How Did You Lose Your Virginity?

I had just run away from home again and was staying in my best friend Mike’s parents’ basement. (You can see Mike and his half-fro at top-left.) We all worked at the local McDonalds. One of our managers was a girl who had moved from California to Kansas City, in sort of a reverse late-teens flight from what she’d known; apparently when you can’t go any farther west, you go bounce back east. Poor Californians.

Her best friend was a girl named Sunny, who came out to visit and stay for a few weeks. At the time, despite the whole running away from home business, I was a pretty straight-laced kid—a literal choir boy. Sunny had purple, spiked hair and a lip ring. All my friends at the time thought I was horribly lame, but Sunny took a shine to me, finding my capacious knowledge for showtunes attractive, especially since she’d only recently vacated the beds of a series of typical post-high school punk rock assholes who treated all the punk rock girls like shit, since the girls weren’t the cheerleaders and prom queens they all craved.

Sunny had huge feet. I kissed them one night on a tube slide in the middle of a park. We went back to the rented house she shared with the McDonalds manager, stepping around cat turds and bongs. She filled up an old bath and invited me in with her, but I was too nervous to do anything but lean over the side and pour water over her from my cupped hands. I fingerbanged her on the couch with ignorant tenacity for about half an hour before she pushed my hand aside, took a swig from a two-liter of root beer, and mounted me. Amazingly, despite it being over in seconds, my previous clitoral doggedness had primed her pump, and she had her first orgasm there in my lap, or at least that’s what she had the courtesy to tell my friends.

She called me about a year later and said, “Guess what? I’m pregnant!” It wasn’t mine, but instead the child of a “really dumb, beautiful” Mexican man she’d be dating for a while, but who had already split.

Sunny wanted to be an artist—specifically, an animator. This was the inside cover of her notebook, which somehow remained in my possession when she went back to California a few days later. She gave me an unused train ticket and told me to come out and stay with her for a while, but I couldn’t be sure of myself, and stayed in KC for several more years before I, too, got the gumption to go east.

Last I heard Sunny had two children and had joined the Air Force, but I lost her number, so the only updates I got were through a grapevine of unreliable fidelity, until they stopped entirely.