Up in Ontario

Learning to Kiss

This story starts a long time ago, in the scope of one life, when a man named Trudeau led our country and we first started to learn to name our places for our people. It was in those days that Shane Penner kissed his first girl in the muddy track between the portable classrooms of Vimy Elementary School. He knew her from church. Her name was Mandy Roberts and she kissed him back just as soon as he pulled back from kissing her. From then on he wanted to have girls kiss him.

When Shane arrived home after school he kissed his mother and kissed her again until she pushed him away. Only some girls wanted to keep kissing. Shane showed his friend Travis how to kiss the next day using his forearm as an example. When Mr. Carpenter saw the two of them between the portables he pulled them apart and hit them both across the face with the back of his hand. “Don’t ever do that again.” And so Shane received his second lesson in kissing: only boys and girls kissed.

That night when his father tucked him into bed and kissed him on the forehead, Shane started to pull back the covers to hit him with the back of his hand. His father saw what Shane was up to and held him down. “Okay, you’re too old for that,” he said and stood and then said goodnight and left the bedroom. In the dark left when his father closed the door Shane felt tears burn in his eyes and slide down his cheeks.

By his thirteenth birthday Shane had kissed eleven girls in his own grade. He also kissed Claire McNabb who was a year ahead of him in school and Jill Parker and Sylvie Fichaud who were a year behind him. In a book beside his bed he keep a log of the girls he kissed with the date and a few notes: “Jenna Bryant stuck her tongue into my mouth when we kissed. Then I stuck my tongue into her mouth. She drooled on my chin but my lips felt nice and smooth after.”

Shane started going around with Jenna the following week, and they held hands when they walked down the hallway, and she wrote him notes on the clean pages she tore from her scribblers. Her bubbly handwriting filled the ruled blue lines with questions about his family and with statements about her own. She didn’t like her younger brother much, her mother tried to get her to try out for the cross-country team but she hated running.

In the evenings Jenna called Shane and told him more about what she thought and felt and how her family drove her crazy. She listed off her favourite television shows and her favourite cassette tapes and why she had hated going to Disneyland with her family. This incredible inventory of items bewildered Shane and frightened him since he felt the heavy expectation that he should remember all of it, and he really just wanted to kiss like she had kissed him that first time.