Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It
Brooke Averick
For the nervous pukers
Author’s Note
Much like the character in the book you’re about to read, I love love. Rom-coms and romance novels are the greatest source of comfort for me, which is ironic, because sex and dating are the two things that cause me the most stress and anxiety in real life. Getting lost in a fictional love story has always been my preferred way to self-soothe, but recently, I’ve been finding it increasingly challenging to relate to the sexually empowered female leads in so many of my favorite books.
Physical intimacy seems to come naturally to most of the characters in these stories, and while reading them, I always find myself wondering: Where’s the part before the first date where our main character can’t get off the toilet thanks to a bout of anxious diarrhea? Or the part where she freaks out and cancels the date altogether? And what’s going on with these sex scenes? Are we just omitting the pre-sex panic attack for the sake of pacing? I know I’m not the only one who struggles with these types of anxieties, but so rarely do we see them advertised proudly in the romance section of our local bookstores. And so, when I started writing about Phoebe, my initial hope was that a book centered around a character with crippling intimacy anxiety would find its place on the romance table sandwiched in between an Emily Henry and an Abby Jimenez title.
It took me writing all of five pages to realize why we haven’t seen narratives like Phoebe’s in the romance section. Simply put, anxiety is not romantic. It’s messy and uncomfortable and funny and sad, and all these things make it incredibly difficult to create a modern-day fairy tale.
So, what you’re about to read may not be as traditionally flirty and sexy as what you’re used to, but I’d like to think it’s a love story for the ages.
Prologue
All I ever thought about was falling in love.
There were approximately one hundred and fifty boys in my grade at Manhasset Central Middle School. By the time I turned twelve, I had been in love with at least one hundred and twenty-five of them. If I didn’t have a crush, I didn’t see the point of getting out of bed in the morning.
I devoured Nicholas Sparks and Sarah Dessen novels like they were my death row meal. The Pottery Barn bookshelf in my childhood bedroom overflowed with neatly organized stacks of young adult romances. The spines were cracked and the pages torn, and my copy of The Fault in Our Stars was missing its cover. Sometimes, while I was rereading one of my favorites, a chunk of pages would fall into my lap. My dad would help me glue them back in with a special adhesive from his toolbox.
I kept the more mature romances hidden under my mattress so that my mom wouldn’t find them. After school on Fridays, I’d visit the thrift store down the street, where the owner, Mrs. Wilson, would be waiting with a stack of mass-market paperbacks she thought I’d enjoy. I’d buy however many I could afford with my leftover lunch money from the week and run home to stash them with the rest of my collection. I only read those in the dark, under the blankets with a flashlight.
Every night, I’d daydream myself to sleep. I would scan through my mental Rolodex of boys I liked from school and pick one to star as my leading man. Sometimes two or three, if the fantasy called for multiple lovers fighting over me. But usually just one. I thought about what our first kiss would be like. Would he tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear before he leaned in? Or maybe he would place a gentle peck on both my eyelids before finally brushing his lips against mine? “I love you, Phoebe,” he would say. “From the moment I first laid eyes on you, I have always loved you.”
These are the types of scenarios that I played on repeat in my mind and read over and over again in my books. But despite all my romantic longing, by the time seventh grade rolled around, I was the only one of my friends who hadn’t had their first kiss. Sometimes I wondered if it was because I wanted it too bad.
And then, finally, things started to look up.
It was the first week of school. Determined to look my best, I woke up an hour earlier than usual. With the concealer I’d swiped from my mom’s makeup drawer, I dabbed at the small bumps that had recently started popping up across my forehead. The pale beige shade was too light for my olive skin and only made the pimples look more pronounced, but at least they were no longer an irritated shade of red. A win for me at the time. I slicked my curls back into a high ponytail with a bottle of foamy mousse and coated my lips with a layer of the stickiest lip gloss I could find. For the first time, I used the tool that my dentist had given me to floss in between my braces. My gums had just barely stopped bleeding by the time the bus dropped me off at school, right on time for our annual welcome-back assembly.
The entire student body was crammed into the musty auditorium. I was sitting in the far-left section of the back row, the area that was infamously obstructed by a giant pole. Making out with someone back there was a rite of passage, one that I was so sure thousands of pages of romance novels had prepared me for.
Lucas Johnson was sitting next to me. My friends knew I liked Lucas, his friends knew he liked me, and that’s all it took for them to corner us into sitting together. As Principal Roxbury droned on and on about the importance of academic integrity, all I could think was I’m about to have my first kiss.
Lucas’s hairy thigh was pressed up against my much hairier thigh, a recent development from over the summer. (“She must take after you,” my mom not-so-subtly whispered to my dad when they picked me up from sleepaway camp, her eyes fixed on the thick black hair covering the exposed skin below my bedazzled jean shorts. And when I finally asked her to teach me how to shave, she refused to let me shave above the knee. “It’s a different type of hair up there,” she had said. “Once you start shaving it, you’ll never be able to stop.”)