My first kiss was pretend. “Just to see,” she said. We crept into the closet in her bedroom; I couldn’t see much save for whatever light the slats in the closet door offered. The two of us crouched on the carpeted floor, lips pressed awkwardly, unmoving, just to see. I don’t know what she saw or felt — probably nothing, like she claimed — but it doesn’t matter. This was the first of many times that I allowed someone else to define who I was; the first of a multitude of moments where I hid away pieces of myself in order to make someone else more comfortable.

After the kiss in the closet, I suggested that we could keep kissing, “pretending to kiss,” we decided, though what the difference was I couldn’t have said. We kissed more in the closet, on her bed, on my bed, in her treehouse, and every time, my heart would hammer in my chest and my lips would tingle and my breath would catch and my body would react in ways I didn’t understand. Yet there wasn’t a watershed moment of understanding. It was more like a collection of pebbles adding to a growing pile of evidence for something I didn’t yet have the words for. But then, it was only pretend, just to see. It wasn’t real. At least, that was what she kept saying.

The first time I kissed a boy, he jammed his slimy tongue in my mouth and I pulled away in shock and horror. I didn’t even really like him. He was rude and mean and smelled like sweat and drugstore cologne, but my friends kept pushing him on me. “He likes you!” they insisted, as if that was the only thing that mattered. And when he kissed me, for some reason, it mattered. Even though I hated it. Even though I only wanted a boyfriend in the same way that I wanted a Hypercolor T-shirt — because my friends had them and it seemed cool. I was a shy, awkward thing, so getting a boy to like me seemed to be an achievement or validation or maybe it was just the easiest way to push down to those other feelings because while I would go on to date other boys with too much cologne and too little deodorant with aggressive, slimy tongues, I was kissing more girls, too. Girls with soft, gentle lips and sweet-smelling skin and silky hair that ticked my neck as we made out. But that didn’t count, because they said so. “Just for practice,” she said. Because she was bored. Because she wanted to try something, just to see.

This doesn’t count, I would think as my heart thundered in my chest. This doesn’t count, I would tell myself as my lungs caught tight. This doesn’t count, I would tell myself, even as my hips shifted restlessly and my skin felt like fire. Why doesn’t this count? I would wonder in the dark, lying in bed and pressing on the bruises she left on my neck. I knew what the reactions meant now, that rush of heat, the ache and the yearning. But it didn’t matter to her, to any of them, and so what I felt didn’t matter. It couldn’t, because they said so. I tucked all of it away. I tried so hard to be someone else. Who cared if I was drowning in their dismissal, who cared if the whole of my self was made up of fragmented pieces? I could be like them. I could make myself like boys, it was easy. You just pretend to kiss them, and it’s almost exactly the same.