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5th of April, 1997

We said goodbye to our friend and began our two-mile walk home. Jeez, it was so fucking hot outside. The sun beat down on the back of my neck as I was sure it did the same to Dan’s. That didn’t stop us from holding hands. Cos that’s what you were supposed to do with someone of whom you were “going out” with exclusively. There were times when our hands got way too sweaty, and we’d have to wipe our palms on our jeans. He’d laugh, and I’d giggle nervously as he put my hand back in his again.

It was a long, grueling walk. I knew I was going to get in trouble the instant I set foot through the door. The excuse for my tardiness had yet been imagined—what was I going to tell them? I was supposed to be home hours ago. My older sister most likely narked on me already, anyhow. Damn her. Suddenly we were passing through my little sister’s elementary school. There were only a few blocks left. It had been a week, and yet I still hadn’t prepared for this moment, even though it was all I could think of. Dan’s pace didn’t quicken beside me when my eyes caught his. He just did that weird little half-smile that he sometimes does. One block left. My heart was beating a bajillion times fast. Do it already, I told myself. If you don’t do it now, when? C’mon, you loser.

“So did you solve that riddle, yet?” I asked. I must have surprised him, because he stopped immediately and looked very nervous. He was still holding my hand, this time neither of us caring about the sweat. Oh, God—he figured it out. That fucking riddle. What was I thinking?! …Say something, you stupid…boy!

“Oh, right. The riddle. Yeah, I think I have another guess,” he finally replied. If it were anymore possible, my heart pounded faster.

I’d given Dan the riddle a week before this moment. What he didn’t know was that I stole the riddle from one of my sister’s young adult fiction books about this girl and her friends trapped in a game with the Dark Prince himself.* This Dark Prince gave the girl a riddle that she had to solve before they were all killed. That same riddle was what Dan had to figure out. He was to give me the answer today. “I am just two and two. I am hot. I am cold. I am a pair of numbers that cannot be told. I’m a gift beyond measure, a matter of course, and I’m given by pleasure when taken by force. What am I?” His guesses so far had been “an orgasm?” and “a tongue?” You stupid girl, I thought. Well, there’s no turning back now. Either way, you’re in trouble. Dan was looking down and then his eyes sparked. “Is it a kiss?”

He’s got you now. What are you going to do about it, huh? I took a deep breath. “Well…you’ve told me the answer. But you haven’t yet given it to me…”

He looked confused, and I swear my heart collapsed inside my chest when I thought he was disgusted by the very idea. At that moment I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole. That’s when he smiled and leaned forward and gave me a peck straight on the lips.

——-

And that’s how I got my first ever kiss.

That was the only kiss on the lips that Dan and I shared during that Junior High Relationship. Sometimes I’d kiss him on the cheek before we had to part for class, or when we’d meet with all our friends at the bus stop in the mornings or after school. Dan was my first ever “true love,” so I really thought. At 14, I thought I’d marry that boy. He broke my heart exactly three months and thirty days later, with the “Let’s just be friends” bit. I didn’t eat much for the entire following summer. It was pathetic. I tried everything I could to win him back, and when sophomore year of high school began, that’s when he started to reconsider. Unfortunately I’d done what everyone thought was impossible: I’d moved on.

Girls. We are so naïve.

*I will swallow my pride and admit right now that Dan was not the last of my past boyfriends who were given this riddle as a means of obtaining a first kiss.