By: Nicole Guice

In retrospect, I may have rushed it a little. You know, just a teeny, tiny bit. Now that I think about it, I suppose I fall into the category of "those damn kids these days" - the ones who discover sex early and take to it avidly - the bane of their parents' existence. The fact that I had no desire to wait until I had even found "someone special" (regardless of that someone's age) didn't help, either. Yes, now that I think about it, I probably could have picked a more opportune time, place, and person...but as the saying goes hindsight is 20/20. But, I hadn't really learned that yet. I hadn't learned a lot of things.

Still, I thought I knew it all--I had, of course, read Cosmopolitan magazine, and filed away each tip on How to Make Your Man Beg For More, What He Really Wants in Bed, and 100 Sex Moves That Will Put The Fire Back Into Your Bedroom!. Oh yes, I was ready.

Keep in mind that even with this wealth of knowledge, I had essentially no experience.  This was a pattern with me: to assume that knowledge must be equal to experience. I had been an unfortunate looking child, all glasses and unruly blonde hair - and a sense of style that was never quite on the mark. While I had nothing to bet on with my looks, I did have an almost abnormally astute mind. Academia came so easy to me it was almost like breathing; and this proved to be a passable substitute for social acuity. Though many of the kids didn't like my appearance, they pretended to be my friends long enough to copy my homework, and that was fine with me.  After all, what did I need them for? I already had a core group of like-minded girlfriends that I hung around most of the time – and that was enough for me.

This blissful carefreeness lasted until middle school, when suddenly my friends got boobs (and I didn't), and boyfriends (and I didn't), and kisses (which I definitely didn't). Some of my friends had even been to “third base.” I listened with more than a twinge of envy as they described these "amazing" experiences to me on the bus rides home from school. But no matter how much I learned, no matter what tips I picked up, my chest stayed flat, my hand stayed empty, and my lips stayed dry and un-kissed. I was mortified. I had skipped 2nd grade, and as such I was in an ongoing but unspoken competition with my friends, some of whom considered me somewhat of a baby. I was as smart or smarter than all of them, and my grades far surpassed their's; but no book I could read would speed up nature, and there was no hiding that. While my closest girlfriends became women, I was still a child. And by the time freshman year rolled around, I was getting desperate to grow up.

That desperation resulted in what is still among my most shocking physical makeovers to date. A week before starting school, while on vacation in sunny, confidence-lending California, I dyed my unruly, straw-colored hair a bright red ("intense aurburn" was the name used on the box) and sheared it to ear-length. I stopped wearing glasses. I started painting my fingernails black and I began reading Dante and Marx. I carried an old camera with black-and-white film everywhere, and I traded in my brightly-colored pre-teen wardrobe for black, silky, lacy things from the local thrift store. My shoes had high heels (I was still agonizingly short) and they clicked when I walked--and let me tell you, that click was unmatched in its ability to make me feel older and more important. So, appropriately remade, I began my high school career...

...Only to find that all the black lace in the world couldn't make me into what I had wanted to be: a mysterious, sexy vixen who would have men (NOT boys) begging at her stilettoed feet. At the end of each day, dejected, I took the bus to my favorite place--Bookman's, a used bookstore that is probably the best thing about Tucson—and I stayed there from 4:05, when the bus arrived, until the place closed at 10 p.m. There, I lost myself in my only lovers: books. It was on one of those nights that I met Isaac.

I was walking amongst the tall shelves of books, looking perhaps for Burroughs or Thompson, maybe for Winterson, when I quite literally stumbled onto Isaac. He was kneeling down, and it wasn't until he straightened to accept my mumbled apology that I saw he was only about my height, with short black hair, skinny, freckled arms, and shifty eyes. I tried to escape.  He was not bad looking, but I was on a search for a book, and in my mind books always came first.  However, he insisted on making conversation, and I had been raised with a heightened sense of politeness that prevented me from simply walking away. Eventually, the subject of age came up.

"So...you're in high school, right?"

I nodded as though it should have been obvious. Secretly, I wondered in horror if I looked too young for high school.

"Yeah, I'm 14, I'm a freshman."

Just a side-note: this was a lie. A blatant, bare-faced lie. As I mentioned earlier, I had skipped the second grade; and while most high school freshman would be 14 or even 15, I was 13 - 13 and 6 months to be exact. But I didn't want to have to explain why a 13 year-old was in high school. Nor did I want him to think of me as "a little kid" when this conversation was suddenly looking promising.

"Oh...that's cool. I'm 17, I’m a junior...we're not too far apart." He laughed a little nervously, like he was really trying to convince himself. I couldn't have cared less, really; I was busy wishing he was older; 19, maybe, or even 21.  Just the thought of someone so much older being interested in me gave me the shivers.

So Isaac and I (and I could be wrong about that name.  It could have been Zachary, but I didn't hear him clearly the first time; and by the time I realized I might have his name wrong I was too embarrassed to ask him to repeat it.) wandered over to the art section and started talking about sex.

It didn't start that overtly, but I had this game I liked to play when conversation got dull:  the "ask me a question" game. You can learn a lot about someone's motives with this game.  It's really simple; when silence ensues, just perk up and say "ask me a question, anything at all, and I promise I'll answer."  Now, for the game to work - you have to be willing to answer anything - and I was. After all, most of the time, people didn’t bother to ask me questions. As such, I was aching to tell my secrets, and Isaac (or Zachary) was as good a person to tell as any. So I pitched it to him, exactly like that: "Ask me a question, anything, and I promise I'll answer."

There was a beat, a space in conversation like he was deciding whether or not he really wanted to ask, and then it came, that simple, quintessentially adolescent question, the come-on that was so blatant it would have been offensive if it hadn't been so damn sexy.

"So, like, how far have you gone?"

This was my cue. I was now supposed to act interested and slightly embarrassed, demure but risqué. I tried to sum all that up in a laugh, but I think it was lost on him. What wasn't lost on him was my choice of words: "Oh, I'm a wanna-be non-virgin." Sure, my English teacher would have about died to hear such sloppy sentence composition, but he understood what I meant. Oh, did he ever understand.

He hunched closer in his chair, eyes sparkling, as though I had told him the secret to overnight wealth or eternal youth.
Maybe I had.

"So...then...you wanna?"

It was all I needed to hear. I would have let him lay me down and take me right there, in the middle of the Fine Art section. I managed to keep my voice steady when I forced out a "yeah sure," that I hoped sounded nonchalant.  And then it hit both of us: we had nowhere to go.

Both of our houses were out of the question; it was around 7 p.m., and parents would be getting home momentarily if they weren't already. I was too young to have a car, and he just didn't have one. Tucson, unfortunately, did not have public beds to cater to the raging hormones of its adolescent population...so the only place we could think of was the bathroom of the bookstore.

Now before noses start to wrinkle in outright disgust, I would like to point out that these were not your average crummy public restrooms. They had cream-colored tile floors, paintings on the walls, wooden stall doors that stretched from floor to ceiling, and soap dispensers that were always full. They even smelled nice. And when it came down to it, the men's restroom at a bookstore seemed far preferable to simply waiting for a more opportune time.  Neither of us had any illusions about this being true love, and I think we both knew it was now or never.

So we did it. Right there in the men’s bathroom at Bookman's, last stall on the left.

To this day it amazes me that we only had to stop once because some other patron entered, and the guy didn't seem to have any idea what was going on a mere few feet from him. Nor did the workers at the store seem to notice the two of us walking into the clearly-marked men’s room - or, if they did, they didn't care.

As for the actual event, there's not much that amazed me. My poor boy was not entirely well endowed, and only a small stab of pain marked my passage from girlhood to womanhood. There wasn't even any blood, or not any that I could see. All I really remember about the whole ordeal is a sense of detached curiosity, like "this is it?" I tried to recall all those Cosmo-girl tips I had waited so long to use, but none of them seemed to make much sense when it was really happening. None of them said anything about how to make your first time feel like everything it was supposed to according to virgin lore. I felt cheated; Isaac or Zachary or whatever his name was seemed to be having a grand old time, plopped down on the toilet seat while I raised and lowered my pelvis over his, but all I felt was the strain in the muscles of my legs from doing all that bouncing up and down. When he came he looked like he was seeing the face of God himself, or an image of the Virgin Mary on the stall door behind me--I didn't come at all. I realized about halfway through that I was just waiting for it to be over.

Afterward, we didn't say a word to each other. I busied myself with rearranging my clothes while he disposed of the condom. Oddly enough, it was the throwing away of the condom I found myself regretting; I had had that condom in my wallet for a full six months, waiting; and now it was gone--just like that. Poof.

He was gone just like that, too. I never saw him again--not that I had really wanted to. With the heavy weight of my virginity gone, I was on to bigger and better boys, with bigger, better toys, and real beds (or cars) to play in.
Since that evening I've heard a lot of girls talk about their "First," always with that implied capital letter; their First Time, the Big Bang that, though fumbling and awkward, would always have a special place in their hearts. Forgive the coldness, but Isaac/Zachary holds no special place in mine. And in retrospect, I may have rushed it a bit--maybe that's why I have no fondness for that awkward bookstore-boy. Maybe I just intellectualized it too much, did too much thinking with my head and not near enough with my crotch. Either way, it's gone now and forever, just a memory that holds no particular emotion save for a strange kind of pitying nostalgia. The End of My Virginity: poof--just like that. Maybe the magic lies in the fact that there was none.