The Abstinence Teacher. Tom Perrotta

have been inappropriate,” Ruth had to sit down and shut up while speaker after speaker rose to accuse her of recklessness and irresponsibility and even, in the case of one very angry old man, to suggest that she had more than a thing or two in common with “a certain lady from Babylon.” A handful of parents spoke up on Ruth's behalf, but their support felt tepid at best—people were understandably reluctant to rally around the banner of oral sex at a school board meeting—and their statements were regularly interrupted by a chorus of boos from the Tabernacle contingent.

      The bad taste from this experience was still strong in Ruth's mouth when she got to work the next morning and found a notice in her mailbox announcing a special schoolwide assembly on the subject of “Sexual Abstinence: Saying Yes to Saying No,” presented by an organization called Wise Choices for Teens. At any other point in her career, Ruth would have barged into the Principal's office and told Joe Venuti exactly what she thought about Abstinence Education—that it was a farce, an attack on sexuality itself, nothing more than officially sanctioned ignorance—but she was well aware of the fact that her opinion was no longer of the slightest interest to the school administration. This lecture was damage control, pure and simple, a transparent attempt to placate the Tabernacle people and their supporters, to let them know that their complaints had been heard.

      So Ruth buttoned her lip—it had become second nature—and went to the assembly, curious to see what the students would make of it. After all, Stonewood Heights wasn't the Bible Belt; it was a well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either. On the whole, the kids who grew up here believed in money, status, and fun; most of them would readily admit that they were a lot more focused on getting into a good college than the Kingdom of Heaven. They traveled, drove nice cars, wore cool clothes, and surfed the web on their camera phones. It was hard to imagine them being particularly receptive to the idea that an earthly pleasure existed that they weren't entitled to enjoy whenever and however they felt like it.

      Ruth wasn't sure what kind of spokesperson she'd been expecting, but it certainly wasn't the young woman who took the stage after a warm welcome from Principal Venuti. The guest speaker wasn't just blond and pretty; she was hot, and she knew it. You could see it in the way she moved toward the podium—like a movie star accepting an award—that consciousness she had of being watched, the pleasure she took in the attention. She wore a tailored navy blue suit with a knee-length skirt, an outfit whose modesty somehow provoked curiosity rather than stifling it. Ruth, for example, found herself squinting at the stage, trying to decide if the unusually proud breasts straining against the speaker's silk blouse had been surgically enhanced.

      “Good afternoon,” she said. “My name is JoAnn Marlow, and I'd like to tell you a few things about myself. I'm twenty-eight years old, I'm a Leo, I'm a competitive ballroom dancer, and my favorite band is Coldplay. I like racquet sports, camping and hiking, and going for long rides on my boyfriend's Harley. Oh, yeah, and one more thing: I'm a virgin.”

      She paused, waiting for the audience to recover from a sudden epidemic of groans and snickers, punctuated by shouts of “What a waste!” and “Not for long!” and “I'll be gentle!” issuing from unruly packs of boys scattered throughout the auditorium. JoAnn didn't seem troubled by the hecklers; it was all part of the show.

      “I guess you feel sorry for me, huh? But you know what? I don't care. I'm happy I'm a virgin. And my boyfriend's happy about it, too.”

      Somebody coughed the word “Bullshit,” and pretty soon half the crowd was barking into their clenched fists. It got so bad that Principal Venuti had to stand up and give everyone the evil eye until they stopped.

      “You probably want to know why I'm so happy about something that seems so uncool, don't you? Well, let me tell you a story.”

      The story was about a carefree girl named Melissa whom JoAnn had known in college. Melissa slept around, but figured it was okay, because the guys always used condoms. One night, though, when she was having “safe sex” with this handsome stud she'd met at a bar—a guy she didn't know from Adam—the condom just happened to break, as condoms will.

      “The guy looked healthy,” JoAnn explained. “But he had AIDS. Melissa's dead now. And I'm alive. That's reason number one why I'm glad to be a virgin.”

      It turned out JoAnn had a lot of reasons. She was happy because she'd never had gonorrhea, like her friend, Lori, a straight A student who didn't realize she was sick until prom night, when she discovered a foul puslike discharge on her underwear; or the excruciatingly painful Pelvic Inflammatory Disease suffered by her ex-roommate, Angela, who'd let her chlamydia go untreated, and was now infertile; or herpes, like her old rock-climbing buddy, Mitch, who couldn't walk some days because of the agony caused by the festering sores on his penis; or hideous incurable genital warts like her otherwise-cute-as-a-button neighbor, Misty; or crabs, which were not actually crabs but lice—real live bugs!— having a party in your pubic hair, like they'd done to her exdancing partner, Jason.

      “Oh, my friends used to tease me a lot,” JoAnn said. “They called me a prude and a Goody Two-Shoes. Well, you can bet they're not teasing me now.”

      And there was one more thing. JoAnn was glad she'd never gone through what her friend Janice had, never had to pee on a stick to discover she was pregnant by some jerk she'd met at a frat party and would never have even spoken to if she hadn't been so drunk she could barely walk; never had to drive to an abortion clinic with this same jerk, who despised her as badly as she despised him; never had to lie there in a hospital gown while some creepy doctor did his business with a vacuum hose; never had to live with the responsibility of making a baby and then not allowing it to be born.

      “I can sleep at night,” JoAnn declared, “and that's more than I can say for a lot of people I know. I can sleep because I don't have any regrets. I'm a strong, self-sufficient individual, and I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that my mind and my body are one hundred percent intact. They're mine and mine alone, and I'm proud of that.”

      It was standard-issue Abstinence Ed, in other words—shameless fear-mongering, backed up by half-truths and bogus examples and inflammatory rhetoric—nothing Ruth hadn't been exposed to before, but this time, for some reason, it felt different. The way JoAnn presented this stuff, it came across as lived experience, and for a little while there—until she snapped out of her trance and saw with dismay how easily she'd been manipulated—even Ruth had fallen under her spell, wondering how she'd ever been so weak as to let herself be duped into thinking it might be pleasant or even necessary to allow herself to be touched or loved by another human being. Why would you, if all it was going to do was make you vulnerable to all those afflictions, all that regret?

      After a short Q&A, JoAnn concluded her talk with a slide show. Instead of the gallery of diseased genitalia that Ruth had expected, though, Stonewood Heights High School was treated to a series of photographs of JoAnn and her boyfriend vacationing on a Caribbean island. If you didn't know better, you might have thought they were on their honeymoon—two happy, attractive young people frolicking in the ocean, drinking out of coconut shells by the pool, kissing beneath a palm tree, clearly reveling in each other's company (now that she'd gotten a glimpse of JoAnn's fearsome bikini cleavage, Ruth was convinced that her breasts had indeed benefited from cosmetic surgery). The final image showed the boyfriend alone—a buff, shirtless, all-American guy—standing by the water's edge in his swimming trunks, a surfboard tucked under his arm.

      “As you might imagine,” JoAnn said, “it's not easy saying no to a superhot guy like Ed. But when it gets hard, I just remind myself of my wedding night, and how amazing it's going to be when I give myself to my husband with a pure heart, a clean conscience, and a perfectly intact body Because that's going to be my reward, and mark my words, people—it is going to be soooo good, oh my God, better than you can even imagine.”

      The lights came on, and the students applauded enthusiastically, though Ruth wasn't quite sure if they were applauding for the hot sex JoAnn would have in the future or her commitment to avoiding it in the here and now. Either way, Ruth had to grudgingly admit to herself that she was impressed. JoAnn Marlow had somehow pulled off the neat feat of seeming sexy and puritanical at the same time, of