Every Boy I Ever Kissed: Excerpt // Nellwyn Lampert

Every Boy I Ever Kissed by Nellwyn Lampert, Nonfiction Editor at The Puritan, has been recently published by Dundurn Press. It is currently available in bookstores and online.

I am eighteen years old and I have never been kissed. It’s my biggest and most shameful secret but that’s not why I am crying right now. I’m wiping tears off my cheeks and trying not to think about my mother’s big green minivan speeding down the highway, away from my dorm room and back toward my little hometown. I unzip the first of my many suitcases and begin to unpack my fall sweaters, my low-rise jeans, and my overpriced eyeshadows. Reaching my hand down in between the soft layers of folded fabric, I feel something unexpectedly hard and square. Pushing my clothes away, I see an all-too-familiar hot pink cardboard box.“Oh, Jesus, Mom,” I say out loud as if she were still sitting in the room next to mine. “Seriously?”I sit down on my unmade bed and stare at the bright little box with the words HER PLEASURE ULTRA RIBBED emblazoned on the front in bold, gold letters.Of course. Mom would buy me the most feminist condoms she could get her hands on.I stare at the box, and feel like it’s judging me.I’ve never been a fan of pink.I root around through my piles of luggage until I find the welcome pack from my college. It’s a big laundry bag filled with dental dams and granola bars, so I throw the box of condoms in there where it seems to belong. The good news is that I’m no longer crying. Instead, I’m remembering a walk my mom and I took along the beach just two weeks before. In an uncharacteristic splurge, my mother had flown my younger brother and me out to the Atlantic coast for one last holiday before I went away to university. We spent the days swimming in the ocean and driving the winding Nova Scotia highways, singing “Daydream Believer” as loud as we could. At night, we went out for lobster and curled up in shared rooms like we’d done years ago. One night, as my brother lay reading comic books by the lamplight in his bed, and my mother and I were tucked up in our own across the room, I asked her to tell me a bedtime story. I was struck by the sudden realization that these were my last moments of childhood and I wanted to do something to capture them, to feel that feeling of being safe and cared for before going out into the world on my own. My mother told me the life story of Virginia Woolf. A biography filled with loss, death, mental illness, and suicide. Her subconscious message seemed clear. It was time to grow up. The next day, we went to the beach. While my brother busied himself with sticks and tidal pools, my mom and I took a walk along the water, holding our sandals in our hands and letting the cool, salty ocean brush up against our toes as the waves breathed in between them.“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” my mother said. “Before you go away to school.”“Mm-hmm,” I said, already dreading what she would say with the instinctual teenage knowledge that a parent is about to do or say something embarrassing.“You’re going off to university and there are going to be lots of guys there … guys who are older and more experienced than you are—”“Mom—” I said, trying to cut her off. I didn’t need to hear The Speech again. Don’t be pressured into anything. Don’t drink anything you didn’t see the bartender make herself. Keep twenty dollars in your wallet in case you need to call a cab.“—and I just want you to relax and have fun,” she finished. I blinked and stared out at the ocean, trying to think of what to say. Part of me was pleased that she thought I was responsible and mature enough not to need to hear The Speech again. The other part of me was shaken to realize that even my mother thought I was a repressed prude.“I think you’re the only mother in the world to give that as her parting wisdom before sending her eighteen-year-old daughter off to college in the big city.” My mom shrugged with the twinkle in her eye reserved for things she found particularly exciting. Sex. Small amounts of responsibly sourced marijuana. The combination of brandy, salted peanuts, and potato chips.“And I’ll buy you some condoms,” she added.Then I finally did roll my eyes.“Mom, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of that myself,” I said. Even back then, my opinion was that if you were too embarrassed to buy your own condoms at the drugstore, you were probably too immature to be having sex. My mom always had a good sense of when to drop a subject, so she didn’t say anything else for the rest of the trip. It wasn’t until I was back home a week later and packing my things that I spotted the box of condoms inside one of the suitcases she’d gotten out of storage for me. “Mom!” I said, marching into her studio. “I was serious. I can buy my own condoms.” I placed them firmly down on her desk and went back to my packing. It wasn’t until I was already on campus that I realized she must have somehow slipped the box in again at the last possible moment, hiding it under my sweaters. Back in my dorm room, I wandered over to the window and looked out at the swarms of students playing getting-to-know-you games in the courtyard while I unpacked and organized. Maybe my mother was right. Maybe my romantic failures were tied to my overall inability to simply relax and have fun.Relax and have fun.It’s harder than it sounds, particularly for those of us who are coming of age in the twenty-first century. They call us “millennials” and “digital babies.” Repeated over and over again, it starts to sound like nothing more than boomer code for “maladjusted.” But while it’s easy to repeat the age-old lament that our parents “just don’t get us,” the truth is that so many of us don’t have that blessed hippie ability to relax and have fun. More than ever before, we are crippled with anxiety, depression, and existential angst that lasts long beyond the mopey misunderstood teen years. When it comes to sex and romance, the surge in anxiety disorders among young people is often cited as a main explanation for why millennials are the first generation to have fewer sexual partners and lose their virginity later in life than their parents. It’s a strange reversal in the tide of sexual liberation that prompts me to ask: what are we really afraid of?It’s not merely the usual risks of disease and parenthood that have paralyzed us. The real problem is much more insidious, much more complicated, and a whole lot harder to work around.

Nellwyn Lampert is a writer, editor, and blogger with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of King’s College. She lives in Toronto.