I was twelve when everything changed. All of a sudden life wasn’t as easy as it used to be and my parents didn’t know everything anymore. In fact, they hardly knew anything. How did they get so stupid so quickly? Or perhaps I just got extremely smart very fast. No, all that happened was I began the long and painful road to adulthood, and it began on my twelfth birthday.

     It was the summer and I was so incredibly happy--I was TWELVE! One more year and I’d be a teenager! It would be so cool to be a teenager and hang out with the "older" group--of course it didn’t hit me at the time that the older group would always be older than me and would never accept me. Oh well let me hang on to my dream as long as possible.

That was the day I started losing some of my friends--we just started growing apart, but that’s one of the factors of growing up--you find out who your true friends are and you lose a lot of them in the process. I also realized I couldn’t talk to my best friend John about everything anymore that day. All of a sudden there was an awkwardness between us that just shouldn’t have been there. Of course that was also the birthday I played my first game of spin the bottle.

     My friend Stacy suggested the game. Suddenly I realized that everyone was in a big hurry to grow up. Sure, I thought about it and idolized my older sister and her friends, but I never realized what "growing up" truly meant. It meant giving up your childhood. Of course I didn’t think of it that way when I was twelve--I just knew it was a big change. However, it was a required change.

      Sitting down in my basement on a hot June day, I embraced that change head on and I spun the bottle. It landed on John and I thought, "No big deal. It’s only John." I got up, ready to give him a peck on the cheek, and was unexpectedly pulled into his strong twelve-and-a-half-year-old arms and kissed more passionately than I had ever been kissed before. It truly was my first kiss though, and, now that I think about it, more like a two-second peck on the lips than anything else.

      The kiss ended before it started and John, embarrassed and three different shades of red, awkwardly let me go and sat down quickly. I stumbled over Stacy and another girl as I tried to find my seat. We then had to sit through the "Ooo’s" and whistles from everyone and try not to blush. So many feelings were swarming inside me; I had no idea what had hit me. Well, actually I did--John’s lips had hit me. I was really confused and wasn’t even sure if I liked it or was disgusted by it. However, I did know that I would never think the same way I had before about John again.

      He never said anything to me the rest of the party. He even stayed to help me clean up, but we cleaned in silence. When it was time for him to go home though, he gave me a hug and said, "Happy Birthday, Janie. See you tomorrow."

      We never talked about that kiss and we continued to act the same way we always had around each other. Except I thought of him differently--all of a sudden he was cute and I began to have dreams about him. And life went on this way for the beginning of my teenage years until I was sixteen.

      It turned out that the cool older group never accepted me and I finally realized that I was too cool for them. I kept my one good friend Stacy and of course John, but I drifted away from my other elementary school friends. I was now a junior in high school--willing and ready for anything and everything that came my way, so I thought.

     One night, I was walking home from studying at Stacy’s when John walked up. Actually he ran up. It frightened me. I thought something had happened to my family or his family. Instead of crying out bad news, he simply said, out of breath, "Janie . . . Janie." He repeated my name at least six times and I could see his breath in the cool winter night air. He was seventeen now and certainly a lot . . .

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