What I was wearing...the first time I kissed a boy for real.

Chapter 7

… were jeans over tights, ice skates and a pair of woolly mittens.

It was at a skating party, to celebrate the birthday of the boy who kissed me. Van. That was his name. The party was on the frozen pond at the edge of his family’s property. His father and two older brothers had lit a bonfire and jammed torches into the hard ground surrounding the pond. We skated in and out of the flickering light they gave off, but in the centre of the pond where the ice was thick, you were in complete darkness.

That’s where my Van kissed me. We were 12.

I had been kissed before when I was younger, seven and eight, the kinds of kisses that were like small acts of aggression, sexless dares.

This was different, a boy deliberately leaning into me, pressing his face against mine, both of us trying to stay upright, not let our skates slip out from under us.

He was a sudden and unexpected boyfriend. We’d known each other since kindergarten but never really acknowledged each other until the day in seventh grade math – we were in the same A.P. class -- he held up his I.D. bracelet and mouthed, “You want this?” When I nodded, he tossed it over to my desk where it landed noiselessly on my open textbook.

That was it, we were going steady, an official couple at his skating party a week later.

I don’t know if I was all that interested in him but I was in the implications of my new status. Steadying myself against him on that dark ice, I realized I was meant to rely on him to keep me from falling, that he would expect to do such things. The thought sent a shiver of delight down the back of my neck.

I wasn’t sure what else to expect. He was my first ‘real’ boyfriend and I did not know what to think or feel about any of it. I certainly didn’t know how to think about him. That was the surprise, the idea I might have to consider a boy’s feelings, or that boys even had feelings to consider. If I’d had brothers this might have come naturally to me, but I didn’t and in any case with my family things revolved around my mother’s needs and emotions, her moods.

I did wonder why he had chosen me, I went that far in trying to understand him. It occurred to me he might have wanted the importance of a girlfriend for his own party, the standing it gave him. It was what I’d experienced, that sense of rank when we stopped in the centre of the pond and his face met mine, his lips providing a shock of heat. But I didn’t have to wonder for very because two weeks after the skating party he wanted his I.D. bracelet back, unceremoniously holding his hand out for it in the brief interval between math and biology class.