I’d always been curious about the tiny little towns I’d drive through with my parents right before we crossed over the mountains into the desert. Many of them were so small that you’d miss them if you blinked. And they were absolutely breathtaking. Surrounded by forests and mountains and beautiful hikes, there was something magical about being in the shadow of a mountain. The air was clean, the light pollution was minimal, and most importantly, I knew nobody there.
My reputation as ‘that weird kid from private school’ had all but eroded by the time I was 17, but my fear and self consciousness remained. And thus, like for most things regarding human interaction, I turned to the Internet.
My first girlfriend who I dated for two weeks at 16 roped me into a terrible teen dating site that was too shy to call itself a dating site where I sifted through a wonderful collection of teen mothers, girls with issues, and teen mothers with issues. Finally, after a year of searching, I found myself having a nice conversation with a cute girl who spoke Al Bhed and was direct enough to force me into asking her out. And so began my summer of an hour’s drive down the most dangerous stretch of road in the state listening to Owen and finding out things I didn’t want to know about that tiny little highway town.
When I first drove down street eight of 10, I thought the little sleepy place I was coming to was cute, if a bit out of the way. A month later, I would know a few of the secrets of that place – barriers of poverty, drugs, and missed opportunity compliment the barrier of distance. On date one, I learned this girl had a history of acid use. I was not deterred.
The girl was 15 years old, but it seemed like she'd lived three times longer than me. Obscuring certain undesirable details, I learned she liked to fight, had slept with an undisclosed number of people (mostly women), and hadn’t had sex in a year and a half. I didn’t think at the time that meant she’d lost her virginity about when she turned 13. I also didn’t think much of her talk of exes. She was smart. Really smart, and that’s what kept me interested. We spent a lot of time at her gay best friend’s house or swimming in the coldest river on the planet, but most of our time was spent in front of her breaking TV playing whatever Xbox games we got our hands on. Things took a turn towards the serious when I beat her at most of the games in her collection, prompting a furious makeout session on her friend’s bed.
She knew I was a virgin and it took a toll on her. She felt bad she was my first everything, I felt bad that I was so inexperienced. This caused us to hold out a little while before we had sex. However, a while to a virgin and a 15 year-old is about a month. Within that month, we saw each other almost every day I didn’t work. My friends and I weren’t talking and I was a-okay with that. After a few McDates and long, arduous yet wonderful drives to her rave music, I was finally invited to stay the night at her house. Her parents didn’t seem to mind, her little sister was too young to know, and from what I’d gathered at the time, whoever could sleep over whenever as long as her parent’s didn’t wake up.
Nothing seemed strange at first. We went through our normal routine, TV, dinner, cuddling. Finally, her parents went to bed. Then her sister went to bed. We started to spoon in the most uncomfortable way possible. This prompted us to move to her room, where I hadn’t really been allowed in the past. There had been so much buildup to the moment where I would finally lose my virginity – pressure from friends, the media, and my own silly notions of what it meant to be a man that I gave her the time of her life, without any sort of consideration to myself. We started off slow and I remember her slipping into her bed without her pants on and thinking, “This is it, I guess.” Things diverged from the way I thought it would go when the blowjob she gave me hurt. From there, we turned to the actual act, which went exactly as I’d imagined. Not great, but not horrid. We did it on the floor and we both ended up with nasty rugburn. We broke up a month after that.
Last I heard about her, she’d dropped out of school. I guess that little town finally swallowed her.
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