What the Ex Called Her

Her ex-boyfriend’s review: prude bitch. Her best friend’s counter-review: dearest person in the world. Ramona, seventeen, from Bremen, has collected both of these assessments with some regularity and has decided to believe the second one.

Every boyfriend she’d had eventually hit the same wall—two or three months in, no sex, exit stage right. One left. One insulted her on the way out. One slept with her best friend, which is the kind of move that says more about him than any argument he could have made. She was waiting for the right moment. The right moment didn’t agree with their schedules. She’s still waiting, still a virgin, still unbothered by that fact in a way that seems to genuinely confuse people.

The Polish side of her comes out in the kitchen and in the temper. Her grandmother was the architect of both—a cool woman who spent summers teaching her to cook from a stack of well-worn cookbooks and simultaneously teaching her how to move through the world without apology. How you push back against people who deserve it. How you keep your chin up in situations that want to put it down. The cooking was almost secondary. Almost.

Ask her what her dream man looks like and she goes quiet. Not because she doesn’t know, but because she knows it isn’t really about looks—it’s about a specific feeling, the kind you can’t manufacture, that starts with tiramisu and a DVD on a couch and ends with both of you losing it at something stupid by the lake. She wants that. The connection first, everything else follows.

She listens to Kate Nash and Kings of Leon and Bob Marley while she bounces around her room and drives the neighbors quietly insane. She wants to eat well and be loved and sleep in a bed that isn’t too big for one person. She believes in Sailor Moon. Her bed is enormous.