“Do you think you’ll ever have, you know, a *girl*friend?” Dan asked me.
We were eleven, living in the small midwestern city where I was born. I shrugged and said, “I dunno. Girls are *weird*.”
That was all about to change. We grew up on the edge of farm country, and we knew how sex worked, but when the school forced us into a room once a week for an awkward description of the mechanics of human reproduction, it seemed like something was missing. Animals didn’t kiss, date, go to bars, or any of that. Humans had it rough.
My friend Dan mastered the basics first and attained near-legend status for being the first to kiss a girl in fifth grade, and he also broke the barrier of going everywhere short of intercourse two years later. Despite being average — brown-blonde hair, blue eyes, B-student — I was the first to have full intercourse. Overnight I became a celebrity at school. The experience also ruined me, as you will see further in this tale.