I can't remember a worse time...

The first time ever was something of an anticlimax. Of course, it is for most people...the first shy fumblings in the dark can never match up to the illicit thrill we got from the real life confessions and frankly unmanageable tips in more! magazine. But my first time really was an anticlimax, because I had deprived myself of the one thing that makes all girls' first times worthwhile. I couldn't speak to my friends about it.

This was not because my friends were devout catholics, or those slightly creepy 'True Love Waits' teenagers. It wasn't because I was ashamed, or embarrassed, or I thought I'd done it wrong. It was simply because I had been telling them for over a year that I'd already done it. A family friend, I told them, helpfully living far enough away that they would never meet, but close enough that my family could conceivably go and visit his parents all the time.

What a lover he was, this 'family friend' who actually lived nowhere but in my imagination. For months I wowed my friends with stories, always tailored to my audience...the bed covered in rose petals for the romantics, the stolen bottles of champagne for the party girls, and, worst of all, the stories that make me cringe to this day - for the more curious of my friends, the intimate sexual details, all of course gleaned from the only source I had. Yes, more! magazine again.Whoever heard of a fourteen year old boy with a ten inch penis? But they lapped up my stories, and for the first time in my school career I stopped feeling like the awkward geek in the corner, and started to blossom as a cool, experienced leader.

So when it finally happened, in a cold, dark bedroom at a particularly boring party, with a slightly chubby boy from the year below me in school, I immediately thought 'Thank God that's over with'. Swiftly followed by 'Who on earth can I talk to about this?'. I can't even remember the event itself, perhaps because these things are only cemented in your mind with the retelling and the reliving. I remember sitting on his bed, having just been introduced to him by a mutual friend. He seemed as desperate to get it over with as I was. And in a sharp, slightly uncomfortable instant, it was. I remember gathering up my things and going back to the party, carrying on as if nothing of any importance had happened. That was it. My monumental step from childhood into adulthood. Less than five minutes in a grubby teenage boy's bedroom.

I had never felt cooler. Or wanted to cry more.