If I could do it all over again…

I would have saved my first kiss. Instead, I wasted it on a boy with cooties.

I was in 6th grade and he was in 8th. Oh, I thought it was so cool to be ‘going with’ an older boy. He was my first crush, my first hand-holding partner (other than my mom) my first peck on the cheek, my first bicycle handlebar ride-giverer. We had been ‘going’ for 2 years (going where, who knows?) And the time came to kiss like the big people do.

Too bad I was unaware of it.

Before that, we had been exchanging dry, chapped-lipped pecks in the darkness of the stairwell, and I was more than happy with that. Truthfully, I didn’t think there was any other way for people to kiss, (I closed my eyes during those parts of a movie) but apparently, there was.

We stood there, the tips of my toes touching the tips of his toes, my arms around his waist, his around my shoulders, and I closed my eyes and puckered up just like I always did. When our lips touched I started to pull away but he kept insisting that we remain connected. It was an awkward moment, and the thought flashed through my mind that our lips were mashed together like a pair of slugs in wet grass and just as the notion of two fat sticky parasites started drifting away, he did it. He shoved his tongue in my mouth and started moving it around. It was as if the putrid slug on his face moved into my mouth and started dancing. I have to say that it was the grossest, most revolting feeling I had ever experienced in my 12 years of life. The slug idea nagged at me over and over again until I felt like throwing up in my-his-our collective mouths and I would have, if he hadn’t pulled away. Must have been the retching, or perhaps, it was the taste of prevomit. Whichever it was, I was glad to escape his diabolical clutches. I spun around and ran hard, my bare feet slapping the pavement, hand covering the orifice where his slimy, slippy thing had been, and when I got home, I let it go right at the front door.

I couldn’t even make it to the bathroom.

Years (okay, decades) have passed since that time, and I still look back at it with a sort of fond disgust. I can’t say slug lips made me a better kisser, I mean, for all I know I’ve invoked the same thoughts and emotions in other people. But I do know that if I could do it over again, I would have waited for my first real, foot popping, firework sparking kiss.