My first time around a lot of girls

I was a young man who grew up in a highly Christian household; I was trained to not make eye contact with girls, lest I attempt to sleep with one before marriage. So when I moved to Johnstown, New York, back in 1997 the only two people my age in this country town where two girls.

Sherry and Jackie, two beautiful young girls. I spent a lot of time that summer struggling with my devotion to my faith and my hormones. Talking to these girls was awkward, but they were extremely kind and tried to get me out of the house, and out and about, as much as possible.

Talking to anyone would be difficult come to think of it, I wasn't really allowed to socialize even with boys. I was able to spend more time out of the house here, for one thing my father was working about 45 minutes away now, and the stress of money here meant he paid less attention to me. After a few months, I got to meet Sherry and Jackie's other friends.

They were all girls, and I was invited to a party. We started playing truth or dare, fairly standard. In this version we wrote down all of the truths and dares on scraps of paper and pulled them out of a jar. If you refused, you were out until the last player won. There were about six girls in total.

One of them was a Filipino (our only ethnicity in town) named Filam. Somebody wrote "kiss Filam's butt," at which one of the girls (named Sharron, who I found out years later from my first girlfriend was a lesbian) begrudgingly agreed. Later a scrap came up that said: "kiss someone." Sharron got it.

Everybody put their hands over their lips to block, I followed suite. Sharron said: "oh...like I would kiss you." The room laughed. I carried that scar for years, I was already awkward with girls, and here one of my firs exposures to a group of them was a huge rejection. One that I should not have taken hard, but did for many years.

The parents declared that the boy would not stay past 9, so I left. But before that I wrote "kiss Filam's butt" on a dozen scraps of paper as punishment for laughing at me. Sherry and Jackie never brought me to another party, and they thought I was a pervert. Not really...