My First Kiss

About midway through second grade, I decided to take a break from women.

At school, a hot brunette named Barb told me that she would be my girlfriend forever if I would link arms with her and walk the circumference of the playground so that all the second-grade women playing pony would see us. If I elected not to, she would leave me for a boy named Billy. When she put it like that, I didn't see that I had much choice in the matter and agreed that she should go to Billy.

At home, a hot redhead named Susie O'Dell said she loved me and wanted to marry me. I did not like Susie, I did not like love, and I did not like marriage. The O'Dells lived in the house behind us, separated by a chain-link fence with a gate that didn't provide sufficient security - Susie could let herself in and out with ease and my dog could not be persuaded to attack her.

One day, Susie crept up behind me while I was working on a new invention - a shoebox with a string tied to either end of it. (I was a brilliant child, really. A savant.) She wanted to help me with it, and I reluctantly agreed because my friend Brad wasn't talking to me because he was mad that I had hit him in the mouth with a baseball. He was being pretty childish for a second-grader - we were playing catch. It wasn't my fault he tried to stop the ball with his lips.

Susie watched me with infuriatingly adoring eyes as I explained how my invention would work. I would take a crayon and write a short message and put it in the box, and then she would tug the box to her with the string, read and reply to the message, and I would pull on the string to get it back.
That's right: In second grade, I invented Twitter.

I wrote "you are stupid" because I wanted Susie to understand that just because I had given her a Twitter account, it didn't mean I liked her or anything. Susie pulled the box to her from behind a tree and then took an almost unbearable amount of time to read it and reply - what was she, stupid? Finally, she called that it was ready and I pulled it back to me.
I was utterly disgusted. She'd written I love you all over the box, essentially taking down the entire network.

Then Susie came out from behind the tree, threw her arms around me, and started kissing me intimately on my shoulders and elbows. Every place her lips touched my skin, a venom seeped into the wound, spreading a warm, gushy feeling. The toxin was paralyzing - all I could do was lie there on the patio, helpless to fend off the attack. As I struggled so feebly, I knew that the only way I could recover was to find the exact location of every kiss and bang the area with rocks.

She even managed to come around and, just like when the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor, launch a punishing barrage of kisses on my helpless mouth. Now I knew how it felt when that baseball hit Brad in the lips. The shock of it was stunning, filling me with fear and revulsion.

It was the lip attack that finally shook the rigor out of my mortis. I jumped up, frantically wiping at my mouth to scrub away as much of the poison as I could manage. Some horrible part of my brain was whispering that I had actually enjoyed being smooched up by Susie O'Dell, which absolutely, vehemently, completely could not be true. I needed to be hypnotized into forgetting this ever happened, I needed an exorcism, a lobotomy. I would have to explain to my mother that we needed to move to another state, join the witness-protection program.

Most of all, I needed Susie O'Dell to stop smiling at me so knowingly, as if we had shared anything other than the worst event in all of human history.
It was my first kiss - I resolved never to think of it again.
Which, of course, is not what happened.

W. Bruce Cameron is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of three books including "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" (Workman Publishing). To write Bruce Cameron, visit his website at www.wbrucecameron.com.