Firsts

IT TOOK ME EXACTLY TWO DAYS of college to be caught with my pants around my ankles, but not in the way you’re thinking. Not in a good way.

On our second night of school, my new roommate, Joyce, thought it was safe to change from jeans to sweatpants in our room, which was on an all-girls floor, with our door propped open—we were waiting for our new neighbor friends, Colleen and Lacy, to come over to watch The O.C. with us—so I decided I did, too. But Joyce is much smaller than I am, and more agile, and maybe those aren’t really the reasons it turned out like it did and it was just poor timing, but I do sometimes have trouble managing my limbs efficiently. This is one of the main problems I keep having: I can almost never pull off the things my friends are able to pull off. There is a reason I almost never take risks, and that is because I know they will end badly for me. I have no evidence to the contrary.

But I was too thrilled with the new permanent-sleepover feel of my dorm—we had all hit it off so quickly, especially a smaller group of about six of us—to think clearly and self-defensively that night, and so our door was still wide open when my jeans were off and my sweatpants were, at best, around my ankles. And that moment was the same moment when two of our building’s cute, male sophomore resident assistants—one of whom I had developed an instant crush on during moving day, when he (because it was his job) helped carry boxes to my room—walked by our door on patrol. I yanked my pants up and kind of tried to jump backward out of view, but obviously it wasn’t done quickly enough. My day-old crush, my beloved, stranger RA said, “Whoa, sorry,” and averted his eyes, holding out his arm to protect them as though I were a solar eclipse. If this were Cosmo magazine, we would have started dating four days later. As it was, we never looked at or spoke to each other ever again.

And that’s more or less how I set the tone for my dating life as a college student.

That was my wild and crazy second night of college. Rylee’s—the actual wild girl across the hall—involved a lot more puking.

It was our third day of orientation and she had apparently gone out to a fraternity party the night before. Already the gossip gears were turning: “Can you believe she had to be carried back by one of the guys from Theta Chi?” “I heard she had, like, eighteen shots.” While Joyce and I had stayed in watching TV and either successfully or unsuccessfully changed into sweatpants without being seen, depending on which of us we’re talking about, Rylee had gone to a real, genuine, college party. She had a real, bad hangover. Though I had sort of gotten a little drunk with my high school friends a couple of times that previous summer—a half shot of vodka in an entire cup of Fanta—I had never looked the next morning the way Rylee looked now, when a few friends and I stopped by her room to see how she was doing. Cocooned in her bottom bunk, she looked like a mess—pale, stringy hair, dark makeup smudged under her eyes. She looked terrible and cool at the same time. It was hard not to be drawn in by the spectacle of the first girl on our floor to get into something like trouble.

We asked her how she felt and she said, “I’m okay,” in a voice much smaller than I expected. She seemed embarrassed by the whole thing. My floormates said they’d stop by again later and walked away, but I hovered for a second. “Do you want to watch a movie or something?” I asked her. She smiled. “Sure.” I went back to my room on the other side of the hall and grabbed A Knight’s Tale, which turns out to be pretty much the best hangover movie ever. It’s extremely weird and kind of dumb, and a lot of it doesn’t make sense, but there is Heath Ledger, tanned and dirty, and all you have to do is lie there and look at his jawline and hair. He had really great, soothing hair.

I wanted to be Rylee’s best friend right away. She was lively and weird. She was curvy but tomboyish, wearing T-shirts and sweatpants almost constantly, without makeup most days, and with her chest-length yellow-blond hair in a messy bun. I don’t mean messy bun in an artful, Vogue-y way. I mean actually, incredibly messy. She liked Mario Kart and kickball and staying up until 4:00 am talking about philosophy. She mostly seemed to eat just Pizza Lunchables and M&M’s. She liked partying and was completely unafraid of interacting with guys, who all seemed to be crazy about her. At the very beginning, we had just two things in common: our sense of humor, and a crush on Aaron.

But I had a crush on him first.

I claimed my territory—as if that’s something that can really be done—before she did. I remember it very clearly: “I think that boy is sort of cute,” I whispered to her, just yards away from him in the student lounge. She nodded, and looked at him like she was giving him a second thought. “Totally.”

In the beginning of the year, our floor of girls and our neighboring floor of boys were so ecstatic to be away from home and around all these hormones that we overlooked a fair amount of personality incompatibility and became a group of twenty people who were all best friends with each other. We ate our meals together, went to frat parties embarrassingly early together, and paired off in insensible couples together. On the same night I got legitimately drunk for the first time—on something called “jungle juice,” of course—so did my very tiny pageant-queen-from-the-country friend, who then proceeded to make out with an emo skater boy, date him for two weeks, and break up with him via a two-page handwritten letter slipped under his door.

It was a weird time.

So I may have told Rylee, repeatedly, that I thought Aaron was cute, and I may have flirted with him to whatever minimal extent I could manage, but because we were all in love with each other to some degree, Rylee came to think he was cute, too. And she was going to actually do something about it, which apparently works out better than my preferred method of willing my romantic daydreams to become realities. (“Why does he literally never come to my door, wet from the thunderstorm, to tell me ‘It’s always been you’?”) She started staying up very late with him and his roommate, getting to know them better and playing video games in their room, getting things accomplished well after the hour I decided I needed to go to bed. My hyper-disciplined need to be a functional human during the daytime has always gotten in the way of my nights.

After either five minutes or about a week and a half (I couldn’t tell you the difference, it was so quick) of Super Mario Brothers–themed trash-talking, flirting behind shrubbery during our dorm floor’s games of capture the flag, and one or two tentative hand-holdings, Rylee and Aaron started “going out.” (What is this term? Why do we even use it for anyone under the age of twenty-five anymore? It doesn’t describe what is actually done, which in college is sit at library tables together, grind exclusively with one another in frat basements, and make out a lot. Nobody is going anywhere.) I learned of this unpleasant development not from Rylee herself, but from two of our friends who knew of my (yes, uninformed) feelings for Aaron. They were my messengers, and I really did want to shoot them.

I heard a knock on my door and I answered it to find Colleen and Lacy standing there, furrowed eyebrows and heads tilted to the side. They were all simpering with very deliberately sympathetic faces and gestures, but it seemed to me they weren’t not enjoying being the bearers of bad news. (It’s like that a lot, isn’t it? It’s not about wishing ill on anyone, but rather just enjoying having a task to accomplish. I think.) I hated them for that, but of course, in that moment, I hated Rylee more. “Aaron and Rylee are dating,” they were saying. “We are SO sorry.” They hugged me cautiously, the way you do when you’re simulating what you think good friendship looks like because you’re only really a fraction of the way there. When they left, I walked across the hall to the bathroom—the place I always go to deal with feelings like the ones I had then—and cried in a stall, imagining myself as the tragic heroine of an ultimately uplifting romantic comedy. It is always helpful, whenever you have to cry a lot about something, to put the additional pressure of wanting to appear movie-like and desperately, morosely beautiful on yourself.

A little later that afternoon, Rylee came to my room to provide me with a live update of her relationship status. I was sitting on my top bunk bed, which really helped establish the symbolism of me getting on my high horse when she told me what was going on. She knew some vague boundary had been crossed, at least in my mind. She came to my room because she knew I’d be upset, but I don’t think she completely understood (or cared) what about this change bothered me. We’d known each other less than a month; what did she owe me, if anything? At the end of our brief conversation, I said to her, “I can see where your priorities are at.” She crumpled her face, but it was a hollow gesture and we both knew it. An introductory drama course could have been taught out of my dorm room for all the faux emotion on display that day. Has anyone ever actually been able to guilt-trip a friend into breaking up with her new boyfriend? I don’t think that happens, but not for lack of trying.

So I was really, really mad for a few days when Rylee didn’t break up with Aaron on the spot, or at least apologize like she meant it. It almost derailed us before we ever got anywhere. It seemed she cared more about dating a boy than she did about building a friendship with me, or with any of the other girls on our floor, and that was everything I’d ever known all over again. I had liked him, too, and still did, and she knew it. And though a sizeable portion of my thoughts might have gone to him in those few weeks, almost none of my actions did. Those were reserved for my new friends, the people I was drawn to instantly. I wanted to like a boy, but even more than that, I wanted to love these girls. Rylee in particular. So I dropped it, because I was never very good at holding a grudge, and anyway there was nothing left for me to do about it.

But because she was starting a new relationship and doing the things that go with it, and because my friends were finding guys to date or to at least make out with at parties, I started to hear a (imaginary, obviously!) tiny whisper in my ear. It said: Kiss anybody.

Kissing someone became very important to me all of a sudden because, technically speaking, I hadn’t done it yet. Yes, there had been a fake wedding with a neighborhood friend way back, but even I was not going to try to make that count. Most of the time I didn’t really care about the fact that I was eighteen with a pure and celibate mouth, but being around so many girls and boys and knowing how frequently they were touching each other convinced me that freshman year was the time to do something about it. I wanted to get it over with, which is always a good way to ensure that doing it, whatever it is, will fall miles short of your expectations. I did not know this yet. I assumed that my first kiss would be, if not magical, then at least pleasant. How could it not be when everyone around me was so cute? My tiny, central Illinois college had an above-average number of extraordinarily good-looking boys. Tall, too. Well dressed and brilliant, every one.

Of course, hardly any of that was true, but I was living in that glorious early stage of moving somewhere new when you think that you’ve landed in some treasure trove of beautiful perfect people, before that terrible other stage when you meet most of them and realize you were sorely mistaken. Walking around campus those first few days of my brand-new life was like being a kid in a candy store, if the kid kind of wanted to do inappropriate things with the lollipops.

When I was younger, I had thought that my first kiss would be transformative. I’d always imagined it taking place in the snow, at night, after sledding down a hill with the boy I liked. I was big on imaginary kissing at bottoms of hills. He’d ask me if I’d like to go to the park with him after school, and we’d ice-skate for a little while before finding an old plastic sled near the parking lot. I don’t know why it always had to be the case that we found it, rather than just brought one along with us. It just seemed more romantic and lucky to leave that part to “chance.” So we’d find the sled, and run for the big hill on the other end of the park. He’d sit in the front to protect me from the flying snow, and I’d sit behind him with my arms around his middle. At the bottom we’d tumble off the sled, he’d sort of roll on top of me, and we’d do that romantic comedy thing where two people “fall” on each other and look into each other’s eyes and decide that, as long as they’re in that position, they might as well fall in love. Then he’d kiss me, and I’d hear fireworks. Then we’d break apart and look up into the sky and there would really be fireworks.

The way it actually happened was that I planned a weekend trip to my friend Jess’s college in Wisconsin, got drunk, and made out with somebody I didn’t particularly like (or… know), and it was gross, and then I never saw him again. So I was only off by a little.

When things aren’t working out quite the way we Americans have dreamed, we go west, and that, I guess, is what I was doing by taking my make-out mission from Illinois to Wisconsin. (Fine. Northwest.) Things weren’t lining up at my own school in that first month and a half, but anything could happen out of state, and it could stay exactly as secret as I wanted it to. Whatever I did in Wisconsin would stay in Wisconsin. It was like traveling across the country for some obscure and minimalist cosmetic surgery. I could get it done and come back looking just slightly different, and people would notice, but they wouldn’t be quite sure why. I expected to return to campus a changed woman: wiser, more mature, glowing. Women who do sexual stuff are always glowing.

On the Friday night I got to Jess’s dorm, she and her friends and I piled into her tiny room to pre-game and play Circle of Death, which is a game that confuses me as I’ve never met a person who really enjoys it, but we all played it all the time anyway. Though the anxiety associated with trying to make any given night into THE night was building with every moment, everything was mostly normal until Will, aka one of the Lisa Frank boyfriends from my youth, showed up to join us. I was like, “What is this, some Ebeneezer Scrooge/Ghosts of Fake Boyfriends Past situation?” I said that inside of my head, though. To Will I just said, “You’re… you, right? From elementary school? Oh my God, crazy, how have you been in the last… ten years?” Apparently he just grew up and went to college and had his own life outside the pages of my diary. He was still sweet and still cute. I didn’t consider him a potential first kiss, though—he was one of those boys who perpetually blush and was thus far too innocent. Also, it would have probably brought up a lot of unnecessary emotional baggage from the second grade. But his appearance felt momentous nonetheless: Here I was trying to arrange my first-ever adult liaison, and one of my first childhood loves had shown up to give me his (unspoken) blessing. My own redheaded guardian angel of kissing.

I met the perfect candidate soon after, at an apartment party that I followed Jess and her other friends to. His name was Eric and he was Jess’s friend from class. “He’s kind of a dog,” she had warned me earlier, while going through her brain’s Rolodex of prospective make-out partners. This is only a problem for a boy you’re hoping to date. It’s pretty much perfect for a boy you’re hoping to furiously make out with for two minutes, tops.

Eric was cute—not my type, but cute. He was blond and tall-ish and frat boy–looking—you know, like, thick. Sturdy. He was also very charming. We probably didn’t talk about much of anything, but whatever it was seemed really amazing during the parts where he was brushing hair off my face. I approved of that wholeheartedly. Angrily moving my own hair off to the side all those years had been a big mistake. When someone else did it, it felt like little birds carrying your hair away in their little feet. It felt like Cinderella. (Fine, I was drunk.) Since my main flirting tactics are to a) make fun of the person and b) run away if you feel like he’s looking at you too much, I have no idea what I was doing aside from sneakily shaking my hair back into my face. I thought I was being pretty clear about my intentions, but I am always wrong about everything. Eric left the party after about half an hour.

I asked Jess to explain to me what happened, and she said she’d give Eric a call to see what he was up to then. It turned out that he had gone to another apartment in the building to get drunker and higher. He asked Jess to put me on the phone. I was pretty drunk by that point, too, so I was all grabby for the phone anyway. “Let me talk to him,” I said, with more authority than was reasonable. I didn’t know him at ALL, but that seemed unimportant. We don’t need to go into what was said, but I know that I committed one of the gravest of alcohol-induced sins, which is to yell and slur your words at the same time. I asked him where he went and why he wasn’t there any longer and he, flirting under the influence, gently reprimanded me for seeming “not all that interested” when he was at the party with me. I told him to come back. I was getting my “first kiss” over and done with if it was the last goddamn thing I ever did.

It was all very touching.

While we waited, Jess and I and a few of her other friends went to lie about in the hallway, to escape the overwhelming heat of too many partiers in too small a space. I was sitting against a wall with my knees pulled up to my chest when Eric showed up looking a little worse for the additional consumption, but still cute. He said hi, and I said hi, and then he put his hands out for my hands and pulled me up off the ground, which was about all the convincing I needed. Sometimes it’s really nice to just be picked up.

We went back into the party and Eric and I smushed (not in the Jersey Shore sense) against a wall by the door. He put his arms around my waist and just kind of looked at me expectantly. I didn’t know why I had to be the one to take action, and I was a little too aware of the dozens of people surrounding us in the very well lit apartment. But we looked at each other again, and finally just sort of mashed our faces together. It was about as hot as that sounds, which is to say, it wasn’t hot. It was a little bit awful.

What do I remember? My mouth feeling like it was too full of tongue. My tongue protesting, “I thought we had an arrangement, I was perfectly fine in here by myself, I don’t know what’s happening or who this is in here with me but I’m not too fond of this and I am a little numb anyway and honestly I’d just rather be going to bed.” I remember cameras flashing (!!) and squeezing my eyes closed tighter, willing them to stop. (Are those pictures out there, somewhere? Mail them to me. No, burn them. No, mail them to me.) I remember thinking, “How long must I keep going with this? Will there be a clear signal when it is time to stop? Can I breathe? Am I breathing right now?”

It probably lasted all of a minute or two, which was about a minute or two too long. When it was over we both kind of looked at each other and laughed, and I scurried away to find Jess and apply first aid ChapStick, and that was that. He and I waved good-bye when Jess and I left the party, but neither of us had anything left to say. (What do other/normal people talk about right after they kiss? I have yet to figure this out.) Ours was a brief and joyless affair. It was purely utilitarian and very spitty. I don’t think either of us can really be blamed for how disastrously bad it was (though later rendezvous would lead me to believe that maybe I could blame him a little bit, just for the vigorous tongue usage). It was much worse than my expectations, but I also knew that my expectations were pretty much bullshit. At the very least, I had done what I had come there to do: I got my first kiss done and over with.

I felt exactly the same after as I did before, and that’s the only part that made me feel bad: that I had let this small and quiet pressure (from nowhere I could even definitively place) get to me, and make me think that there was some need to rush or feel bad about what I had not yet done. It gives the “first” label so much more credit than it is due. When Jess and I would recount the story to our other high school friends over winter break, a few months later, Leigh would tease me about having had my “special first kiss,” in a way that felt infantilizing and mean. “You’re one of us now, sort of,” is how it sounded. “But you barely made it.” She’d never say it directly. Nobody (or almost nobody) would, because I don’t think that anyone thinks they believe that hookups, of whatever base, or relationships with guys can be measured like defining achievements. But you know what? The number of people that do—despite what they say—is so much higher than I ever realized. That’s both the worst and the most important thing I learned my entire freshman year of college.

And I didn’t—I don’t—want to be like that. So I stopped rushing. And I went back to my own school for the spring semester, with my own new weird and uncomfortable and funny make-out story to contribute whenever the topic arose in the cafeteria. That part I did love: having something specific and adult-like to share with my new friends. But racing out and around campus to rack up hookups (without really wanting them) just to have something to talk to my friends about? That’s just plain lack of creativity.