Kissing

Sitting on the grass, just outside the lunchroom doors, Nod and I were talking as we sipped our soda. People milled around us like ants scurrying everywhere and buzzing incessantly about the latest drama over so-and-so. Lunch was half way over and we were lazily enjoying the spring sunshine when a shadow came over us.
Looking up, I was surprised to see the adorable boy standing over me, and the skinny one beside him. Nod jumped up and threw her arms around the skinny one and they kissed vociferously like two people that hadn’t seen each other since, I don’t know, the week before. I coyly embraced the adorable boy and the group chattered excitedly for a few minutes. Then, the two surprising shadows announced that although they had only been there for five minutes, they had to go if they were going to make it all the way across town to be back in time for fifth hour at the dread POKY HIGH. So, like any gracious high school girlfriends, we offered to walk them to their car and see them off into the midday sun. As we trudged off past the parking lot, to the old abandoned lot across the street from the school, my brain raced furiously to think of something cool, casual and enticing to say. Unable to procure a witty comment from my fifteen year old brain, I resorted to alternately batting my eyes and the tantalizing slow blink that I was sure I had perfected in the mirror that morning (which really made me look like I had not slept in 48 hours. Very appealing, I know…) and smiling my demure, sweet smile.
When we reached the battered 1980’s brown car with the spider cracks in the windshield, the adorable boy put his arm around my waist and pulled me in close and stared at me with those clear blue eyes. His face got very serious and his tugged me closer to him and went in for the kiss as my stomach did back-flips. Our teenage lips mashed together for the longest five seconds of my life. When he finally pulled away, the skinny one and Nod were giggling from the other side of the car, and I blushed furiously. The adorable boy’s face broke into his crinkly smile and they bid farewell and then drove out of the lot in a cloud of dry brown dust.
As Nod and I walked back to the school grounds, she was grinning from ear to ear, waiting for me to tell her of the wonder of my first kiss. I was a bit torn as I explained things to her. I was expecting the romantic, movie kiss where I am swept off my feet and he dips me in a debonair fashion, not the smashing lips without any tenderness or romance in an abandoned dirt lot with a white trash car. (That’s right Mr. PC, I said white trash!) Nod giggled and explained that it would get better and if I ever decided to *gulp* French kiss a boy, I would love it, Nod being the more experienced of the two of us. Unsure of how I would feel with a boy’s tongue in my mouth, I weakly nodded. Then the bell rang and my surreal life came crashing back into my reality again.


At least since that experience, kissing has gotten better…Oscar movie, debonair, most romantic kiss ever, better. Not every time, but close…