We met in the third grade, the same year I started parochial school at Our Lady of the Rosary. We weren’t friends at first. Not that we weren’t friendly, but we weren’t close the first year, nor the second. K was one of the class originals, the ones who had been together since kindergarten, and I was one of two new kids. K was friendly enough to jump rope and hopscotch with the girls, and cool enough to play basketball with the boys. I didn’t play any of the games well enough to know, but she was good at both from what I could tell. She never wore uniform plaid, or pleated skirts with bike shorts like the other girls in our class did. She wore the same polos and khakis as the boys, and I liked that. She wasn’t like the other girls. Her hair was jet black and cropped, like I imagined Ponyboy’s hair when we read S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. She was skinny and confident and cool. When the other girls grew breasts overnight, K’s chest stayed flat, and her collar was always popped. When I pictured Ponyboy, I pictured K.

There was something about her name that always drew me to her. K was the same name my parents had picked out in the case that either my brother or I were to have been born a girl. I was due on the June 5^th, but wasn’t born until June 25^th. During the nine and a half months she carried me, my mom had a reoccurring dream that she gave birth to a developmentally disabled, red headed, twelve-pound girl. The night she went into labor, she drank a strawberry daiquiri at dinner before seeing Flashdance at the movie theater. By the next morning, she had delivered me, a ten pound, but otherwise healthy, baby boy.

By fifth grade, after two years of working my way into the Catholic school social structure, I had secured a few friends, and Nick had become my best friend. We lived in the same neighborhood, and his house was bigger than mine, so I liked going there. Plus, he had a sister with the most extravagant white wooden Victorian style dollhouse I’d ever seen. Her room was full of lace and femininity – eyelet bedding, white furniture, and shelves lined with Precious Moments figurines. Nick’s room had dark wood furniture and boyish, celestial bedding. His dresser had a large mirror and shelves, which were lined shiny gold and silver trophies and Breyer horses. Nick was the kind of boy I wished I could be, and his sister was the kind of girl I dreamed I might have been.

Nick and I played on the same football team at another nearby Catholic school since our school was too small to have its own team. After practice one night, we talked about getting girlfriends that year. He had already had one or two, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for that kind of pressure. At some point, I suppose when Nick’s point began to belabor, I gave into the idea. I was going to get a girlfriend. Nick gave me confidence, and talked me through the steps of asking a girl out. He told me everything I’d need to do to be a good boyfriend. I’d need to hold the door for her and hold her hand. I’d need to invite her to Golden Skates and find the perfect song to slow skate to. If I did all those things, I could even get my girlfriend to kiss me. And I wanted to be kissed.

Before winter break that year, I constructed my plan to ask K. I had picked her as the girl to ask because we were already friends, and because Nick was going to ask her best friend to go out with him. We could go on double dates, and maybe, even better, we could kiss our girlfriends at the same time.

K and I were at recess, under the bough of the Viking ship – that is what we called the playground set. I don’t know why we called it that. Maybe because it was long and wooden. There, under the bough where we stood, the words “MY DIXIE WRECKED” were carved into one of the wooden beams. I wouldn’t understand what those words were intended to mean until I repeated the carving in college and heard myself say them out loud. When I said them out loud, all those years later, I turned as red as I must have been under that bough when I pulled the note and pen out of the pocket of my Apex jacket.

All the kid’s has Starter Jackets. Nick’s was an Atlanta Braves jacket. I had begged my parents for a Starter jacket of my own, and they conceded with a Phoenix Suns Apex jacket from a J.C. Penney sidewalk sale. Someone had returned the jacket after washing it, and the orange colors bled onto the white. Under sunlight, the white shone pink.

Bundled in her Duke Blue Devils Starter jacket, under the words, “Will you be my girlfriend?” K circled yes.

We didn’t see each other over Christmas break, but we were boyfriend and girlfriend when school started again. For Valentine’s Day, I sent her a candygram with a pink carnation. When I went to her house over spring break, she had dried the flower and placed the brittle stem in a milk glass vase on her dresser. Her dresser was dark wood like Nick’s, but she had no particular decorations except the bubble vase. Her walls were white and her bedding was plain. I was allowed in her room as long as we kept the door open. Her mom was cool and let us do things like that. She trusted us.

K’s mom had long, dark flowing hair. The texture and length were the opposite of her daughter’s short, gelled crew cut. She recorded soap operas on VHS tapes in different rooms of the house, so she didn’t have to pick or choose which ones to watch. They were all her favorites. She wore bright, icing pink lipstick, and loved bubble baths. She walked around the house in silk robes. She even wore her silky robes outside where she smoked boxes of Misty cigarettes on the back porch. The smell crept down the hallway, and into K’s room where we puffed chalky dust and chewed on candy cigarettes from the neighborhood pharmacy. I pretended they were the same one’s in her mom’s cigarette pouch. I held the taste of the air in my mouth and on my tongue in between bites of the candy sticks.

There was a park behind K’s house, and her mom let us walk there while she caught up on her shows for the day. I held K’s thin hand for the first time as we walked across the big chips of dried out mulch to the side-by-side swings. The plan was working.

Nick was right. I did everything he told me, and K kissed me. I sat in the swing and she stood in front of me to initiate it. She leaned into my face while I sat suspended in the swing. She kissed my mouth, pressed her chapped lips to mine. Her lips were rough, but her mouth was soft. She tasted like the second-hand smoke I inhaled from the plumes that poured out of her mother’s mouth. We kissed hard, and she put her face on my hands, like when Johnny kissed Baby in Dirty Dancing. I felt nothing. She didn’t stop, so I kissed her back. Harder. I closed my eyes and pictured Patrick Swayze. When I opened them, it was Ponyboy kissing me. Our tongues slipped in and out of our mouths. We were wet breath and smoke, and I felt something when Ponyboy kissed me, when he held my face. 

When we finally slowed our kissing, we both gasped for air. We both said we felt different. “I love you,” I said.

K laughed. “We should get home.”

One Saturday, before the end of the school year, K’s mom drove us to the skating rink to meet Nick and his girlfriend there. I sat in the backseat, because Nick told me to always let your girlfriend have the front seat. From the passenger back seat, I watched her mom drive with one hand on the steering wheel. She sipped from a Styrofoam gas station cup with the other hand, only setting it down to pick up her burning cigarette from the plastic ashtray on the dashboard. I loved watching the top of that slim cigarette burn while her cheeks sucked the smoke in. She set the cigarette down, then released little cloud rings from her pink painted lips. She was so cool, so sexy. She looked like a movie star, Jennifer Grey even, and I wanted to be like her. I wanted to lick the caked pink residue from her straw and the filtered end of her cigarette. I closed my eyes in the back seat, imagined it tasted like buttercream icing.

I breathed in her smoke, wishing the car ride to never end.

At the skating rink, Nick and I talked to the disc jockey to request songs. I requested the song K and I had decided was ours. We skated hand in hand to the wails of Celine Dion and Clive Griffin cover of “When I Fall in Love.”

“In a restless world like this is

Love is ended before its begun.”

I thought that might be the day Nick and I got to kiss our girlfriends at the same time, but K had other plans for us. After we skated and danced, clammy palms sliding in and out of each other’s hands, K told me we needed to talk. She told me she didn’t think we should date during the summer. We both had plans to travel with our families, and she needed her independence. 

I told her I understood, but I didn’t. We were happy when we were together, weren’t we? Wasn’t this the way it was supposed to be?

K’s dad picked her up, so I didn’t get to see her mom again. Nick’s mom took his girlfriend home, then dropped me off at my house. Nick told me not to worry. He said we’d get new girlfriends next year, and I believed him. He was always right, and I wouldn’t have had my first girlfriend without him.

Summer came. I missed K, but I missed her mom more. Another girl kissed me in a swimming pool during our family vacation to Orlando. K had taught me how to kiss back, and I did when I kissed the girl from the pool. I didn’t picture Ponyboy or Patrick Swayze this time. I picture Zack Morris. The girl from the pool asked me to go to Rainforest Café with her and her family, but my parents didn’t think it was a good idea.

I ran into K a few times throughout high school and college. It’s been 20 years since we saw each other last, but we’re friends on Facebook. When I like the posts of her and her wife, I wonder if she ever thinks of me. I’ve scrolled for pictures of her mom to see if she is as beautiful as I remember, but I’ve never seen photos of her. I wonder if K remembers grabbing my face on that suspended swing, as if she was holding my whole body in the air by my head.

It was K who made me crave that feeling first, the feeling I chased with other women, before I realized only a man could ever make me feel that way again. I wonder if she was thinking of Jennifer Grey when she closed her eyes the way I was thinking of Patrick Swayze. I wonder if when she opened them, she saw Cherry when I saw Ponyboy. I wonder if she’s ever filled with nostalgia when she licks secondhand smoke from the air or sees a certain shade of pink.

– Ryan Walker