I’m no Pollyanna, but I think we’d all like to believe that the physical part of a relationship is not the most important part. We’d all be wrong.

My first kiss with Joe was my first kiss ever. He took me out to our high school football field at night to “look at the stars.” (Yes, we’ve already established that I am stupid.) When we got down to the track, he abruptly stopped, gave me this weird look that I thought meant he was about to puke, but actually meant that he was about to kiss me.

It should have been great. I mean I wanted a swelling trio of violins and light from heaven and sparkles shooting out my toes. I wanted a kiss. Instead, I got a fat, ashtray-smelling tongue shoved not so delicately into my mouth, and amounts of slobber which I still cannot fathom today.

So I stood there and let him swirl his tongue around in my mouth for a while before I, like, faked a hug so I could turn my head, wipe my mouth on his letter jacket, and tamp down my gag reflex.

And the sweet nothing Joe whispered to me was, “You’ve never done this before, have you?”

I couldn’t very well defend myself. I was fourteen; he was seventeen. It was a catch-22. If I claimed innocence, I was a rube. If I claimed experience, I was not only a slut, but also a bad kisser. I went with innocence.

He took that to mean he should give me lessons, so I had to endure another twenty minutes of his overzealous saliva. Shortly, though, his charming friend Kevin pulled up in his shit-can of a Thunderbird and honked the horn. Joe walked up to the parking lot to talk to him and left me on the track, hidden in the shadows. I stood there, by myself, for probably fifteen minutes, wondering if I should stay, or walk up and say hi (although I really didn’t like Kevin at all), or maybe do a lap or two around the track in the dark.

Joe came back grinning—the ass. When I asked him why, he said that Kevin had asked him if he needed any condoms.

I nearly died on the spot, and then when I didn’t die, I wished I had.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my first kiss.