The ##

In honor of the zine First Kiss, which should probably arrive at The ##’s New Jersey bureau today, some of us will share the stories of our own first kisses. It’s also possible that only one of us will. Either way, sit back, cringe, and enjoy the awkwardness. 

It was December, right around the time when the seventh-graders in my predominantly Jewish town had started to tire of the weekend routine: Saturday morning service at any of three or four temples, Saturday afternoon party for that bar or bat mitzvah or another, Saturday evening party in black-tie attire and, if the weekend was particularly brutal, a Sunday afternoon affair, too. Four months into the school year, we were experts. We showed up midway through the bar-mitzvah boy’s haftorah and gossiped in the back, snickering at voice cracks and trading furtive glances at the girls, the mean and pretty ones, wherever they were. Then came the brunch—bagels!—before we were chauffeured to the first party of the day and, with it, the endless supply of cocktail-hour pigs in a blanket and mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers and slabs of catering-hall pizza and fountain sprays of Coke. The deejay’s dancers mingled with teenagers; the boys tried to show off for the 28-year-old women who led the line dances and flirted with the parents for free drinks, and the girls were captivated by the buff, black dancers who sweated profusely and shimmied with the single women when “Lady Marmalade” blared, to the giddy screams of women of all ages. The actual lunches and dinners were often bland—stuffed from the brunches and cocktail hours, boozy on the dance floor, sometimes we revelers skipped supper altogether—and either way, we saved up for the dessert platters: namely, the ice cream sundae bar, with its wonderful smattering of toppings. Photo montages and candle dedications and slow dances rounded out the night, and then we were onto the next one or, if it was the next one, into the dark night, ready to do it again—maybe the next day, and certainly the next weekend.

Katie’s bat-mitzvah party was a Saturday afternooner, not at a country club but at the town’s most decorous catering hall, where, six years later, my friends and I would munch on the same type of cocktail hour hor d’oeuvres before our senior prom. Katie and I had been dating—or doing the seventh-grade version of it, anyway—for a few weeks, which meant that we talked a lot on AIM. Sometimes, we would call each other’s houses and pray that our mothers didn’t pick up, usually coordinating the operation beforehand online. (“OK, I’m going to call now.”) We said hi in the hallway of our middle school.

At bar mitzvahs, this type of dating amounted to ignoring each other for great swaths of time, while, at the same time, being completely aware of the so-called significant other’s whereabouts. Sometimes, this variation of playing hard-to-get led to petty fights, with messages mediated by boyfriendless lackeys. More often, it led to finding each other, pseudo-serendipitously, for the first slow dance. At Katie’s bat-mitzvah, during the opening slow song, I lingered on the side of the dance floor, refusing to dance with anyone else while she partook in the traditional first dance with her father. We found each other for the next song, the decidedly unslow “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy, and we probably grinded, sweatily and unsurely, the way middle schoolers do.

That night, she invited a group of friends over to her house. Her parents and their adult friends continued their party upstairs. After spending thousands of dollars on their precious 13-year-old, it’s hard to blame them—in retrospect, at least. Plus, they were Russian, so they probably pounded a lot of vodka. Either way, we were in the basement—of course we were—watching movies and listening to music and playing spin the bottle, which we favored over Seven Minutes in Heaven. By that time, Seven Minutes in Heaven had become culturally cliched. No one I knew played the game more than they scoffed at it, all the while wondering what it would be like to actually spend seven minutes making out. It was such a long time! Spin the bottle was more tame.

We tracked down a liter of Coke—it only occurs to me now that we probably should have used some well-worn bottle of Absolut, but that would never have crossed our virginal minds—and circled up, no more than a dozen of us. Our hearts fluttered out of our chests as the first person spun. I don’t remember how long we played or if, on my turn, the bottle landed on Katie, sitting, Indian-style, next to me. Whatever happened, we used it as an excuse to put on another movie and escape, just the two of us, to the closet in the back of the room. We walked hand-in-hand. Everybody noticed we were gone, and everybody pretended not to. We shut the door and locked it.

She flicked a switch in the closet, and dust flew off from the one suspended light. It was a closet for assorted toys and mostly board games, so after skimming around for a few seconds, I looked at Katie. She was an inch or two taller than me, with dark eyes and long, brown hair, straightened for this day and flowing past her shoulders down her back. She wore a crewneck wool sweater, green with thin yellow stripes. She looked as I had imagined her. I had dreamed about brushing her hair behind her ear and gripping her head to bring it close, maybe even dropping my other hand by the back of her waist and sweeping her backward, but instead, I muttered something, like, “So, do you want to do this?” before jutting in, my eyes more open than my mouth.

Her eyes were shut, beautifully; she had done this before, once, at summer camp. We kissed for a few seconds, no more, and I asked her how it compared. She told me to shut up, wisely and politely, and we kissed three more times, taking breaks for silent breaths. It was probably five minutes later that we emerged from the closet, and, giggling, she flocked to her friends. Mine were playing foosball, and so I joined them silently. I hugged her when I left, and even though it was around midnight when I got home, we talked about the kiss, on AIM, before retreating to our very much separate beds.

The next time, I promised myself a day later, would be better. I would remember to whisk her errant strands of hair behind her ear before kissing her again, long and hard, and I wouldn’t have to ask her how it was.