“Accidental virgin”

My first kiss took place on a warm night in June, on a little wooden bridge, underneath which a pond spilled its contents into a gurgling brook. Boughs of evergreen trees danced overhead, fireflies looked to get lucky, and, as if it couldn’t get any better, crickets began to hum “This Magic Moment” and little field mice in sombreros carrying miniature guitars poked their heads out of the grass to harmonize. I was a bit old for it being my first kiss, but this didn’t bother me at all. It was finally happening and that’s all that mattered. And I was in luuuve. (Or so I thought until a few weeks later when I discovered that the object of my infatuation was trying to seek recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records for growing the longest pinky fingernail. “It’s me or the fingernail,” I told him. He chose the project he’d been working on for months: the fingernail.) Anyway, the kiss was a euphoric moment. This was a boy I’d liked for a while, a boy who made animal sounds on the PA at school, a boy who could freestyle, a boy who was so popular he had a following of friends who would unconsciously mimic his gestures and mannerisms. Funny, cool and powerful, he fulfilled all my future-high-school-boy-friend criteria, and here he was kissing me. I never knew a sweeter taste than Bud Light and Wintergreen gum. “This is the stuff of Shakespearian sonnets,” I remember thinking. I went home with a shit-eating grin on my face that night that took days to fade.

So that was my first kiss. Then there was losing my virginity.

This took place in a dorm room. Towers of beer cans loomed overheard. It was hours before my birthday, an age I’d designated as crucial that I lose my virginity by. It was painful, awkward and about as much fun as going to the dentist, but luckily I’d been warned by many a friend that this would be the case, and hadn’t expected anything more.

I didn’t know this boy at all. He didn’t know I was a virgin. We never slept together again.

The next day I remember feeling a bit odd about what I’d done. I was convinced I was the only person I knew who had spontaneously lost her virginity to a random person during a one-night stand. Then I started to meet others. It turned out several of my friends had pulled the same stunt, and simply never mentioned it. Confessions started coming out of the woodwork. One friend of mine bragged that she’d broken her own hymen with her vibrator. Another performed a fuck-and-run. We were all members of what I like to call the Accidental Virgin Club: girls who simply never stumbled upon a guy or a situation where they felt compelled to have sex. We weren’t virgins by choice as much as circumstance. We had all been plagued by nagging complexes about our virginity. It seems that to be a virgin after a certain age one must be either a) very religious b) prude or c) undesirable. I blame the media for this. My virginity seemed cheesy to me, out of character. I blame Jessica Simpson for this. The Accidental Virgins I met weren’t undesirable, prude or religious, they were just girls like me. It was time to say amen to the hymen. The virginity had to go. Emboldened by a few drinks, there was a boy. And then it was gone.

There’s this word I hate that’s frequently attached to the subject of losing one’s virginity. Special. As in Special person and Special moment. The longer a person waits to loose her virginity, the more pressure there is to make it this Hallmark word. The more she begins to panic that when she does finally lose her virginity, the boy who takes it will assume she’s been waiting for him all this time. He might be flattered, he might be freaked out, but either way it places significance on him. For me losing my virginity was not about me and another person, it was about me. And so I lied about being a virgin. The way non-virgins my age several decades ago probably lied about being a virgin.

I had a middle school health teacher who used to lecture us on when it was Appropriate to sleep with someone. “If you are intimate and comfortable to clean up a each other’s vomit,” was her verdict. “I want you to REMEMBER this,” she would say, her voice becoming shrill, her face red, little pieces of spit flying out of her mouth, “Because when you are hiiiiiiigh and hoooorny you aren’t going to care!”

When the time came, I did remember this, but I didn’t care. But not so much because I was high and horny than because I was turning X years old in a matter of hours. And to me, being an X year old virgin was about as shameful as having a boyfriend with a three inch long pinky finger nail.