The Germophobe Defense

To say that I was awkward in high school would be a severe understatement. I was the king of the inelegant moment. If there was a wrong thing to say, it would be me that said it, and if there was a wrong thing to do, you could count on me to have done it twice already. What did I do when one of my friends decided she wanted more and leaned in for the kiss? I scampered away, of course. As so blunderingly one does.

At our school there were very few places that you could have a private moment with someone, and once you found one of those places, you returned often. The most popular was beneath one of the stairwells, just out of view, where not even the teachers would ever go to because it was so out of the way of everything. While every other staircase in the building always had someone walking up or down, the private stairs were generally quiet.

Liz and I were in our science class one afternoon and, having decided that we had had enough of phenotypes and other biological characteristics, we retreated beneath the stairs. This area lent itself well to romantic trysts as it had a great echo, and in order to lessen the amount of noise one made, you had to sit close and speak barely above a whisper.

I, for one, was not prepared for a romantic rendezvous, and I assumed that Liz felt the same as I. We had always had a very flirtatious relationship, but it never crossed my mind to consider anything more than that. It wasn't that she wasn't attractive, because Liz was a very pretty girl, she was just really, really high-maintenance, and I also didn't think that she would be all that interested in me anyway.

We were sitting together, huddled closely, our arms wrapped around each other, her head leaned against my shoulder. I think we were drawing something with markers, but I can't really remember what, just sort of doodling absently as we chatted. Every few minutes she would start forward as though she were about to say something, but she would stop herself every time. After she had repeated the action about four or five times, I asked her if everything was okay. For a moment we locked eyes, and she seemed really unsure about something. That's when we both leaned forward at the same time and knocked our heads together.

We both fell back a little, rubbing our foreheads and laughing, and she asked "what are you doing?!" a little too loudly so that it reverberated up the stairs and into the classroom at the top, as evidenced by one of the english teachers poking yelling for us to get back to class, though she seemed to have no idea where we actually were.

We waited for a few moments in silence, hoping that the teacher would be appeased by the lack of noise and return to her classroom so that we could return to our truancy.

"...do you think she's gone?" I asked, trying to hush my own laughter. Liz smiled back, lurched forward with the speed of a puma, and kissed me on the lips. I broke free and asked, far more loudly than I had intended, "WHAT are you DOING!?" This, of course, regained the attention of the teacher at the top of the stairs, who came out of the classroom once more to tell us to get back to class.

Liz's grip on my arm intensified in what I thought, at the time, was a concentrated effort to molest me, but was far more likely just an attempt to keep us both quiet again until the teacher had left for good. Since I thought that my friend was now sexually assaulting me, I launched myself to my feet, with Liz falling forward because of it, and scampered off down the hall.

Now, I can tell you that this is not the reaction that a young woman wants you to have when she kisses you. In fact, it's probably the exact opposite of whatever reaction she's going for.

I was a little freaked out by the experience, and spent the rest of the day floating from classroom to classroom to either gather my thoughts on the subject or to speak with my friends and try to ignore the matter entirely. Eventually I started to see Liz coming into the classrooms, in what was an effort to find me, and I would quickly duck out and move on to the next destination. At first I was avoiding her because I was embarrassed that I had had such a pitiful reaction to her kissing me, but as the day wore on I started to worry that she was growing increasingly angry with every moment that I snuck away.

Eventually I snuck back to underneath the staircase. I figured that it was quiet enough that I could contemplate my situation and not be disturbed by anyone. Unfortunately, the more I thought about it, the less hopeful I was that I could come up with a solution. I was hoping that, if I could come up with something clever enough, it would just become a hilarious story that we would tell when people asked us how we started dating, but by the end of the day Liz had somehow gotten the message that I wasn't interested. No idea where she got that from.

By the time I had gotten onto the bus at the end of the day, I had managed to successfully avoid Liz since our incident, and I prepared myself for a weekend of worrying about what I would say to her on Monday.

We wouldn't speak to one another for the next two months. In part, it was because we were both embarrassed about the entire situation, but we certainly weren't trying to avoid one another during those months. It was just that...well...I came down with a sudden, and severe, case of mono. This took me out of school from, roughly, the middle of November to the middle of January, and pretty much everyone I knew thought I had just transferred to a different school without saying goodbye. But that's a story for later.