One fall afternoon during kindergarten I had discovered what it meant to kiss a girl from overhearing my brothers talk about it.
Around that time, I always ate lunch with a girl named Lily. She had adorable brown hair and blue eyes. She was a perfect match for me and we both knew it. She sat at the table with all my guy friends and me at lunch. In some abstracted way we were boyfriend-girlfriend, or at least we claimed to be, and we wrote cute letters to one another in class.
She was always two people in front of me in line because her last name was Robinson, right behind her was Paula Anderson, and then Smith (me). I swear Meredith hated me because I forever smiled past her at Lily—she would kick me and shove me. Man, I was scared of Paula.
But back at the lunch table, Lily, my male cohorts, and I, sat in a circle. To my right I passed on a secret to my friend Paul. “Lily should kiss Andrew, pass it on,” I whispered. Paul laughed and passed it on.
As time expired during lunch the cat came out of the bag. Lily had heard the news and she whispered in my ear. “During last recess, I will be waiting for you by the gym.” My heart fluttered, and I felt trepidation in my bones. I didn’t even know what trepidation was, but I was about to experience Lily’s wet red lips on mine.
The clock ticked and the bell rang, recess was now in session, and everyone scrambled from their desks toward the playground. It was like a mirage: all the students in the class moved at full speed while Lily and I moved in slow motion, two small blobs drifting toward the location. My friend Harry came with me and Lily brought a friend with her. Harry stood behind me, while Lily’s friend stood behind her and kept watch for administration.
Lily stood patient as a turtle and looked directly into my eyes. I reciprocated; our eyes locked. I stepped closer, and her face became bigger. We were at a threshold, and then we closed our eyes as our lips agreed to meet. Then all four of us giggled as we separated in sequence and ran to the playground. I was a whole new man. I was high on life. The next day in class she and I had a secret.
Time passed and I graduated kindergarten and moved across the hall to first grade. My teacher was Mrs. Payne. I remember half way through the year my friend Paul and I were doing arts and crafts and we played with the supplies. There were some cotton balls and we thought it would be fun to shove them up our noses. So we did. But one of the cotton balls got jammed in my right nostril. The more I picked at it, the higher up my nostril it traveled, and for some reason I was without worry.
My teacher was quick to notice and took me to the principal’s office where I met bald Mr. Walker. I ended up having to go see a doctor later that day. He tried to pry the cotton ball out of my nose with tweezers, but it was crammed up there. I was so embarrassed about the art project gone awry. That left only one scenario: they had to knock me out with anesthesia and surgically remove the cotton blob. The next week at school, my friends thought it was marvelous, so this only pushed me higher into the popular limelight.
Then my parents switched me and my brothers to the local elementary school by our house, Westgate Elementary. I was crushed that I had to leave behind my girl Lily and wingman Harry. I arranged my valediction, and began my new life at Westgate. This was where my neighbor Olivier Mars and I became best of friends. He had five brothers and was the popular kid at Westgate. He and I walked to school together, he introduced me to the people he knew, and I began to become popular once more. And that was when I met Mika Hoff.
This is a letter Lily wrote to me in first grade before I left Holy Rosary.
Lets skip through second grade and move to third grade, where my hyper-activeness caught up with me and I began to make far worse mistakes. Mrs. Flowers switched around the seating arrangement part of the way through third grade, putting Olivier in a different class, so I was forced to make some new friends. The altered seating arrangement allowed me to meet the voracious girl named Mika. She sat directly next to me and we started to get along well. She had black hair and wore a black necklace snuggly around her neck. She and I developed crushes on each other.
Then one day she tapped me on the shoulder. “Want to hang out after school today?” I nodded and continued to work on my prime numbers.
I had no idea something very romping was about to occur.
After school Mika came over to my house with my neighbor Blake to hang out. They brought over a game to play that I was unfamiliar with at the time. The game was Twister, and I was a Twister virgin. Mika pulled the game out of her backpack and set it up. The game did not look anything like a vicious storm. I was intrigued.
We were downstairs with no supervision and we started to twirl the spinner. I ended up positioned spread eagle doing a backwards push up type stance with Mika beneath me. Blake was lucky and got stuck on the edge.
Things escalated and Mika and I wound up in the bathroom downstairs while Blake kept watch outside the door for parents. We stood facing each other and she spoke quietly, “You can do anything you want to me.” I figured it was time I moved on from Lily, and so I nervously remarked, “You start.” She shook her head no. I had a bad case of the butterflies. I felt like a schoolboy. Then I wiggled my toes and proceeded toward her and kissed her, tongue and all. I am sure it was the most pathetic thing ever. We definitely tongue scraped, but we managed not to hit teeth, so that was to our advantage.
This is me in 3rd grade holding up my name card.
Then Blake knocked on the door and blabbed, “Almost done?” Mika and I stopped kissing and were now having a staring contest. She wanted to do more. In a soft voice, she said, “You can do anything you want to me,” but I was a wimp. I pondered if I should chicken out or not.
We stood there and hopelessly gleamed deep into one another’s eyeballs for a good five minutes. Crazy thoughts were going through my head. I did not know what sex was yet, so thoughts of cooties and my mom walking in was as far as my mind could go. Then a thought struck me: was it too late? Had I just been infected with cooties from Mika? I was going nutty trying to collect all my thoughts. I can only imagine what Mika was thinking. Then she walked toward the door, opened it, and it was all over.
Third grade came to a close and I graduated to fourth grade. My teacher was Mrs. Jenkins and I ended up having Olivier in my class that year, along with his cousin Riley. They kept me out of trouble for the better part of fourth grade.
Mika’s home life was rough and she once acted out by attempting to commit suicide by choking herself in class. All in all, I believe I saw this wave of a blue gel penned girl scampering down the school hallways—fleeing onward, trying to escape because of her jangly homelife and dark thoughts, both of which I was into. Not that my homelife was bad, but because I felt like I was a singular soul among my cohorts. We connected like magnets and I tried to be a rebel with her because I was a psycho in my own right, though not as much of one as she was.
Her choking incident was when Olivier helped me realize that she was crazy and the crush for her diminished. I then started to have a new crush or girl, Monica, and we would talk until we were blue in the face.
Half way through fourth grade my parents took my brothers and me to Australia to visit Spencer and Paige Bo, some family friends. I missed two weeks of school because we were there for a month, just after the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. The first week there we were on the beach and I saw a girl with her top off. I fell to the ground and laughed and laughed. That was the first time I had seen two scoops of matter dangling in front of my eyes. I was wigging in the sand, astounded and mesmerized, as my parents giggled at me.
I forever can’t unsee that moment in time. Being exposed to that pair of boobs changed me. I saw a live rack at the age of ten, and there was no going back. Later on during the trip I got an ear infection when I swam through the fierce waves on Bronte Beach. That made me vomit and I was under the weather for most of the rest of the vacation.
Scientists have done studies about people who get ear infections when they are younger and have shown that they are more likely to become distracted and have ADHD symptoms. The vacation was a small clip into the biological changes of my body and may have played a part in the antics I would be involved in when I returned from Australia.
When I got back, I was popular because I had missed school and traveled. People thought it was cool, which was totally unintentional. I was tired of being popular. When I returned my assigned seat was next to Monica, the girl I liked, which was lucky and also unlucky.