Buddy Benton kissed my cheek at my locker in ninth grade.

He’d been wanting to carry my books, hold my hand, or get a kiss from me since I’d met him the year before when I transferred junior highs. He was a little bit goofy and kind of a loud mouth, but we were both soccer players, singers, and honor students, and it was easy to be around him.

I always rolled my eyes at Buddy’s advances and lectured him many times that we were just friends -- especially because he was a Mormon and I was a Baptist. I’d been indoctrinated enough to know there was no chance, no sense in starting anything since our religions were incompatible.

But Buddy stole a kiss on my cheek and something in my heart shifted. With that fast swoop to my face, where I could feel his hot breath on my skin, I felt something I hadn’t known before. Perhaps I felt what it was to be desired; perhaps I felt what it was to desire someone else: to let all the little details I’d ever noticed about him -- his lanky gait, the muscles in his calves, the milky quality of his tenor voice -- awaken something beautiful, fluttery, and tender in me.

To my surprise, after that, Buddy stopped asking for kisses and stopped trying to hold my hand. Maybe he’d gotten what he wanted and was done; maybe he was ready to move on to someone else.

But I don’t really think so.

Instead, maybe he saw the pathetic doe eyes I’d make at him when I thought he wasn’t looking. Maybe he knew my heart had switched over but that I’d never say so -- throughout all of high school -- because we were being raised with different versions of God, different versions of the Afterlife.

In the years following Buddy’s kiss we remained pals -- even excruciatingly so at times, with that familiarity that breeds meanness in hormonal teenagers -- and, eventually, I had other boyfriends and other kisses that went even further, ran just as deep.

But sometimes now, when I look at my children, just ten years shy of the age I was when Buddy kissed me, sometimes I can’t help but wonder about the choices they’ll make in the years to come.

What opportunities will they take or deny, based on the values I instill in them? What will they write about when they’re thirty-six years old, sitting in bed on a Sunday morning with delicate light filtering through the blinds, as they raise a hand to let it rest ever-so-lightly against their cheek?

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: adults, Angie Reynolds, junior high, kissing

Stumble This Post