Boys: Jeff

My first real kiss with tongue, know more popularly as frenching, songging or sucking face, was when I was 14. Until then I had only received and given the innocent peck on the lips. In fact my mother was an instigator of many of those innocent pecks when I was 8. She insisted that I play with and subsequently kiss every classmate of mine who had the chickenpox. Despite my mother's attempts to get me ill early on, I didn't actually get the chickenpox until I was 26, but I digress.

For the sake of their sanity, my parents sent my brother and me to separate camps every summer. My parents also laboured under the delusion that I was some type of musical talent. Thus, I was carted off to music camp when I was 14. This was the first time that the summer camp I was attending wasn't run by the Girl Scouts. There would be boys! I was quite excited. Fantasies of my first kiss from a hunky, young, and musically talented man filled my head as I packed.

When I got to camp, I was hit with the reality of adolescent boys and music camps. There were about 75 kids at this camp and only 20 of them were male. I spent the next few days giving my piano, flute and vocal lessons 85% of my attention but a boy named Jeff took up the other 15%. He had decided that out of the other 55 girls at this camp, I was the one he would go after. I was flattered that his attentions turned my way. He was cute too. We sat together at every meal and secretly held hands at every opportunity. There was one problem. Jeff was about 5 inches shorter than I was, but since I had reached 5'7" by the age of 12 there weren't many 14-year-old boys who reached my height much less surpassed it. However, I was utterly repulsed by the thought of my bending over to receive my first kiss. Even while sitting next to him he was shorter than I was. This bothered me more than the giggling and teasing remarks made by other girls, who I decided were jealous that I had landed one of the few boys at camp. He may have been short, but he was cute.

I befriend a girl named Jan, who was from the same town Jeff was. She told me that I would not be his first kiss and assured me that he knew what he was doing. I told her oh my trepidation of kissing someone so much shorter than I was, but she just laughed. "He's used to being shorter than the girls he dates. Don't worry about it." Somehow that didn't make me feel any better. In fact it had quite the opposite effect.

The last days at camp were upon us and I had still not received a proper kiss from my 'boyfriend.' This wasn't for his lack of trying. I dodged every move he tried to make to avoid leaning over. At one point I was saved by biting horse flies, probably the one and only time I would have preferred to have gotten bitten by a horsefly than kissed a boy.

Finally, the last day was upon us. Our parents would be coming to see us perform and then we would be going home. I was a bit saddened that hand-holding was as far as it was going to go with this young man, but I was relieved that I didn't have to suffer the humiliation of bending over. After lunch Jeff grabbed my hand and said, "Follow me," and pulled me off into the woods. He had obviously planned this and took me directly to a spot that was hidden and beside the little creek, which ran through the camp. We sat down. "Isn't this nice?" He asked. I was getting more and more nervous and not certain of what to say, so I just nodded. I could feel my heart thumping inside my chest and was certain that he had to hear it as well. "Here, lie back," he said and as I started to do so he leaned over me, grabbed the back of my hair, and kissed me.

I didn't know quite what to do. Here I was lying on some sticks with this boy on top of me, his tongue darting in and out of my mouth rapidly. In fact I instantly envisioned a little lizard or turtle's head poking in and out. I wanted to bite it. My eyes were wide open and I realised that they should be shut. Jeff had his eyes shut. I closed them. His hand was rubbing my side up and down almost with the same rhythm that his tongue was going in and out of my mouth. Then suddenly, without warning, he stopped. "There!" he said as if he had completed a chore he was glad to be done with, and he sat up.

We walked back hand-in-hand and my head was spinning. Was that as good as it would get? This was an experienced kisser after all and I was but a virgin kisser. Should I have done something differently? Was I meant to dart my tongue in and out of his mouth as well? Wouldn't our tongues have become tangled if we did that? Was there a possibility of gagging on each other's tongues? All of these thoughts and questions were running around my head as we approached our friends. Jeff high-fived another boy and I sat next to Jan. "Well," she asked, "how was it?"

"Interesting," I heard myself say.

Later, at the concert for our parents I had a solo. I stood in front of the audience of campers and their families and sang, "Time in a Bottle" while looking at Jeff the entire time. My voice cracked not because I was filled with emotion, but because I thought I should be and wasn't. We then said our good-byes and went to our homes. Some letters were exchanged, but I never saw or spoke to Jeff again. I did, however, make certain to practice my kissing technique on a pillow so I would be better prepared for next time.

Cars: Part 1

I don’t own a car, and that’s a good thing. If I were the princess in some fairytale where an evil witch were to put a spell upon me, my curse would not be to fall in an endless sleep or to be locked in a tower guarded by some dragon. No, instead my curse would be an eternity of bad luck surrounding automobiles.

The curse took hold when I was 11 and in the Sixth Grade. It was my first year of East Grand Rapids Middle School, and I had to walk a mile to school (uphill both ways in the snow). The year previous I had been a safety captain at my elementary school. This meant that I did the schedule for and checked on all the other Fifth Grade safeties (crossing guards). It was quite the prestigious position for a 10 year-old. I had to be nominated by my teacher and demonstrate that I had a complete comprehension of traffic safety rules, a comprehension that evaporated the second I started Middle School.

I would go meet my friend Christina, who lived across busy Breton Road, and we would walk to school together. Christina would wait by her front window for me and once she saw me about to cross Breton, she would go get a banana for us to split on our way to school. Then, I would dash out into the street knowing that I had timed sprint perfectly across so that the approaching car would just miss me. Now, keep in mind that I liked to live dangerously at the age of 11, which may explain my stupidity when it came to crossing Breton Road. I did things like climb trees to the very top where the branches were the thinnest and get pulled by a bicycle while on my skateboard or my roller skates, letting go just in time to careen down the steep hill of Pinecrest at about 20 miles an hour. My knees still bear the scars from injuries of these childhood exploits and my foot still bears the scar of my first run-in with a car.

I knew my timing would be perfect as bolted into the street that cold November morning; however, what I didn’t count on was the car turning right onto Breton Road. Suddenly, I was knocked to the ground. The front tire of the vehicle stopped just at my foot, and my tennis shoe came off. To this day I can see it flipping down the street in slow motion, and I remember thinking that I was lucky the car hadn’t run over my foot. Frankly, I was lucky that aside from a cut on my foot I wasn’t hurt at all.

The driver and the passengers of the car instantly surrounded my while I started to cry and blubber apologies. The people helped me into their car, and one of them ran to a house to call an ambulance. It was at this point that Christina left her house to meet me. Having not seen me get hit by the car, she was convinced that I was getting kidnapped and began screaming for her mother.

Eventually all misunderstandings were sorted and the ambulance arrived. I was thoroughly checked for signs of concussion or internal bleeding, and then I was granted the wish of almost every child under the age of 12. I got to ride to school in an ambulance, going top speed, lights going and sirens blaring. Despite the speed, I knew I was still going to miss the first bell, but I had a helluva good excuse. When we arrived at school, I looked up and saw the faces of my entire homeroom plastered to the window staring down at me. I smiled and waved.

The curse went into remission for four years and didn’t show its ugly head again until I had my driver’s license.