Good Girls – Laura Ruby

Good girl Audrey Porter has decided to break it off with her sometime hook up, school hunk Luke DeSalvio – she’s madly in love with him, but he ignores her at school and flirts with (and hooks up with) other girls, and she’s had enough. Besides, it’s senior year and in eight months they’ll be heading off to separate colleges anyway. When Audrey, dressed as a Goth for the night, gives him an intimate farewell… kiss in a secluded bedroom at a costume party she expects that to be the end of it, but on Monday people at school start acting weird.
Then she gets an image sent to her phone, a digital photo that’s spread like wildfire from phone to phone: “Luke’s head is cut off, but the pale skin of his chest hips glows in the dark, and his hands clutch fistfuls of the bedspread. Between his knees, a cascade of waist-length blonde hair striped with black.” And nothing’s the same.
Ruby has a great voice – she combines strong characterisation, a firm grasp of the world of adolescence, authentic dialogue, and a genuinely compelling plot with an economy and purity of language. The first time Audrey sees Luke after The Photo, he cuts her dead and “he speeds up, passes me, and keeps rolling, like a wave that jumps the beach and takes you out at the knees.”
She uses Good Girls to explore not only sexual double standards, the girl as defender of her own virtue and not assaulted by hormones as much as boys, and the pressures exerted on young women, but the transition from seeing your parents as parents to people, the way it changes the way they see you, the difference between sex as a concept and as reality, the way sex (especially when you’re younger) changes things you didn’t expect, the things that can get in the way of formalised worship providing spiritual succour, how rumour gets in the way of truth and how judgement gets in the way of friendship. And how friendships can be forged and strengthened by adversity, how women can band together, and how individuals can take control of their lives.
I have to include a quote I particularly liked. When Audrey’s mother tells her about waiting “as long as you can. Until you find someone you love,” and Audrey voices her assumption that her mother waited for her husband,

My mother looks extremely uncomfortable, like she’s just be stricken with intestinal cramps. ‘This is not about me. I’m just one person.’
Whoa. ‘You didn’t wait?
‘What I did or didn’t do is beside the point”…
Now that we’re talking, I realise I don’t want all the sordid details… I mean, yuk… For something that’s supposed to be all God-given and Song of Solomon and comfort-me-with-apples fabulous, it feels about as beautiful as drinking from a toilet bowl. At least that’s what it feels like afterwards, when someone’s taken a picture of you and decorated the world with it…

I love that last part, I love the sentiment of Audrey’s pastor that sex is about expressing, not creating, intimacy, and I want to read anything else that Ruby’s written. - Alex