Kane Weeks likes to be first at everything.
He was the first kid to learn to tie his shoes in kindergarten. The first of us to use the f-word, the first to get drunk, the first to own a cell phone.
So it was only natural that he was the first to have sex.
It was years ago, and that eventful. Everyone knew about it. I know, because I was the one he had sex with.
Kane’s had a long line of girls since then. But it’s hard for me to forget, since he’s it. The one. The only. The end.
I was his first too. We were fifteen, too cool to play in all the snow that had graced us with a glorious three-day weekend. Instead, we sat cross-legged on the shag carpet in Kane’s room, playing some zombie video game. I kept losing. After my brains were eaten for the hundredth time, I threw down my controller and shouted obscenities at the television, then turned to him, about to ask what we should do next.
As usual, he read my mind. He quirked a quarter smile at me and drew out a mischievous “So…”
That one word, coming out of Kane’s mouth, always means trouble. His blue eyes turned stormy, and his hair fell into his face in a way that recently made my heart flutter. I hated that flutter, hated that the charm I’d been immune to all my life suddenly had an effect on me. At fifteen, he’d never had a gangly or awkward day in his life. He said, “Don’t you ever wonder what it’s like? What all the talk is about?”
“Um. What are we talking about?”
“You know,” he whispered, checking the door. “It.”
Oh. It it. It consumed everyone at the school like the plague. Everyone spoke about it, whispered about it, joked about it. You couldn’t avoid the subject, but I did my best. In a lot of ways, it was even scarier to me than that clown in Stephen King’s It.
But nothing scared Kane.
“Sometimes,” I said. I did wonder, vaguely. Mostly I fantasized about having my first kiss with some debonair Prince Charming, and occasionally my mind would stray past that to things I’d only seen in movies. But Kane was used to kissing. He’d had girlfriends since fifth grade.
“So let’s do it,” he said.
I didn’t always blindly follow Kane Weeks. But he was my best friend. We didn’t have to swear blood oaths or cross our hearts; we trusted each other, the way you’d trust that your welcome mat would be under your feet the second you stepped to your front door. Whatever he was saying, I was usually thinking. We’d played doctor when we were kids, him groping under my shirt and making me giggle because I knew it wasn’t right but it didn’t feel all that wrong either. So I agreed.
“Here?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
Not that we would have gone anywhere else. The tension in my home suffocated me. His house was the only place we ever hung out. The door to his bedroom was closed. Even so, I could hear his dad down the hall, rattling the keys on the laptop in his office. His dad rarely left that office. Dishes piled up in a fortress around his desk, the smell of stale oatmeal and rotting fruit sometimes wafting down the hall. But Kane’s room was like a trophy showroom—dozens of little gold figures wielding baseball bats stared down at us, our only audience.
Kane untied his sweatpants. I undid the zipper on my jeans and pulled them off, hiding my panties in them as I neatly folded my pants at the foot of his bed.
“Now what?” I asked. I looked at his penis and started to get scared because I’d never seen one that didn’t include arrows pointing out the scrotum, the sperm duct, and other anatomical parts I couldn’t quite remember. He was looking at me too, at everything I didn’t have. Not in a lustful way, like in movies—he craned his neck and cocked his head to the side with scientific curiosity.
He told me to lie down, so I did. He climbed on top of me and told me to spread my legs. He weighed a ton. Suddenly, his body was so much more than a picture in a textbook. It was between my thighs, poking me. I had to stifle a giggle. I was pretty sure that while it was okay when I was seven and we were playing doctor, giggling wasn’t appropriate now. Having his skin against mine was no big deal because we were close, but he’d never been there before. “Is that the right place?”
“Um,” I managed. The right place for what? “I don’t know.”
“Geez, Hail. Haven’t you ever watched porn?”
“No,” I mumbled. Had he? He probed and prodded against me, and I finally had to tell him I didn’t think he was in the right place after all. Frustrated, he moved his hand between us and guided himself closer, his eyes never meeting mine. He pushed again. This time, he got it right. It didn’t hurt. He sank into me like a hypodermic needle without the pinch, like the tampons I’d started using earlier that summer. Then he stayed there, bearing down on me for the longest time, until his heartbeat and the clattering of laptop keys all mingled together and I imagined being so flattened like Silly Putty that he’d have to peel me off his sheets later. The sweat coming through his T-shirt soaked my stomach.
“Oh shit,” he’d said before I could ask him what was supposed to happen next. More doubt crept in. I’d helped Kane on many of his adventures—trying to sail his raft in the retention pond out back, making barbeque-sauce-flavored ice cream, holiday caroling to make money for a trip to Disney (we made $3.50, and most of that was from our own parents)—but this was certainly one of our stupider ones. He pulled off me, looked down at his sheets, and grimaced. “Whoa.”
I could’ve asked him to kiss me. He would’ve, maybe, because I never asked for much. But for some reason, that seemed scarier than what we had just done. I knew his mouth much better than the part of his body that had been inside me. Those parts we could hide afterward—forever, if we chose. Go on with our regularly scheduled lives and pretend it had never happened between us. But as I scooted up to the headboard and reached out for my pants, I realized how backward it had been. I’d never had a real kiss, but I’d had sex.
But this was what everyone was talking about. I figured that if sex was that, then kissing probably sucked hardcore.
“Is that all it was?” I’d said to him breezily when he sat on the side of the bed and leaned over to retrieve his underwear. “Hardly seems worth the buzz.”
We never talked about it after that. It was like a footnote, something that I could almost believe hadn’t happened. After that, he went back to having a steady stream of girlfriends, so I guess it was worth the buzz, considering the way they lined up for him, and the way he never turned them down.
But to me, he was just Kane—nothing and everything at once.