Female • 17 years old • Canada
I'd been seventeen for about six weeks. School had let out in late June, and since then I'd been cruising through the days in a cloud of smoke. I was even living on my own because my relatives were visiting from the other side of the world and crashing at my dad's until the end of summer. By mid-July, I'd tried ecstasy twice, seen my dad maybe half a dozen times, and had not gone a single day without being stoned.
I thought I was the shit.
It wasn't planned out — nothing was planned out that summer. I spent my days jobless and bored, chilling with my best friend while she worked her lifeguarding shift at a private pool down the street from my temporary home. One afternoon, we were craving drinks, but the liquor-store workers knew how to identify fake IDs better than an American border cop. Obviously, we decided to shoulder-tap. Long story short, we met some guys who not only bought us drinks, but invited us to a 'party' at their friend's place. The party turned out to be a dud, but on a munchies mission, one of the guys and I ended up hooking up in the rain. Woulda been romantic and all if I hadn't been ready to keel over in hunger.
 Illustration by Thomas Pitilli |
He came over the next day, this older boy whose name I can no longer remember, and we ended up hooking up again. This time, we tried to take it all the way. Note the word tried. Didn't work: bastard was huge, and foreplay nonexistent.
Boy number two played the guitar. He was older, and with my ecstasy-goggles on, he was cute. And I needed to bond. E-tards know what I'm talking about. It was embarrassing.
Things started out great. He really did have magic fingers, and I was convinced that this time, things would work out right. I was wrong. Maybe I was biased because of my first "first time", but guitar-boy was plunged to the hilt and I couldn't feel anything. So I'd gone from the large end of the spectrum to the small. At least this time it hadn't hurt.
No more drugs. Third time being the charm and all, I wanted to be sober.
Eight months passed by. Smoked weed every day, got myself off when I could, and soon I found boy number three. But this one was kind of special to me. Via Facebook, we'd decided to rekindle our friendship from primary school. Chemistry was instantaneous. Two spliffs later, we were on each other like rabbits. And the third time really was the charm.