kiss
11:44 p.m.<>2002-01-18

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i was 13 when I kissed a girl for the first time.

what I should say is that i was 13 the first time a girl kissed me. i wanted to kiss her so badly it was like a hot ball of lead in my chest, but i didn’t have the nerve to make the first move.

it happened at the movies. the film was ‘heathers.’ which is funny, because her name was also heather. that’s fate for you, working its quirky, ironic little will upon the universe.

heather was in my english class. we had become friends during a field trip to the smithsonian. it was about this time of the year, cold and blustery, and i noticed her shivering as we waited for the bus on the steps of the national air and space museum. i offered my coat, and when she declined, i simply took it off and draped it around her shoulders. i took a lot of teasing from the other kids for that, but she smiled at me and told me i was sweet, and i felt as if i had just discovered a cure for cancer. i’m positive that my chest actually swelled up with self-satisfaction. i was such a little suckup to girls. still am.

looking back, heather was the archetypal all-american girl. norman rockwell and blue jeans and blackberry cobbler and a parade before the high school football game. originally from utah, she was the only daughter of a crew-cut, mormon air force major. she was thin and lanky, with bony knees and pale blonde hair cut into a short bob. with her corduroys, reeboks and rugby shirts, heather was easily mistaken for a boy, which didn’t seem to bother her one bit. or me. i was much too infatuated with her big brown eyes to care much about her crooked teeth or lack of a figure.

besides, I was a 13 year old boy. there is no creature on earth more lust-addled, more angsty, more prone to immediate, profound crushes that leave the mouth dry and the body aching (except, from what jodie tells me, for 13 year old girls; but i've always found that hard to believe). adolescent boys are not much more than walking vats of hormones that slosh around and threaten to spill over at any moment. so i fixated on those big brown eyes that crinkled at the corners when she smiled, and before long i was convinced that i was in love with heather.

i thought about her constantly. in class i would sneak glances at her out of the corner of my eye. i would watch her hand when she wrote in her notebook, the way her small bones moved lightly beneath the skin of her hand. riding the bus home from school, i would stare through the grease smear on the window at the grey suburban landscape, and remember the way she cocked her head slightly while talking with a friend in the hallway. long after she returned my jacket on that wintry day at the smithsonian, i would press my nose against the collar, hoping to catch the lingering scent of her soap or shampoo on the fabric. in an adult, these actions would be the warning signs of a stalker. but in a teenage boy, they're just business as usual, symptoms of the strange and inevitable malady called adolescence.

eventually we became such good friends that there was no awkwardness when i asked her if she wanted to go to the movies with me. my intentions were, in fact, perfectly honorable. i had no intention of trying to kiss her, and certainly held no expectations of her kissing me. all i knew is that i wanted to sit next to her, for two hours, in the close darkness of the theater. i wanted people to see me with a girl and think i had a girlfriend. because teenage boys are also supremely egocentric, and are convinced that the world revolves around them, and that all eyes are constantly upon them.

heather's father dropped us off at the theater. because she and i spent so much time hanging out together, the major had no reason to believe that his daughter and i would be up to anything less than wholesome if he left us alone. so we stood in line, and i bought the tickets and the soda and the popcorn, and we took our seats toward the rear of the theater, in a warm darkness that smelled of old chewing gum.

we didn't talk during the movie, or touch, except when my fingers accidentally brushed hers reaching for popcorn. but it was enough for me to be that close to her, to know that her leg was only centimeters away from mine, feel her presence next to me. and it was great right up until the very end, when the credits began to roll and the house lights came up and people were gathering their coats and heading for the green exit lights. that's when i ruined everything by taking a deep breath, looking into heather's big brown eyes and telling her, in a quavering voice, that i thought she was beautiful.

those words, so fine and pure and crystalline in my mind, turned into blocks of rough wood the instant i gave voice to them. they tumbled out of my mouth and landed at my feet in a clumsy heap. i felt idiotic. my ears started burning and i could feel tiny little pinpricks of sweat at my hariline. but instead of laughing at me or making fun of me or becoming uncomfortable, heather did something that amazes me to this day: she leaned forward slowly, her eyes closing, her lips parted,

and the walls

of the world

dissolved.

or they melted. or they came crashing down in a storm of light and sensation. heather's lips were thin, like the rest of her and her mouth tasted of popcorn, and of sugar from the soda. but beneath those i detected another taste, a soft warm taste that washed through my brain and wiped away everything that wasn't happening at that exact moment. it was like peaches. like apricots. like some ripe, tart fruit you want to bite into again and again. her small tongue was wet silk and slippery velvet inside my mouth. our lips opened wider against each other, i reached up tentatively to brush the side of her face, and i knew that this was something i wanted to do all the time. we kissed and kissed, and suddenly i realized that you could still breathe when you kissed someone, and here i had been thinking that all those movie stars had to hold their breath for long minutes when they shot kissing scenes. heather and i kissed and kissed, and even right now i swear i can still feel the soft puffs of air from her nostrils on my cheek.

dimly i became aware of some whooping and hollering behind us, and we reluctantly broke the kiss. a group of high school kids were laughing and making catcalls at all. embarrassed but grinning like dolts, we left the theater. i found it difficult, because my legs were rubbery from the kissing. i now knew what the expression 'weak in the knees' meant. i took her small, bony hand in mine as i pushed the theater door open into the winter air.

we kissed some more in the weeks after seeing 'heathers'. we were never a couple, never 'going out' in any formal sense. we were just friends who...kissed on occasion. and then we graduated from middle school and she went to one high school and i to another and we sort of lost contact after that. her father the colonel got a new assignment midway through our sophomore year, and so heather ended up moving to texas and that was pretty much the last we saw of each other. i heard some time ago that she had graduated from berkeley, but i have no idea what she's doing now.

she sure could kiss, though.

thank you, heather.

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