First Kiss

Writing my first post is a little exciting and awkward. Kind of like my first real kiss.

The first girl I kissed was Megan (name changed). She was a nice girl with a pretty smile, a cute wardrobe, and a broken home. In retrospect, she’s probably the girl most of my guy friends had their first real kiss with, but we didn’t know it at the time. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and talking about not having properly kissed anyone wasn’t a popular topic of conversation. We talked about laser tag.

But Megan and I were going to the movies. What movie? The star-studded, action/romance “Pearl Harbor,” of course. We went to play putt putt the previous weekend, and while neither of us termed it a “date,” I had high expectations for the movie based on prior experience with popular culture. Teenagers make out in movie theaters. The thing was, though, that Megan had invited a lot of people to the movies. She couldn’t plan on kissing me with a bunch of her friends around. And so with this mind set, I proceeded to do what I had done over the previous decade of going to movie theaters: I walked to concessions and purchased a 16 ounce container of Butterfingers and a medium Sprite. As an added bonus, since I bought the tickets, she offered to pay for the snacks. She got water.

Butterfingers in hand, I followed our crew of high school friends into the theatre. We settled into a couple rows of open seats near the top of the stadium seating. It wasn’t the very back row which would have all but guaranteed a make out session, but it was close enough that kissing remained a faint possibility. But then the movie started and kissing ceased to be an option. It didn’t make sense to kiss during a movie—especially when said movie had explosions in it.

But then the explosions stopped and Megan leaned against my shoulder. This was going to be the start of something good, so I did the only reasonable thing: I began scarfing down my remaining Butterfingers (a little over half the box) so I wouldn’t have any left over at the end of the movie or have to interrupt the make-out session to eat some more. Butterfingers have a way of getting stuck in your teeth when you eat them quickly. Luckily I had my Sprite. I used my soda as a mouthwash and the straw as a rudimentary tooth pick—very subtle, very classy. My mouth was mostly clean, and I put my arm around Megan. And nothing happened.

Nothing happened for so long, in fact, that when Megan offered me an Altoid, I declined; I’ve never been the biggest fan of Altoids. And as soon as she put the box away, she put her head in my lap and looked up at me, and I realized why she offered me an Altoid. Hindsight’s 20/20, and I didn’t want to ask her to get out of my lap to get me a mint, so I took another swig of Sprite, and leaned over for my first big kiss.

It was pretty awesome. It had taken long enough in coming, I thought, but I was finally making out with someone. Unfortunately for both of us, my Sprite hadn’t completely cleaned my mouth. There were still pieces of Butterfinger I hadn’t been able to dislodge that all of a sudden came free. And I had chugged my Sprite. I needed to burp. I didn’t want to burp in her face, but I didn’t want to stop making out, so I did one of those under-the-breath burps that you sometimes eek out when you’re at church or a big family dinner with the grandparents. It tasted like a minty peanut butter disaster with citrus undertones. After a while, we took a quick breather. Megan offered me another Altoid, which I accepted, and we got back to business (with a persistent peanut butter flavor).

And then the credits were rolling. What the heck? Making out was great, but I had paid to see a movie. I know “Pearl Harbor” is supposed to be one of the quintessential bad movies out there, but there’s a part of me that’s still disappointed I hadn’t seen it. Megan and I disentangled ourselves, got up from our seats, and then I remembered we were sitting in a row full of people I knew. Maybe they hadn’t seen anything? Nobody said anything as we walked out, so I thought that I might have just been in the clear—or at least people were being cool about the whole thing. Megan went to the restroom. And then Adam, a friend-of-a-friend who I had known since fourth grade, ambled up to me with a big smile on his face. He held up his hand. “High five man!” I blushed a little, said I didn’t know what he was talking about, and walked outside the theater. Megan met me shortly thereafter, and we said goodnight with a small kiss. I think we went on one or two dates after that night, but that was my first real kiss.

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