hand in the air.

  “Yes, Robin?”

  “I didn’t hear you before.” Robin kept her eyes glued on her notebook as she spoke. “What was the name of the website you mentioned?”

  “Plannedparenthood.org,” Ruth replied. “All one word, no punctuation. Planned Parenthood is a highly respected national organization with a long history of defending women’s reproductive freedom. They’re an excellent resource for anyone who needs information about contraception or sexual health in general.”

  Robin’s pen raced across the page with impressive speed. It looked like she was taking dictation, trying to record every word Ruth said for posterity, or at least the next school board meeting.

  “Am I talking too fast?” Ruth asked her. “Do you want me to repeat anything?”

  Robin looked up. She was a pretty girl, if you could get past the dowdy clothes and the scraped-back ponytail. But there was no sign of friendliness in her face, not the slightest effort to disguise the loathing she felt for her teacher.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I think I got the important stuff.”

  IT WAS a rainy afternoon, the low gray sky pressing down on the world like the lid of a box. A gusty wind scoured the treetops, stripping away the foliage with merciless efficiency. Fumbling for her car keys in the school parking lot at the end of the day, Ruth caught herself glancing anxiously over her shoulder as though it were late at night on a deserted street.

  It’s the goddam Christians, she thought, ducking into her car and pulling the door shut behind her. They won’t leave me alone.

  She knew she’d crossed a dangerous line in fourth-period Health, openly challenging the Wise Choices curriculum, encouraging the kids to seek out more reliable sources of information. There would be a price to pay down the road—probably sooner rather than later—she had no illusion about that. But what was the alternative? To just stand there like a good little zombie and let the half-truths and outright lies—36 percent failure rate!—pass by without a peep of protest?

  I’m done doing their dirty work, Ruth thought, flicking her wipers to peel away the wet leaves plastered to her windshield like souvenirs in a child’s scrapbook. They’re gonna have to do it themselves from now on.

  In a way, she was grateful to Maggie’s coach for making the situation so clear. Until she’d seen those girls, those beautiful young athletes, sitting on the grass in the sunshine, being coerced by adults they trusted into praying to the God of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the Republican Party—the God of War and Abstinence and Shame and Willful Ignorance, the God Who Loved Everyone Except the Homosexuals, Who Sent Good People to Hell if They Didn’t Believe in Him, and Let Murderers and Child Rapists into Heaven if They Did, the God Who Made Women as an Afterthought, and Then Cursed Them with the Pain of Childbirth, the God Who Would Have Never Let Girls Play Soccer in the First Place if It Had Been up to Him—until then, she’d allowed herself to succumb to the comforting fiction that her quarrel with the Bible Thumpers was confined to the classroom, to a political dispute about what got taught or didn’t get taught to other people’s children. But now she understood that she’d been fooling herself. This wasn’t just professional; it was personal. They’d already messed with her job, and now they were coming for her kids.

  THE FULL extent of the threat hadn’t become clear until Saturday evening, when Frank brought the girls home, and Ruth tried to engage them in a conversation about what had happened that morning on the soccer field. At the time, she’d been most concerned with explaining her position to Maggie, but she wasn’t unhappy to see Eliza follow her little sister into the kitchen and take a seat at the table. Eliza still hadn’t fully recovered from her mother’s fifteen minutes of infamy last spring, and it seemed like a good idea to prepare her for the possibility that things could get ugly again, which was something Ruth hoped to avoid, but couldn’t rule out.

  “Who wants hot chocolate?” she asked brightly. “It got kinda chilly out.”

  Both girls shook their heads.

  “So.” Ruth smiled stiffly, settling into her chair. “You guys have a good day?”

  “Okay,” Eliza muttered.

  Maggie just shrugged, fixing Ruth with a frosty stare. On normal Saturdays she showered and changed at her father’s, but tonight she was still wearing her rumpled, grass-stained soccer uniform like a reproach, letting Ruth know that she hadn’t been forgiven.

  “Look,” Ruth told her. “I know you think I overreacted this morning.”

  This was an understatement. Maggie had been stunned by her mother’s intervention in the postgame prayer, and had only managed to stammer a couple of mild objections as Ruth forcibly separated her from her teammates and marched her off the field. It wasn’t until they reached the parking area that Maggie found her voice, but by that point she was a complete wreck, sobbing furiously and calling Ruth an asshole over and over again, a word that Ruth had never heard her use before. Maggie also repeated the phrases You’re insane and I hate you several times, in response to her mother’s increasingly flustered attempts to defend what she’d done. Though she believed she deserved an apology, Ruth had decided to let the matter slide; she didn’t think there was a whole lot to be gained from rehashing statements her child had made in anger and probably regretted.

  “I admit that I may not have handled the situation as well as I could have,” she said. “Maybe it would have been smarter if I’d taken your coach aside and spoken to him in a less confrontational manner. But that doesn’t change the fact that he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to do, and that I intend to make sure he doesn’t do it again.”

  Maggie pushed out her bottom lip and scowled, a look that, for all its attempted ferocity, just made Ruth want to hug her. It was the exact same face Maggie had made as a tiny baby, when she was working herself up to a good cry.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she demanded. “Coach Tim wasn’t doing anything wrong
. He was just thanking God for all our blessings and saying how happy he was that no one got hurt. I don’t see what’s so bad about that.”

  Ruth didn’t know where to start.

  “Thanking God?” she spluttered. “He’s a soccer coach, not a minister.”

  “So what? You don’t have to be a minister to believe in God.”

  “First of all, honey, not everyone believes in the same God. There are Jewish girls on your team, and Nadima, is she—?”

  “Muslim,” replied Maggie. “But not strict.”

  “See, you’ve got Jewish girls, a Muslim girl—”

  “Atheists,” Eliza piped in. Until that moment, Ruth hadn’t even known if she’d been paying attention to the conversation, she’d been so completely absorbed in the origami box she was constructing out of a sheet of notepaper.

  “That’s right,” Ruth agreed. “Atheists and agnostics, too. Not everyone believes in the same God, and some people don’t believe in God at all. And other people aren’t sure what they believe. But you know what? Even if every girl on your team belonged to the same church, the coach still doesn’t have the right to say a prayer with them. The soccer team is a town organization. I’m sure they taught you about the separation of Church and State in Social Studies.”

  Maggie looked puzzled. “You said it’s the town, not the state.”

  “The State just means the government. Town, state, federal, it doesn’t matter. The government can’t promote a specific religion.”

  “My soccer team’s part of the government?”

  “It’s a town-sponsored league,” Ruth said, worried that the discussion was drifting into a swamp of technicalities. “Plus you were playing in a county park.”

  Maggie seemed momentarily stymied by the legal argument, but she quickly regrouped.

  “Well, I still don’t see why you had to yell at Coach Tim like that. You looked like such a weirdo. Your voice got all high and shaky.” Maggie flailed her hands around her head like she was being attacked by a swarm of bees, and screeched, “Stop that praying or I’ll call the police!”

  Eliza snickered, and Ruth shot her a dirty look. It was not a pleasant thing to be mocked by your children, especially when you were trying to protect them.