After her nineteenth birthday, the girl tells her mother that she’s a lesbian. She assumes that she already knows, as she has always shown the tendencies of a tomboy, and her mother is generally considered to be a progressive person due to her counterculture youth. The conversation happens after her mother says that she doesn’t have much of a social life in college, to which she says that she’s been dating someone, a woman. In disbelief, the mother says that she merely thought her daughter was a late bloomer. They talk for six hours about all sorts of things, after which her mother asks her if she has ever had sex with a man. The girl says that she hadn’t.

The girl’s mother is diagnosed with a severe kind of lymphoma. The mother is in her fifties, and the girl is in her early twenties. The girl, now working in healthcare, takes a leave of absence from her job as a microbiologist to care for her mother in her last few months of life. In one of their last conversations, the mother asks her to have sex with a man at least once in her life just to see how it’s like.

One day, the girl—back working at her hospital—asks her gay coworker out for a drink. At the bar, she runs him through the whole story about her mother and her dying wish. The male coworker is gay, so he happily obliges in pointing her toward some of the other men at the hospital. She preemptively turns down some of the prospects, but they zero in on an X-ray technician who may be compatible with her.

Soon enough, the girl approaches the X-ray technician—whom she knows is into tennis—and asks him if they can play tennis at his club sometime. When the weekend comes around, she cleans her apartment , buys condoms and pornographic magazines, and ponders the mystery of penises as she flips through the porn mags. On the day of her date, she plays tennis with the X-ray technician, invites him to dinner, and heads to his apartment with him by night.

At the X-ray technician’s apartment, the girl is asked if the rumors are true, that she’s really a lesbian. She dismisses them and says she may be bisexual. With some more drinks in their system, they talk openly about themselves and eventually start kissing. They try to have sex in his bedroom, but he can’t get an erection, allegedly due to the alcohol they had.

Driving home from the X-ray technician’s apartment, the girl resolves to meet someone not from her hospital. She thinks back to her brother’s best friend, a man who sees her like a sister after a childhood spent together. They haven’t seen each other in a while, as he moved to California for college, but he did attend her brother’s wedding, as well as her mother’s funeral. Eventually, she calls her brother’s best friend and catches up over the phone. She tells him about her mother’s dying wish, and he agrees.

Two weeks later, the girl is with her brother’s best friend in her apartment. He still struggles to wrap his head around what’s going on and quickly confides that he isn’t very good at sex. Generally, he is an insecure person who doesn’t feel great about his body. Still, the girl encourages him and wants to go forward with having sex. In her bed, however, he ejaculates quickly, before anything else can happen. She says to him that it shouldn’t change anything between them.

After two failures, the girl no longer knows who to turn to. Her life is normal and good. One day, her gay coworker comes to her apartment and explains that his partner has left him after secretly cheating on him for a few months. He beats himself up about it, and the girl says that she never liked him or thought of him in high regard anyway. Tired and full of bad feelings, he asks if he can crash at her apartment, to which she allows.

Before sleeping, the gay coworker says that he feels powerless and no longer like the strong one which others typically rely on. Upset seeing him in such a way, the girl invites her gay coworker into bed so that they can sleep together. Eventually, they start touching each other and having sex.

By June, the girl and the gay coworker have married each other and even have a child on the way. In September, the girl gives birth to her daughter. Many people don’t think their marriage makes sense, but they consider it to be a sustainable living situation between two best fiends who find joy in raising a child. Often, in bed, she thinks about how funny the world works sometimes, much like what her mother used to say.