7 minutes with Mike

It was 1998, and I was 13. I had a big crush on Mike. He was 14 at the time. We lived in Los Angeles, California. There was a rumor going around school that a party was going to happen at Mike's house on Saturday night. His parents would be out of town, for a two day vacation.

He had to bribe his older brother, Thomas, not to tell on us about the party. Thomas was 18, and was in charge of the house while his parents were gone. When I got to the party there were about 15 people there, mostly girls. Mike was there and he looked so cute. He had spiked his hair with gel, and had the most awesome Billabong shirt on.

He was a skateboarder guy. We played twister, and spin the bottle, and finally 7 minutes in heaven. A few couples went before me and Mike. When it was my turn I was so nervous, my palms were sweating. When I and Mike went into the closet I told him this is going to be my first kiss. He said we will take it slow.

We heard the laughing coming from out behind the door. We both were so nervous. We turned the light off. I didn't mention that I had braces at the time, and I was self conscious about my teeth. We kissed slowly, with closed mouths at first. Then we started tonguing each other slowly, and then fast.

I felt him get all excited. He started touching my hair, and my back. I even felt him get a little excited in his pants when he got close to me. I was a little weird out by it, but that's what you get from hormonal teenage boys. After our seven minutes in heaven, we dated a little in junior high, and a little through high school.

I still think about him time to time. I even looked him up on facebook. He's married now with kids. It's surprising how fast time flies when you get older.

When I was in high school, I was painfully shy. I was involved with a bunch of different team sports, even poms, but I always felt like an outsider there. The most popular, well-known girls in my school were on the poms squad with me, and they always did things together, but I was never really involved.

I didn't date because I always hid my feelings (although I had a huge crush on a guy named Mark). I was pretty, smart, and kind, but also stand-offish and shy. People misunderstood my shyness for snobbishness all the time. One Friday night after a football game, some of the girls invited me to a party for a change.

I agreed, and was extremely excited. When we got there, I realized the party was at Mark's house, my longtime crush. I started to get really nervous. The butterflies in my stomach were terrible. It was close to eleven at night, and I hadn't eaten anything since lunch, and when I was offered a beer, it went straight to my head.

After about an hour, some of the girls decided to round up some of the guys for a game of seven minutes in heaven. I was so scared, but wanted to be invited along again, so I agreed to play. When it was my turn, Mark was to be my partner in the closet. I got as dizzy as I was walking to the closet, I almost fainted, and my stomach started churning from the hunger, and the beers I had consumed.

Mark started to tell me how he had always thought I was pretty, but he always thought I hated him. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. He liked me! He leaned in to kiss me, and all of the tension I had been feeling, my nerves, and the beers decided to use that precise moment to revolt against me.

I vomited all over him right as he leaned in to kiss me! I thought I was going to die of embarrassment. Mark was disgusted and also vomited and then ran from the closet--everybody saw he was covered in puke. I started to cry, and ran from the closet and ran all the way home.

Needless to say, I was never invited to a party again, and never again had the opportunity to kiss Mark.

Five minutes after I met Kerry in Drama class, we were passing notes back and forth to each other. We'd sit together in The Commons and discuss plays and music, and just about everything. He was so smart, and so cute, and I was so happy for the first time since we'd moved to Columbus from South Carolina.

He introduced me to all his friends and I was instantly welcomed into the group. There were regular weekend get togethers at the clubhouse of the apartment complex where Kerry lived, and I was thrilled to be invited. We'd play all kinds of games; charades, and there was this one game called Train, which was really a kind of practical joke on the newcomer involving fake kissing and a slap.

I guess it was inevitable that someone suggested one Friday night that we all play a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven. There was a broom closet in the clubhouse kitchen, just big enough for two teenagers to sit down in without quite touching. I was excited to be picked to go in with Kerry. I really like him a lot, and he seemed to like me.

We went in, and sat down, and there was enough light coming through the vents of the door to see that he was smiling at me with that goofy smile of his, and I smiled back. "So, what do you want to talk about?", he asked. "Um...I don't know, "I said.

Usually we never had to think about what we wanted to talk about; we talked all the time we were together. "Did I ever tell you about the performance we did of "Oklahoma" last year"? He didn't bother to wait for me to answer him. He spent the next seven minutes telling me all about his role in the musical.

I sat there and listened, spellbound as usual, happy to be with him. Slowly, I realized that talking and listening was all I was ever going to be doing with Kerry. But that was OK. Just before the seven minutes was up, he reached over and kissed me on the cheek. He stood up and took my hand to help me up.

We went out holding hands. "Well, how was it,"? our friends all asked. I looked at Kerry and smiled. "It was the best seven minutes I ever spent in a closet with a guy," I said.

I will never forget the one and ONLY time I played seven minutes in heaven was at my friend Jessica's house, along with about 10 other kids. It happened when I was about nine years old. My parents moved around a lot because my dad was in the military. Because of this, we moved from one place to another very frequently.

At this point, I was living in New York. I had started cursing my parents, due to them I had to leave my all friends. I was definitely in the "rebel" stage, or at least the beginning of it. At Jessica's house that night, there were also some other kids.

The parents of all were belonged to the military at that time and were having their own fun at upstairs, where as we all were playing downstairs. I still remember that I was so excited to play "7 minutes in heaven," especially when Jessica decided that she is also interested in this game.

I was so frustrated about my first kiss, always ready for it. I always had dream about my first kiss and used to fantasize it a lot. I just wanted to have my first kiss so that I transformed to a woman from a girl. As we began playing, I became more and more confident that I was ready for my first kiss. When it was finally my turn, I thought I had hit the Jackpot!

Not only was I going to have the opportunity to kiss a boy, but I was also going to be able to kiss the cutest boy in our school! (Or at least in that basement) I was so ready to kiss him. As soon as the closet door shut, he told me that he was also fantasizing kissing me for the whole night.

I of course told him that I felt the same way, and then he kissed me. I still remember that kiss and consider it as the best among all other kisses. I can't forget the warmth of his lips and the smell of his breath. His lips were so sweet like a cotton candy melting in my mouth.

The bottle stopped spinning, leaving her defenseless to its voodoo-like mandate. The bottle made fate real, turning future to present. Lucy's eyes met mine and suddenly we were the only two in the room, and for seven more minutes we would be the only two in the closet.

The uproar caused by the other kids' reactions was drowned out by an adrenaline rush and anxiety that set a fire beneath my feet, sending me jolting into a standing position and then into a walking motion towards the door. Lucy felt the fire burning too. The door creaked to a close.

I saw the outline of her face and body a bit lost in the backdrop of jacket sleeves and shoe boxes. The first thing I noticed was how silent it had gotten. I could hear her breath, filling the space between mine. "What's your name again?" she whispered. "Robert..." I whispered back. She knew my name.

It was a nervous question, a filler, meant to delay the inevitable. I leaned over to take what was mine; to give her what was hers... She looked away. "My daddy's name is Robert," she said, looking now at the light leaking through the bottom of the door. "Great, now kiss me," I said, leaning closer still.

She gave me a shove, sending me into some old clothes in the corner. The listeners were pleased with the sound of movement. Some catcalls followed. "Robert. Do you ever wonder... what adults do? If this is what we kids do, well, can adults be that much different? We're not that different, you know, we kids and those adults."

I hadn't a thing to say back to her. I was stopped dead in my tracks. "What do you think Thomas my daddy is doing right now? What do you think your daddy is doing right now?" she continued. I shrugged, still at a loss for words.

It was silent for four more minutes. Once time was up, we opened the closet door and took our places amongst the other kids. As it turns out, our parents actually weren't behaving much differently than we were.

When I was younger, my mom had a best friend. Her best friend had children the same age as my brother and I so we spent a lot of time with them. My friend had a lot of cousins, and on that I had taken a particular liking to, and he felt the same way about me.

We all decided one day that we were going to play Seven Minutes in Heaven. Our parents were all in the kitchen playing cards, and we thought it would be a fun game to play. Being as young as I was, probably about nine or ten years old, I was nervous to play this game. Would I have to kiss someone?

What would I do if they tried to put a move on me and I didn't want to follow through with it. Well I had no choice, everyone else was playing. Of course we spun a bottle and it landed on Mark, the one boy that I had a crush on and we went into the closet for our seven minutes. All I remember is everyone saying Oooohh because they knew that we liked each other.

After we got into the closet, we heard everyone laughing outside, and we just started talking about normal stuff that we usually talked about. Well then Mark asked me if I wanted to do anything. I was like NO!! Not even a kiss, he said.

The next thing you know, my best friend opens the door, and there I am sitting on top of a mattress with Mark nowhere to be found. Mark kept trying to harass me so I took the mattress in the closet and threw it down on top of him to get him away from me!

The middle school party rolls around and it's finally time. Time to play seven minutes in heaven; well I remember that game quite clearly. It was Beka Green's party the Saturday before the big dance. She had invited everyone she could find and could talk to, and with Beka's mouth that was a lot of people.

The party started at 7:00 P.M. but being the cool kid I was I didn't get there until 7:30. But apparently I had gotten there right in time; they had not started playing yet. Everyone sat down in a large spin the bottle type circle and we had begun. First it was my best friends Alex Iverson's turn to go, and he had been practicing his spins for some time trying to get a specific girl.

Well he spun, and of course his practice was all for not, he got Amy Desmond a self-proclaimed big foot expert, (her and her dad every weekend would go out searching for big foot in the back woods east of Acworth). Within a sudden I saw how real this game was, in seven minutes I would be up, and the game would hit close to home.

I was nervous, there was only one girl that I had wanted it to land on and that was Beka Green. Not because I had any sort of feelings for Beka Green, but because it was a best of the worst situations. Seven minutes had elapsed and it was time to seal my fate and prepare to enter what could be Heaven or could be Hell.

I had spun and I was waiting for the end of its cycle. Around and around it went, where it would stop I could only hope. My nerves boiled up, and I crossed my fingers it was going around and round. The darned thing wouldn't stop, until that second, the second it lingered on Beka Green.

But of course with my luck it had not stopped, it only lingered and only for a second, imagine a game show where the arrow is sitting on the peg between one million and one dollars; it always goes towards the one dollar. Well of course, it had gone to the one dollar.

My luck as a child was never great. It was so bad; I actually chose not to believe in it, rather than to believe my luck sucked. I had landed on Christine Meloni, she around school was a self-proclaimed big foot, she always wore jean jackets with the sleeves cut off, all black, with black pants.

She was a bully, but only in a physical way, not the typical female bully at all but a bully nevertheless. Needless to say my seven minutes in heaven was turned instantly into seven minutes in hell.

I remember this one time in high school, when I was invited to a friend's "end of the year" party. The entire class was there, and we decided to play "Seven Minutes in Heaven." The boys put all of their names in a hat, and the girls had to draw a name when it was their turn. I was fifteen at the time, hoping to choose a certain boy. I was first to choose, and instead of getting the guy of my dreams, I got paired up with the class loser!

As it turned out, this guy was a real dork. He dressed like our grandparents, and was almost impossible to have a conversation with. I wouldn't call him a nerd. Since he wasn't very smart or interesting either. The thing that I remember the most about him was his hair, which was, as usual, wearing way too much hair product in it. It looked like he had a ton of hair gel in it, making it looks greasy and disgusting.

He had a face full of nasty zits, and there was absolutely no way I wanted to go into my friend's coat closet with this loser. Unfortunately, I had to do it since everyone was waiting to see what would happen. We went into the closet, and as soon as we got in there, I thought that he was going to try to make a move on me. I was quiet, but was ready to fling the door open and run home screaming if he was going to try anything.

To my surprise, instead he sat down on the closet floor and got as far away from me as possible, and started to cry. "I didn't think I was really going to end up with you!" he sobbed at me, over and over again. At first, I was really angry at him because he was acting so upset that he was in the closet with me.

I was a lot cooler than him... not popular by any stretch, but still, I wasn't the biggest nerd in school either, so I figured that he would be happy to come into the closet with me and try to fool around. In fact, I was so sure that he'd love to do something like that with me that I was prepared to either run out of there or maybe even punch him in the nose if he tried to kiss me.

But instead, I got rejected and it felt awful. So, angrily I started complaining at him. "What's the big deal?" I said. "After all, I'm the one who was stuck in here with you. Nobody likes you!" I was so mad that I didn't even care if I hurt his feelings. The guy then admitted that there wasn't anything wrong with me, and in fact he'd had a crush on me all year long.

He had actually asked the guy who'd dealt with the names in the hat if he would try to somehow pair us up. But he didn't think anything was going to happen. So when he started crying and getting upset, it was because he was afraid that he was going to be a bad kisser or something. He had a crush on me, but he was nervous about being in the closet alone. Since he knew I didn't like him that much. I started to feel really bad, and my heart went out to him.

I told him that he wasn't so bad, but I just didn't know him that well, so of course I wouldn't know if I liked him or not. (OK, so that was a little lie to make a crying teenaged boy feels better!) I also said that if he wanted, I would let him kiss me on the cheek, but that was all since I didn't know him very well.

Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance. By that time, the other kids had decided to open the door and found me standing just where I had been a few minutes before, and the nerdy guy still on the floor, wiping his tear-filled eyes and dripping nose. Everyone assumed that he really had tried to kiss me, and that I wouldn't let him. The kids all laughed, mostly at him, and although we went back to join the party, he left after just a little while.

That week was the final week of school before summer started. When we signed each other's yearbooks, I added a note that he could call me sometime if he ever wanted to talk. I felt so bad about his unrequited crush, and the weird way that he acted, as well as how the kids all laughed at him. I was surprised when, a week or so after school ended, he called me.

All summer long, the two of us talked on the phone in a friendly way. It turned out that he wasn't so boring or stupid after all. Even though he dressed kind of dorky and sometimes acted strange, it turned out that he was somewhat funny and had some cool things to say. We found out that we had lots in common. I would spend time babysitting my two little brothers, and he'd call to keep me company.

I would return the favor by quizzing him on driving laws, since he was a few months older than I was and studying for his driving test. We actually became pretty good friends, though we never hung out together or anything over the summer.

The day before school started, he and I spoke on the phone and found that we had homeroom together, and agreed to meet then to catch up and compare the rest of our schedules the next day. When we'd met the next day, I was floored. Somehow, over the summer, his skin had cleared up and he'd grown a couple of inches. He was dressed pretty well too, and had taken my advice and gotten a better hairstyle.

In fact, he was looking pretty good, and I told him so! We wound up dating for most of that school year, and even now, we stay in touch on Facebook. It was a really interesting twist of fate that made us become friends. I guess that you never know what's possible until you get to know someone!

In seventh grade I was invited to a party at one of the "cool" kid's house. The party took place on the second floor of an old building that looked like it wasn't used for anything anymore besides giving kids a place to make out in. I was sitting in the corner of the room as the party started, as did the rest of the boys and the girls.

We were too young to be drinking so there wasn't a soul among us who had any kind of liquid courage. I remember thinking how awkward I must have looked, but in reality I'm sure everyone was feeling the same thing. Eventually the older brother of the boy who was throwing the party came up into the room and asked us if we were having fun.

I guess he noticed how scared we all looked so he suggested that we go play spin the bottle in an adjacent room. While there were many girls at the party that I would have liked kissing, I remember thinking that there were far more girls that I really didn't want to kiss. So like a giant pussy I waited in the original room with mostly the girls I didn't want to kiss which really pissed me off.

After some time and hearing lots of girlish screams and giggles coming from the other room I heard my voice being called from within. I was all too excited to get away from the awkward flirtation the ugly girls were throwing my way. I entered the room where everyone was sitting down staring at me as I entered.

So I guess one of my "best friends" had told the rest of the room who the girl I liked was. So she agreed to go into the closet with me. What I was told was that she really wanted to go in with me and when I heard that I almost jazzed in my pants. I was so excited to hear that she wanted to make out with me.

I think I barely took a breath as I walked into the closet with her. So eventually we get into the closet and we are completely covered in darkness. I can hear the rest of my class whispering on the other side of the door and the quite motionless, inside the closet was starting to get to me. I had never kissed a girl or felt a boobie, but I defiantly knew that we were taking way too long.

As each painful second drew out I felt the pressure more and more until I had to make some kind of move. So I opened my mouth to say her name. "Allison" I said. But before I could ask her for some kisses she cut me off. "Will, I know you really like me and everything, but I don't really like you at all."

So at this point I was a little hurt, but what she said next just about killed me. "The guys out there know how much you like me so they gave me twenty bucks to get you in here and make out with you, but now that you are here I can't do it. I'm sorry." After that she walked out of the room, nobody said a thing and I thought to myself how I know that everyone must have heard that.

I stayed in the closet for a couple more minutes and by the time I came out there were only a couple of my friends waiting for me. They both said sorry as I walked alongside them back out into the main room where everyone was dancing and not caring about my heartbreak. I drank a few more cups of punch and then called my mom to come pick me up.

A few years later I learned about the wonders of alcohol and haven't been heartbroken since.