My first kiss isn’t much of a story. It was pretty pedestrian, if not a downright suburban fairy tale. Church youth-groupers smooch on a park bench by a lake after school.

Puppy love. It was nice.

There was a lot of INXS in the air at the time. Things were shining, like they do. They’d never tear us apart. There may have been a devil inside. (Ahem.)

Two years later I went to college a few states away, in Florida. She followed me there, though not the same school, a year after that. We broke up while still in our teens. We’re still acquaintances, still Floridians.

As a fan of alternate histories, I’ve always wondered how our lives would’ve been different if she and I hadn’t kissed. I’m sure I still would’ve ended up in the Gunshine State. I don’t know that she would have. There were schools in Virginia and North Carolina that interested her.

What if her first crush had gone to University of Missouri? Would she be in St. Louis now, instead of living in the Shadow of the Mouse? What if she’d gone to Washington & Lee, still in its early co-ed years? What if she… well, you can only think about it so much before you reach the, “Enough. It is what it is,” stage. You get what you get, and don’t be upset.

Still, every now and then you see a piece of news that knocks you back, that causes you to wonder, “What if?”

Here’s one I ponder sometimes: The story of what was almost my first kiss.

Our 1980s suburban United Methodist Church loaded up a bus every summer and took a group of high schoolers to a beachside cabin compound in the Florida panhandle. After a middle-school break from church in general, our family started attending the UMC again at the beginning of my sophomore year. This re-appearance coincided with my return to the public school system after a very strange year in the care of the Christian Brothers.

Moving from an all-male school of 500 (maybe?) to a public school of 2,000-plus was a shock. GHS at the time amalgamated the rising 9th graders from four different lower schools including my K-8, so a quarter of a quarter of the student body was composed of familiar faces. There were a handful of friendly acquaintances; all the same bullies remembered me. Within a few weeks I’d revolved into a distant orbit of a smart, somewhat jock-y cliqué. An acquaintance from middle school, a wiry track type, randomly waved me over to his lunch table in September. By Christmas he and I were fast friends. Let’s call him Neil.

[An aside: How long can a friendship last? At our first jobs in the early-mid ‘90s, in different states, we faxed jokes to each other all day. When I bombed out of grad school five years after that, Neil let me live in his house rent-free for a few months. Another five years passed and there I was, attending his Las Vegas bachelor party. (We spent the whole weekend in the sports book watching the AFC and NFC playoffs. Not movie material.) A decade on from that, we email each other about our college football rivalry and other important matters. He texted me last week; something along the lines of “I heard ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ on The 80s on 8 today and thought about freezing in the stands at GHS football games on Friday nights. Good stuff right there!”]

So. A lifelong friend, unexpectedly found. Neil was a fellow UMC’er and in the process of getting to know him and the church I discovered a whole community of nice kids, nice church administrators, and nice young married couples volunteering to prepare big communal dinners for, and hang out with, 50 to 100 teenagers on Wednesdays and Sundays.

[Another aside: Only the kindest people would volunteer for that gig, right? In retrospect it became obvious that all our volunteer parents were doing so as Save-This-Marriage projects. It never worked — one of the big Life Lesson takeaways I took away from UMC youth group was this: “It’s the 80s. Nice people get divorced, too.”]

Even as we went through two or three crumbling couples, it was all… nice.

Although the pop culture of the time was fixated on tie-dye T-shirts and the 20th anniversary of Woodstock — there were at least five Randis of the Redwoods at any given Halloween party — 1987 to 1990 will always be my personal Leave It To Beaver 1950s. I had a little K-Car convertible and a girlfriend. I had a harmless drinking buddy she didn’t like, and UMC friends she did. I got a job as a lifeguard and earned a few bucks. I had the entire U2 back catalog dubbed on Maxell XLII 90s and was frantically growing my music collection. I had not yet met that guy — that guy who locks you in to a certain universe of music — but I was getting there pretty well on my own.

I got a job as a dishwasher and learned a few small business lessons. For example, consider this note from the owner, tacked onto a bulletin board over the 55-gallon trash can in the kitchen:

IF GARNISH IS CLEAN, RE-PLATE || DO NOT TRASH.

My drinking buddy, also on the kitchen staff, stole a case of St. Pauli Girl from the basement one weekend. If parsley was margin-critical, a case of SPG probably drove the whole café out of business; I heard the skate punk who replaced me never got his last paycheck.

I listened to Erasure’s The Innocents literally every day that I held that dishwashing job. Pulling shut a Hobart and humming along to “Yahoo!” in the back of a sports pub/café? That’s hand-in-glove for me. The cooks preferred K-97 and “I’m Gonna Get You Sucka.” (That factoid probably dates this memory to a single unique biweekly pay period.)

Teenage Suburbia ‘88. Nice.

The school year ended and Neil and I got our parents to sign off on the paperwork for the UMC trip to Panama City Beach. A critical note evades their notice but not ours.

PARENTS PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOUR CHILD DOES NOT BRING INAPPROPRIATE MUSIC OR OTHER MATERIAL. CASSETTES AND OTHER MATERIAL WILL BE CONFISCATED BY THE YOUTH MINISTER AND MAY NOT BE RETURNED.

Wisdom received from upperclassmen: Buy Christian music tapes in the cut-out bin and scotch-tape over the write-protect holes. Dubbing Murmur, Listen Like Thieves, Catching Up With… Depeche Mode, and others — my contributions to the “subversive” cassette pile. I ran out of cassettes, however, before I got to the Violent Femmes tape I’d recently borrowed from a neighbor. I scrounged up a non-CCM soundtrack and blackened out the entire label. Breakin’ II: Electric Boogaloo suddenly became the wackiest folk punk album ever. I hoped someone would have an extra CCM cassette case — worst case scenario, I get caught with it and it gets pitched into a gas-pump trashcan somewhere in Mississippi.

We gathered in the pre-dawn church parking lot and boarded the bus half-asleep. A sudden exclamation from class-clown-in-the-back-row: “We’re GOIN’… t’ FLORIDA!” And so we did. The bus was a jumble of Walkmen, sleeping bags, and junk food crumbs 10 hours later.

The compound, it turned out, was not a resort or even a hotel. It was the kind of place where you bring your own bedsheets and pillows and grill out in the courtyard between morning church lessons and long afternoons of beach volleyball, body-surfing, and floating in the pool.

And guess what? It was nice! A nice vacation with nice church kids.

We went to the Miracle Strip Amusement Park one afternoon and evening. A frenemy of mine enlisted the help of a girl a year ahead of us to coax me onto a roller-coaster, my first. It was a blast — a wooden 40-second number called the Starliner. She also sat with me on the Abominable Snowman as it blasted “Pour Some Sugar On Me” into the frozen air (a brilliant idea for a Florida carnival ride — enclose it in a stucco igloo, add air-conditioning, strobe-lights, and Def Leppard.) A freshman got drunk and we helped her evade parental notice. A girl named Missy stole my first UF ballcap and never ever returned it. I’m still miffed about that — in a nice way.

I have vague memories of the beach, of my cabin, of the communal kitchen…. I don’t really remember anything about our religious instruction. I think someone did the “…It was then that I carried you” thing in the sand one morning. I remember Miles displaying an impressive mastery of a Hammer album, but looking at release dates on Wikipedia, that had to have been the next year’s trip — eons later by teenage reckoning.

What I clearly remember is the bus trip home.

It was early in the morning, four days later. I was sitting near the front of the bus alone in a window-seat, a row or two back from the front steps. My roller-coaster partner sauntered barefoot up the aisle and sat down next to me and said something like, “You’re the only one awake, and you’re not using your pillow. Can I?” I said of course, because GUH. GIRL.

She fluffed up my pillow, laid it in my lap, and put her head down. Gazing up at me, she asked, “Whatcha listening to?” I offered her one of my earbuds. (I don’t think we called them that, then. But what did we call them? I’m looking at the buds in Engadget’s photo of the Sony WM-101 Walkman from 1985. That’s them. I can’t say whether I was using the WM-101 or a similar Panasonic I remember owning, but those are the earbuds.) She put the tiny speaker up to her left ear and immediately recognized the music. My Femmes-on-Breakin’ II had escaped notice all week.

“Oh my God. This is my favorite album.”

We listened to it over and over, and over and over and over in the way that only teenagers can do. We talked a little bit about each song at various points in the day. Rock-and-roll-lyrics book club… not that there’s a lot of deep philosophy in those lyrics. Still, we were kids. Nice kids. It was weird and threatening and romantic and awesome.

In between talks, we dozed, the miles ticking by on NB I-55 while the tape counter rolled past 999 and back to 000, again and again.

I remember trying to get her to explain the deal with her shoes. Her big thing was hating shoes. She never wore shoes if should could possibly avoid it. School? Shoes — it’s the law. Youth group conference room? No shoes. Driving her muddy old Jeep around town? No shoes. Lying next to me on a bus? No shoes.

We were entering a beautiful purple-and-blue mid-afternoon, just a few miles from the state line, when she said something funny. I don’t remember what. I’d been twirling a strand of her hair for an hour. Whatever she said, I laughed and kissed her very gently on the nose. I hadn’t been planning it; I was too shy — strike that, too naïve!— to have been thinking “first kiss.” It just happened.

She replied, “Don’t kiss my nose, if you’re going to kiss me.”

GUH.

If she’d prodded me a little more, given me just one more molecule of hope, I’d have understood that was my cue… but I lacked the nerve to lean in again.

BOY LACKS NERVE. THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN. Not even Rip Torn is going to be able to defend me on this one — definitely one of my nine days. (“Nine days?! You better have more sake!”)

Instead I pretended to smile, looking out the window as if I were a smooth operator, as if I had a plan. As if I was playing coy, when in fact I was quaking like New Madrid, 1811. I peeked down and she was smiling too, eyes closed, already drifting back to sleep.

I don’t remember disembarking at the church. We never talked about that day again, though we remained friendly for the next year. She graduated a year ahead of me and went to [Redacted] State. One summer in college I came home and worked as a lifeguard with one of her college classmates.

“Oh, you must know her from UMC, right? She’s doing great!”

“Well when you get back to school, tell her I said ‘Hello.’”

I didn’t think too much about her after that. I’m sure I told the “I came late to roller coasters but now I like ‘em” story a few times over the next couple of decades. She’d have come up then. I kissed that other girl, the one by the lake, just a few months later, so it wasn’t a lasting agony. Just one of those things you remember.