People never forget ‘firsts’ in their lives. No, you don’t remember your first word, or the first step you took, or the first time you used the grownup potty on your own. But I’m talking about everything after your memory secures a foothold--your first friend, your first broken bone, your first crush, your first kiss, your loss of virginity ... these benchmarks of life are branded in our brains, even if minor details get changed or forgotten.

Jamie wasn’t my first crush, but he was my first time, on the hot, humid Florida evening in August of 1999. Just a couple months shy of the turn of the millennium. Rebirth, new beginnings, coming of age, those were all certainly fitting parallels.

I remember my heart thudding against my ribcage as I took the phone into my room, out of earshot of my grandma, as my best friend Gina grilled about the monumental events of the previous evening.

“Girl, don’t lie ... Zach said Jamie told him everything!” Gina implored on the other end of the line, laughing. “Now I want the details! Never in a million me years would I have thought you’d beat me to it! Props girl!”

“Wow, Gina, easy there, I’m still trying to process it myself,” I giggled nervously. “It was his first time, too according to him,” I said. “He said the furthest he’d ever gone was a hand-job from a girl last year. So he was more experienced than I was.”

“Well, yeah, um ... Zach told me not to tell you this, but of course we’re girls so I’m going to ... Jamie hadn’t done anything either, not even a hand-job, so that was a lie,” she said, a revelation that confirmed what I suspected in the back of my mind. “He probably just didn’t want you to think he was completely clueless and inexperienced,” she amended. You can’t trust fifteen-year-old boys to be perfectly honest about matters relating to sexual experience.

“So we were both pure as snow I guess,” I replied. “Not anymore though.”

“Yep, but alright, cut to the chase girl, no more stalling! How was it? How many times? Positions? I’m trying to write a book here!” Silly Gina seemed even more eager than I was.

I was still so new to this, I was trying to figure out a way to calmly and clearly tell my best friend about the loss of my virginity the previous evening, when I couldn’t really explain it to myself. A million different emotions were buzzing around in my fifteen-year-old brain. How did I feel about Jamie? Was this anything more than just a white-hot crush? How did he feel about me? Where was our relationship—if there was one—going since I lived nearly a thousand miles away? What would Gina think of me after I told her? Was true love a real thing or just some immature adult fantasy?

I should probably give you some background information. My name is Cara, and even though Gina was probably my best friend at the time, she lived nearly a thousand miles away from me. You see, I lived in Pennsylvania, but Gina lived in Daytona Beach, right next door to my grandmother. The two houses were sixties-style concrete block ranches that shared a private driveway off of Old Kings Road, separated only by a few live oaks and some sea-grape trees. I was so young I can hardly remember our exact meeting but I’m told that it was when we were on vacation when I was about six. The neighbor girl, her brother, and her dad were building a tree fort in an old Live Oak next door. The girl, Gina, had a Raggedy Ann doll and a couple others and was arguing with her brother on what would be ‘initiated’ up in the treehouse. His Power Rangers and Toy Story characters were, of course, perfectly acceptable. But dolls? ... Well eventually my dad and her dad started talking and my dad helped her dad with building the fort. And of course, I took Gina’s side in the doll initiation debate-- I had a Barbie collection and a bunch of Beanie Babies myself.

As far as who ruled the treehouse, it turned out we split time. Gina and I soon became fast friends, and when Ethan, her brother, had his friends over, he would use the fort to play War or have water gun fights or whatever eight-year-old boys do with their time. When it was just me and Gina we would make friendship bracelets or play with silly putty or just read and gossip about girl stuff while Spanish Moss draped lazily in front of the window cut into the particle board. When we were about nine her mom even let us have a Easy Bake oven up there. Sometimes while we were hanging out up there Ethan would come out and shoot his BB gun up at us, while we stockpiled acorns as ammo to fire back at him. Gina and I would only see each other on my vacations but we always looked forward to those visits as much to see each other as to go to the beach or Disney or whatever theme park was trendy at the time. I was a pretty quiet and shy girl but she became one of my best friends. She was a bold and outgoing redhead, surprise. They say opposites attract.

When I was thirteen I was allowed to start a tradition of staying a few weeks alone with my grandmother every summer. Oh, mind you ... my grandfather was still alive and lived there too, I don’t mean to overlook him, but he was a Vietnam vet that had Alzheimer’s and periods of PTSD that sometimes made him think he was still at war in the middle of the night if he didn’t have his medication. He usually stayed in the glassed-in Florida room all day in his recliner, downing can after can of Budweiser and crushing them with one hand, a Joe Camel in the other, watching reruns of MASH and the Rifleman. I’d poke my head in to see him whenever I could stand the cigarette smoke and ask how he was and if he needed anything. He’d invariably want to show me some relics from the war, like his guns or poison-tipped bamboo blow-darts they’d made in the jungle to fight the Viet Cong. That was pretty cool, but he couldn’t hear well and it was not easy to hold a conversation with him. Whenever he needed something, he’d yell “Hey Bernier!”, referring to my grandmother’s maiden name. She’d always yell back, “I’m not your maid, Richard!” but invariably she’d wait on him anyway. It wasn’t like he could really take care of himself at that point, and only the next year he was put in a nursing home.

Anyway, that first summer I was 13 I was allowed to vacation on my own, my mom took the flight down with me and then flew back, but the next couple of years I came down alone, usually in July, and stayed for a couple weeks. I was nervous that first time flying alone, but not after that. Those stays with at grandma’s house were among my fondest memories of my childhood/adolescence. As an adult I’ve moved down here full time, and as I drive around reminiscing and looking at old landmarks from those days, I’m always struck with a fond and sometimes sad nostalgia. Early mornings trying to wake up before my grandma, putting the pot of coffee on for her, and going get the paper before first light to impress her. Trips in her minivan over the causeway to the beach, the blinding white and scalding sands, the smell of sunscreen and hot dogs from the boardwalk mixing with the thick summer heat. Trips to the Daytona Mall off ISB Boulevard with Gina in flipflops with the allowance money grandma gave me for cleaning up the yard, meeting Gina’s friends at the Inside Scoop Ice Cream stand. Going back to the cool air-conditioned comfort of Gina’s house and playing endless hours of Monopoly or Scrabble, Gina showing me her Computer and how to use AOL and the chat rooms, which were the big things of the time before social media.

“It’s how you get to meet cool guys,” she’d confided in me. I laughed, blushing, as she showed me how to create your own AIM account. This was the year before this story, when I was fourteen, and boys were just starting to show up on my radar screen. I liked N’ Sync and the Backstreet Boys, more for their looks than for their music, but I wasn’t a boyband music fan. I wasn’t one of those screaming fangirls, and I’d never been to a concert, but I may have had a poster or two in my room. I had my favorite TV stars, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Joseph Gordon-Levitt among them. I’d been asked out by a cute boy named Stan at school last year in eighth grade, we’d gone to a couple movies together and kissed a couple times but it was all pretty tame stuff. I’d been to one junior high dance, but it was that awkward age where boys and girls kind of congregate at opposite ends of the gym whispering to each other and daring each other to make a move to the other side, with just a Chad or Stacy or two being bold enough to move into the frontier. Don’t get me wrong, I was curious and I’d started exploring my body—I’d watched Titanic several times and would rewind over and over again through the Leo and Kate scene in the car, liking the pleasant tingle that I felt—but nothing had really happened yet with a boy and I wasn’t in any particular rush.

But enough reminiscing for now, back to that early August morning when I was fifteen that set into motion my coming of age and ultimate loss of virginity.

“Alright, Sugar, you gals off to the beach today?” my grandma asked that morning as she tinkered with the Crossword puzzle in front of the TV.

“Yes grammy,” I answered, going to the bathroom mirror for the third time to check out my new swimwear. I’d started wearing two-piece bikini suits last year, unconsciously trying to draw more attention to my developing body that I was still self-conscious about. My breasts had filled out to a natural-looking C cup, and while I wasn’t fat by any means, I was still slightly soft around the midsection. I wasn’t in eating-disorder territory by any means, but I was a bit insecure as is normal for that age and somewhat shy about my body. I did not have that ideal and ageless Cindy Crawford hourglass figure I assumed every guy wanted. My hips were prominent enough, I reasoned, and my hair was a nice glossy brown with natural auburn streaks in it. It had a gentle curl enough to make a one helix spiral as it fell just past shoulder length. My eyes were brown with flecks of green in the iris, what my mom called ‘seawater’ eyes. She said they were my best feature and expressed the ‘perfect mix of wisdom and innocence.’ I did pluck my eyebrows every couple of days, for me they were a little too wild for my taste but then again I was picky at that age. I also had a light dusting of acne on my forehead which seemed to get slightly worse every year. I put something on like Proactiv but at that age didn’t help much. I opened my bra to examine the twins in the mirror. I chuckled to myself over my farmer’s tan, noting the slight contrast between my pinkish-tan neckline and the milky appearance of my breast mounds. The girls sure could use some sun, I thought. These I was fairly proud of; they were fairly high and firm, about the size of baseballs topped with half-dollar-sized areolas that were a nice healthy pink. No boy had been able to see or enjoy them ... yet. I heard down by Cape Canaveral there was a semi-nude beach, but there was no way Gina and I could ever go there till we got older. I’d probably be too modest anyway. I looked lower and liked the look and feel of my freshly shaved legs, they were tanned enough and had lost that coltish look in the last year or so, but my thighs were still a bit meatier than I wanted. I mean, if you slap them, you want them to stop jiggling within one second, not shudder for two or three like Jell-O, which is what I had.

I’d even shaved my vagina, I just liked the look and feel of it completely bare. It felt sexy. Overall as I looked at myself in the full length mirror that morning in August, I rated myself about a 7 out of 10.

“Is Mrs. Ziegler bringing you gals or are you taking the bus?” Grammy asked, referring to Gina’s mom. It was just this year that grandma and our moms had agreed Gina and I could take the city bus over to the beachside if no one could drive us, as long as we stayed together and took grandma’s cell phone, which at the time was a Nokia flip phone. For my birthday grandma had gone to the bus station and bought me a bunch of bus tokens which were good for whole summer’s worth of bus trips to the beach from the pick-up down the street.

“Mrs. Ziegler,” I lied, my heart starting to pound a little. I hated lying to my grandma.

“OK, hun, have fun and call if you’re going to be gone past dinner,” grandma said. Gina had her learner’s permit, but her folks were out for the day, and Gina was not allowed to drive underage passengers without an adult in the car. But that wasn’t stopping us today; Gina wanted to show off her driving skills and test drive the old Subaru Forester that would be handed down to her once she got her license. Gina and her mom had picked up a couple of secondhand surfboards at a yard sale last weekend, and we were going to try them out today. Or so we thought—we’d never surfed before, and were going to try to learn on our own even though some of the surf shops were probably offering lessons on a weekly basis. The beach was fun, but we wanted to try something new on top of just sunbathing, swimming and enjoying our boogie boards.

We’d practiced pretend-paddling and popping up on the boards the other day in the sparsely-grassed sandlot of her backyard, trying to mimic what Ethan had impatiently showed us how to do. We were hoping to avoid looking like complete dunces once we got to the beach, which, without any real water practice, was insanely naïve to anyone but fifteen year old girls. We’d penciled a line down the middle of the boards and were practicing our footwork.

“Can’t be more than one step up from boogey-boarding, do you reckon?”, I asked half-seriously, raising myself up off my belly then deftly sliding feet first into the crouch position, hand pointed forward, hanging ten on an imaginary eight footer and catching it slickly down the face.

Gina laughed at my antics. “Girl, if either one of us is going to wipe out and crash head first into a two-footer, a hundred buck says it’s you!”

“At least I’m practicing, looks who’s just standing there getting eaten by fire ants,” I smirked as she swatted at her ankles to beat back the bane of the Florida lawns.

It’s our first damn day, I’m going to be on my belly paddling the whole time. No need to be the laughingstock of the beach!” she retorted.

At last we loaded up the boards into the back of the Ziegler’s old Forrester station wagon and discreetly pulled out of the driveway, making sure my grandma was out of sight.

“You’re sure everyone’s gone for the day?” I asked worriedly, knowing that if we were caught sneaking out like this with Gina driving, my grandma wouldn’t do anything herself—but she would tell my mom on the phone, who would order her to ground me for the rest of my visit.

“Yeah, some tournament out in Orlando,” she said. “His indoor baseball league.”

It was one of those classic Florida summer days as we headed over the causeway to the beach. Sailboats and runabouts cruising lazily on the intracoastal waterway, the sky a hazy and milky blue with billowy white clouds that promised to be pregnant with thunderstorms by late afternoon. The salt air was breezy but the heat was cloying and humid, and the high rise condos faded away and merged with the hazy sky a couple miles distant down the beach. The ocean was a dreamy turquoise blue with about two or three-footers lazily breaking ashore at low tide. Good for novice surfers.

We parked in the beach lot and each carried a board and towel down to the beach, along with sunscreen and a couple beach chairs. The boardwalk was pretty empty today, but there was nothing for us their today. We’d worn out the boardwalk like a well-loved stuff animal, having enjoyed the arcades, rides, and Midway Fun Zone on each vacation until there was nothing new to hold our interest. We would get a slice at Pizza King if we were there at lunchtime but that’s as far as we went up there anymore. Today there were just a couple tourist families and some homeless guys loitering about, panhandling and riding around bikes toting cans and heaps of clothing. Even though this was a beach and tourist community, it was still somewhat seedy and had a reputation for drifters, night prostitution and unsavory characters. Gina and I were told to stick together at all times.

We applied our sunscreen (Gina was a redhead and burned to a fresh lobster if she didn’t) and enjoyed the surf for a little while. I got the hang of paddling on the board for a little and catching the whitewater after a wave broke and letting it carry me into shore without paddling. Standing up—or popping up as it was called--was the hard part. I couldn’t quite find the middle of the board to keep my balance and kept tipping it over.

“Yeah, rip it Cara!” Gina encouraged, more content to watch me make a fool of myself than test the waters for herself, so to speak.

“Hey ... did you happen to wax that thing?” a deep and friendly voice asked behind me. I turned to see two boys with surfboards under arm, wading toward us in the knee deep surf. They looked to be about our age. The one that had spoken to me looked to be at least half Hispanic ... or maybe half Asian like Vietnamese or Thai, it was hard to tell. He had olive colored skin with thick black hair that covered his ears and bangs that nearly fell into his eyes, which looked kind of Asian to me. His full pink lips were smiling in a warm, shy kind of way. If first impressions counted for anything, this boy definitely made one. His friend was kind of cute, too, definitely Polish or German or something with a short, spiky blond crew cut and very light hazel eyes and strong facial bone features.

“Uh ... no,” was all I could manage. “To be honest, we’re sort of beginners.”

“She’s a beginner,” Gina, always the troublemaker, interjected. “I’m just here for moral support.”

“Catch a wave and hang ten then,” I shot back in spite of my nervousness.

“I’m not a show off, girl,” Gina said.

“So you were saying something about waxing the board?” I asked the darker boy.

“Yeah. Its easier to get a grip with your feet if you wax it first. Especially for beginners. Come on over to our stuff, we’ll show you how. It’s called Sticky Bumps.”

“Cool, thanks for the info...” I purposely trailed off.

“Oh! I’m Jamie,” he said. “And this is Zach,” he thumbed over to the blonde boy.

“We’ve been doing this for years, we were in your same position when we first started,” Zach said. “My uncle taught us when we were about nine.”

“Cool,” I said. “I’m Cara, this is Gina.”

For the next little while we had a great time, with Jamie and Zach showing us how to wax our boards and a little about the basics of staying upright while guiding the board toward a wave. It was clear from watching their interactions that Zach and Jamie were best buds, and probably had been for some time. Somehow, just naturally, Jamie gravitated toward showing me what to do and Zach did the honors for Gina ... and I was happy it worked out that way. I liked both boys but something about Jamie with his friendly deep voice and exotic appearance kind of just clicked with me, and he seemed taken with me as well. There was just more chemistry there, and the same was true with Zach and Gina.

“Another thing is to make sure you use the leg rope until you get really comfortable on the board,” Jamie advised as he showed me how to strap it to my rear ankle. He paddled gracefully on my board and deftly raised himself up on his belly and thrust his legs out to stand upright in one smooth motion, then caught a nice three footer. He wiped out a few times himself, but on a couple waves he was able to ride up the face for a good ten seconds before the break finally outran him. Even though he wasn’t an expert, to me he still looked like pure poetry riding those waves on that red longboard, with his mop of rich black hair blowing about his face. He was tall, almost six feet, and fairly lanky but he had some wiry muscle definition in his arms and abs. I just wished I had a camera handy.

“I can pop up okay now,” I said, feeling like I could do that semi-ok. “But how do you keep your balance?”

Zach responded, “As long as your feet are in the middle, think of like a caveman or Sasquatch. Kind of hunched over but in an athletic position.” The blonde boy did a demonstration for me.

“Z, this is Florida,” Jamie hassled his friend, grinning at me. “We have skunk apes down here, that should be our reference.”

“Oh, yeah, my bad,” Zach laughed, deftly maneuvering the nose of the board back and forth.

Time flies when you’re having fun, and by the time the tide had fully come in, I was able to stand up on the board and maneuver it around pretty comfortably. I used my hand and lead foot to be able to steer it around but I hadn’t really ridden a wave yet.

“Alright, me and Jamie are going to have a competition,” Zach announced as both boys took turns catching a couple two or three footers. “Whoever rides the next breaker longest without grubbing has to buy lunch all around.”

“Grubbing?” I asked, raising my eyebrow.

“Wiping out. Falling off,” Jamie clarified. “It’s surfer lingo.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I smiled. They both deftly rode up the face of their respective two foot waves, maneuvering the nose of their boards back and forth in a flashy manner. It was up to us girls to keep track of each time on the wave. Zach lasted longer on his wave then Jamie--about five seconds, to our amusement-- so Jamie had to buy. Gina and I gladly went along with that. It didn’t occur to us until later that this ‘bet’ was an easy way of getting a double date with us without straight-up asking us out. Teenage boys and their cleverness.

We went to the Inside Scoop, which was an ice cream/takeout place on the other side of A1A. I had a chili cheeseburger and onion rings and we just had a good time getting to know one another, sitting on the patio under the table umbrella.

“So do you guys live around here?” I asked.

“I live on Wyverly, Zach lives on Peninsula,” Jamie replied, “We rode our bikes here. This is pretty much an-every weekend thing for us in the summer.” I knew those roads were on the beachside here.

“What about you, Cara?” he asked me. “It doesn’t sound like you’re from around here. I could here it by the way you pronounced ‘house,’” he chuckled.

“Yeah, no, Pennsylvania,” I replied. “I’m only here for three weeks visiting my grandma. But it’s an every-year thing,” I added quickly, and I swear his brow lifted a little when I said that. Maybe he’s excited that I’ll be here every year, I allowed to myself giddily.

“Oh, so close. I was thinking Canada, eh,” he said, and I chuckled.

“So you guys go to school around here?” I asked, fishing for how old they were.

“Yeah, we both go to Seabreeze, I’m going into tenth grade. I’ll be sixteen in November,” Jamie said.

“Oh, same here. I won’t be sixteen until January, we can’t get our driving permit until then, unlike here,” I lamented.

“Yeah, I have mine already,” Jamie said.

“You’re lucky to live close to the beach,” I sighed. “Pennsylvania’s just a bunch of hills and farms and Amish country. Oh, and some abandoned coal mines.”

“Yeah, a lot of residents take it for granted because it’s just, you know, there all the time, but I enjoy it every chance I get. The water’s never the same day to day. And my parents are divorced so I go visit my dad in Georgia every school vacation.”

“Really, mine are too,” I said with empathy. “My dad ran off with his secretary or one of his co-workers and started a new life with her or some shit like that. It got really bitter. My mom got the house though so I live with her. I see my dad every other weekend.”

“Yeah, divorce is horrible,” Jamie said, looking at me with sympathy. “Me and my dad don’t really get along since all this happened.” He didn’t elaborate and didn’t look at me when he said it. It was looking like we had more and more in common by the minute. I was usually really shy around boys, but with Jamie and Zach, I was coming out of my shell. Especially Jamie.

Zach and Gina were also in conversation, until Zach addressed his friend, “Hey Jamie, are you going to tell Cara that your name’s not really Jamie?”

Jamie grinned ruefully and shook his head. “My dad is from Iowa but my mom is from Honduras. My real name is actually “Jaime,” which is pronounced “Hi-May,” the way it sounds in Spanish. We lived there for three years when I was younger,” he said.

“They pat him down at Orlando Airport after every trip there, ‘cause they kept catching him smuggling cocaine and non-fair trade coffee through security in his fanny pack,” Zach retorted. He was clearly joking but I could already see that Zach was a bit of a good-natured smartass.

Gina almost blew her coke out through her nostrils laughing, and Jamie punched Zach in the arm. “Dude, you are so goddamn racist, why do I even keep you around?” Jamie hassled his friend, laughing. I liked the dynamic between these friends, they’d clearly been buddies for a long time and were comfortable with each other, and were getting more comfortable with us by the minute.

“So you must be fluent in Spanish then?” I asked him.

“Si, senorita,” he said, then began talking in fluent Spanish, only a few words of which I understood. I’d taken a year of foreign language in sixth grade, but we covered all the Latin languages, spending no particular time on Spanish.

“He plays the Latino card when there’s girls around, but with anyone else, he’s the whitest guy you’ll ever know,” Zach clarified, earning him another arm-punch from Jamie, or “Jaime” as I know liked to think of him. It sounded exotic.

“And how often are there girls around here?” Gina asked coyly, fishing for the relationship status of these boys to make sure they weren’t attached.

“Around here? A lot,” Zach said, pointing to the A1A strip. “Around us? Not so much except for my baby sister,” he said.

“Yeah, me either,” Jamie said, not quite looking at me. Well, I’m glad they got that out of the way, because to be honest, I was wondering about that in the back of my mind. I didn’t want them gaming us if they each had another girl waiting for them. Of course, they are teenage boys, they could be lying...

The server came around and refilled our drinks to go. Jamie picked up the lunch tab per the boys’ agreement although I insisted on paying the tip. We went mini-golfing after lunch, and somehow it became Jamie and I versus Gina and Zach. We supposedly won by a shot, but there were a lot of mulligans and do-overs and lipped out putts that counted as in as we were all goofing off more than concentrating on the golf. When I was bending over a putt I could see out of the corner of my eyes both boys surreptitiously taking sidelong glances at my cleavage, which I internally smiled at. I know I was sneaking glances at their butts, especially Jamie’s, when they were in front of me bending over a putt. Nice and tight and probably all muscle from all that surfing, the thought came unbidden, and I blushed. But it was a great time, we all got along really well. This was the most fun with boys I’d had in a long time.

Jamie had to mow his neighbor’s lawn and Zach had to get going too, plus we were due back home as it was getting to be evening. The boys asked if we could possibly meet up at the beach again the next day, which thrilled both me and Gina.

“Oh my God, Car, Zach was SO funny, and did you see his eyes??” Gina gushed on the drive back home. “You don’t see them, you melt into them!”

“Yeah, like ice chips. Kinda creepy,” I teased her. “But seriously, Jamie has these deep chocolate eyes that you could get lost in,” I said. “He looks at you and looks like he knows everything about you.”

“I just can’t wait until our next lesson tomorrow,” she said. “I’m going to have to break out that Victoria’s secret suit for tomorrow. You know, the one my folks don’t know I own,” she smirked.

“Yeah, the one that leaves nothing to the imagination,” I mused. “I’ve only got this one two-piece I’ve got on, I don’t really want to wear the same thing twice.”

“If we were the same size I’d let you borrow one of mine,” she teased.

“Yeah, thanks for that,” I rolled my eyes as we approached our driveway.

Luckily grandma didn’t ask any unusual pressing questions about the day, and, that night, lying in bed with the ceiling fan whirring overhead, I recounted the days events. We’d met two great boys who we both got along really well with. I’d officially learned how to surf, even if I was still a novice, and I had Jamie to thank for that. I had noticed his eyes flit down to my breasts once or twice when he thought I wasn’t looking (even the times I wasn’t looking directly at him, I had him in my peripheral vision the whole day!) That sent a tingling of excitement through me. I loved how gracefully his board played through the water as he effortlessly kept it upright and maneuvered down the face just ahead of the breaking surf, his olive skin seeming to glitter with droplets of the sea and his own sweat. The intense look of concentration in his chocolate eyes and just the peak of his tongue through his pink lips, the way his thick black mane whipped about his beardless face in the sea breeze. His features were so delicate and at the same time so masculine. I couldn’t help but imagine what his luscious lips might taste like mashed against mine, the feel of his long fingers caressing my back as we made out passionately on an empty beach. I looked over to make sure my bedroom door was closed and my right hand made its way down into my nether regions and explored a bit before sleep took me over for the night.