Kiss The Girl

(Editors Note: This one's kinda long. Take a bathroom break.)

Three days until 30. Let the random memories roll:

They say you never forget your first kiss or first love or first "other thing," but let's just stick with kiss for today. I was a late bloomer when it came to relationships. It's funny because I started puberty at 10 and had a full mustache before I left elementary school. You'd think I would've had kids by the time I was 14, but I still hadn't kissed a girl. That changed in 9th grade.

My best friend lived across the street and his sole mission in life was to hook me up with a girl. I ended up talking on the phone to this girl that he met. Like all high school flings, we felt we had so much in common because we both liked the same 5 songs that they played on the radio and we both thought Friday was funny, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, we decided to meet up after school to go to the movies. I caught the train all the way out to Silver Spring, which wasn't cheap back then either, especially on a high school budget, and I met the girl.

Instead of going to the movies as agreed, she suggested we go to her house. "Okay, where is that?" She swore it was just a five minute bus ride away. Note: I grew up truly in DC. I knew nothing about Maryland, its bus systems or any of its roads. For that reason I had a rule to NEVER talk to suburban girls. If you didn't live in DC and weren't on a train route then you were short shit out of luck as far as I was concerned. But I liked this girl, so I made an exception.

Forty-five minutes later we were still on that damned bus. "Where the hell are we going?" She said it wasn't much farther. Eventually we got to her stop and we went and sat on some bleachers at a nearby school where we talked about absolutely nothing. It was that nervous conversation that kids have before they kiss for the first time. I went in my pocket to get some tic-tacs at the same time that she pulled some out of her's. We laughed and before you knew it we were doing what we were doing.

It sucked. I don't think she'd kissed anyone before either. Her teeth crashed into mine. She bit me. It was bad. But, practice makes perfect and eventually we got the hang of it. So then someone from the school told us we had to leave so we went to her house. I'd just graduated to kissing and was not looking to adding parenting to my list of skill sets so my plan was to just drink some Kool-Aid or something and go home.

We went inside, she put on a bootleg copy of Set It Off and then (of all things) she started vacuuming. I don't know if she was trying to show me her domestic side, but the vacuuming went on for about 15 minutes. Very weird. So anyway, she got that out of her system and sat on the couch with me. We kissed some more and things got a bit heated and she went from 0 to 100 really quickly. She asked me, "You wanna go upstairs?"

I most certainly do not.

"Don't you like me?" Yes, and that is why I don't want to go upstairs with you. Don't get me wrong, I'm not scared (I was) but my mother had me when she was 15 (she did) and I'm not trying to beat her record. "Come on, I just wanna show you my room. I have a computer." I felt like a toddler being offered candy by a stranger to get in their van. I won't lie, everything inside of me (and I do mean everything) wanted very badly to go up there. I imagined it being like a pleasure paradise and myself about to have a Prince Purple Rain "Darling Nikki" moment ("Sign your name on the dotted line, the lights went out and Nikki started to grind). But, I couldn't do it. Yeah, I was nervous, but it had more to do with me not wanting to mess my life up with a kid. That was always my fear.

Fate took it out of my hands though. We heard the sound of a key going in the door. "Oh shit, it's my parents. Hide in the basement!" What the fuck? Hell no! I'll go out the backdoor. "We have bars on the door and I don't have a key for it. Please go in the basement and I'll come get you when they go to sleep." What!? When they go to sleep? You done lost your goddamned mind. I gotta go home.

I smooth out my clothes, take my hat off and try to look like we were studying or praying or something and in walks (not her parents) her older brother...and three of his friends. He stopped dead in his tracks and just stared at me. I started thinking, "Goddamn I should've gone in the basement. I should've gone in the basement. These niggas are gonna jump me and I have it coming because I never shoulda come all the way out here with this damned girl." I considered just getting up and running, but the four of them spread out like they anticipated it.

The three friends looked at the brother like, "Say the word." In a strange twist of events which completely defies logic and "the big brother" code, he started laughing and said "Damn she getting her man in here. Imma leave yall to it." He went in the basement to grab something and they all left. "He gets on my fucking nerves, nosy ass!" I played it cool like what just happened was normal. She went back in for a kiss and I just sat there kinda confused like, "Does anyone in your family give a damn about you?"

I told her I had to go home and asked her to show me how to get back to the bus stop but she refused. "I don't want you to leave." Rrrright. (Reading off an imaginary script with no feeling whatsoever) Yeah, I don't want to leave either my dearest (insert name), but the fates have conspired that I doth go home. "Stay five more minutes and I'll take you to the bus stop." It was like 7:55 and at that exact moment I remembered something that a friend told me months, maybe even years earlier....Maryland buses don't run 24/7 like DC buses do. I asked her what time the last bus left and she looked down at the floor kinda before saying, "eight o'clock."

I wanted to curse her out, but I needed the map that was in her mind to get home. So I gave her the most passionate Billy Dee Williams-esque speech and kiss I could come up with. It must have worked because she was like, "If we run, we can make it." And run we did. It looked like the end of Ferris Beuller's Day Off. We ran through bushes, backyards, whatever and then we got to the bus stop just as the bus was pulling up. "I'm never gonna see you again am I?" I looked her in the eyes, gave her a deep passionate kiss and said, "Hell no."

I got on the bus and haven't seen her since.