Nine years passed between my first kiss with a toy and my second kiss with a boy (dans la mode française, ooh la la!). At this age, I was never allowed out of the house without adult supervision, so when my middle school pals were going to the skating rink or the park on their own, I was never allowed to go. American parents weren’t as strict as mine, and I envied the casual freedom of my peers. Sneaking out for even these age-appropriate activities came with a big risk of getting caught and beaten for it. I think this dynamic pushed me to take bigger risks, to make any potential discovery worth the physical abuse that would accompany it. By 14, I still wasn’t allowed to be alone around boys, but I was already drinking, smoking pot, and dabbling with snortable drugs and psychedelics with my female friends, who knew well enough to put their halos on around my parents. Yet, I had never even had a playground romance or gone on a real date with a boy.

I wasn’t naïve. I became aware of sexuality (and therefore my own sexuality) at an early age — in a completely baffling contradiction, my parents never censored media accessibility. When I was more or less the same age as that of the aforementioned canoodling, our father was then in the habit of dragging the entire family to the local 3-screen movie house for a Mexican fichera double feature. Fichera sex comedies are, in their worst iterations, misogynistic, exploitive pieces of machista garbage. I eventually grew bored of “those naked lady movies” (as my parents say I called them) but my complaints were dismissed as childish whining. In later years, my parents would chuckle softly when they recalled how I would wear my pajamas to the theater, so quickly did I fall asleep once we arrived. But he didn’t just limit our exposure only to ficheras — we saw every film that came through that theater. Mainstream Hollywood films aren’t really that different, though. In addition to all these movies, my dad’s subscription to Playboy and a trove of 1970's sex manuals which my parents hid (poorly) in the garage completed my sex education. By the time I was 12, I had a sophisticated knowledge of sex, sexuality, and the biology involved in creating life, but I still had no desire or interest.

By the time I had my second kiss, that wasn’t true anymore. I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity now placed before me: to be alone with a guy I liked a lot, who was a little bit older, and whom I thought was really smart and funny. Like my first kiss, the house was quiet, and we were alone, and the stillness didn’t last. Over the next hour, he managed to mark off a lot of ‘firsts’ in the record book. I lost my virginity underneath the pool table in my parents’ garage while we listened to the Velvet Underground & Nico. When I look back on this event now, I picture [REDACTED] but I picture what I know he looks like at this very moment.

After this, I got better and better at hiding my secrets, until the obfuscation became second nature. I hid all my dangerous and risky behavior behind a 4.0 GPA and demanding extra-curricular activities. On paper, I was a model student, and although I was a bit of a smartass in class, I never really got in any trouble, and this appeased my father. Still, as my high school years progressed, boys were still never allowed over at my house, but my oblivious parents made my dyke friends feel welcome, which was fine since the girls kissed in more adventurous locations than the boys.

By my junior year, the dynamic in the house shifted. The physical abuse from my father stopped around this time. I had become expert in my duplicity, and I suppose we were both a little too old for that kind of thing. We still had awful shouting matches, but we reached a precarious entente: as long as I kept my grades up, I pretty much had access to the car, granting me some kind of freedom, but I still wasn’t allowed to wear makeup, and boys were still forbidden. While I could sneak eyeliner and red lipstick onto my face as soon as I was in the car, I was turned off of dating because no boy was worth the trouble of introducing to my parents. Oh sure, I would give cute boys a quick handjob in some friend’s garage after school during “band practice,” but those weren’t the kinds of guys I wanted to spend any real amount of time with.

I developed a crush on this boy in my calculus class and we started dating, like for real dating. He only rarely came over to my house, and never for very long, so we did most of our fucking in the back of my car. He had a gaggle of siblings in his house, so although his parents seemed to look the other way whenever we were in his bedroom, his younger sisters were always in danger of barging in on us. We sometimes rented a shitty motel room and I would lie and tell my parents I was going out with my girl friends. It was perhaps the most stable, safe, and innocent of all my high school relationships, but I still had to keep it secret for a very long time. Although my mother knew that I had been on the pill for about a year, she chose not to pry to deeply when I told her it was for my acne and bad cramps. She played along, really. My dad thought I lost my virginity at my senior prom to this steady boyfriend. We argued about it a few days after the dance. He called me all sorts of vile names, but I was leaving for college soon and had no more fucks to give, so I returned each volley. Out of fear for my life, I didn’t tell him when I had actually lost my virginity and to whom. I guess I played along, too.

I don’t play along anymore. I have no reason to. There just isn’t enough room for kissing underneath the bed.