I’ll tell you a secret. One time I made out with a girl in a bus as her best friend, my date, smoking a cigarette, waited for us outside the bus, and when I got off the bus my date took one look at my face and tried to put her cigarette out in my eye. I don’t know how she knew what had to be the shortest-lived secret ever and I still don’t know. She never spoke to me again, and neither did her friend.
This was not the first time women and secrets led me to murky confusion, where I have lived ever since. The first girl I ever kissed swore me to secrecy, but we were fourteen years old then and I didn’t actually have anyone to tell the secret to, since my brothers and friends would have fallen down laughing at the very idea that a girl had kissed me, and besides the whole actual kissing event was a muddle, I had major spectacles and she had complicated braces, and neither of us knew how to breathe while kissing, did you come up for air every thirty seconds like swimming, or take turns breathing, or breathe like walruses through your noses or what, and our shy clinking kisses, in a dank dark basement with peeling paneling and moaning music and moist potato chips in a sad chipped bowl, were more like spaceships docking in the vast silence of deep space than they were heated or romantic or anything like that, and anyway our few tentative kisses were ended abruptly by her roaring father who was supposed to be elsewhere but suddenly and definitively wasn’t.
After that it seemed that every girl I met was webbed with secrets, and whenever a girl told me a secret, or we did something that was supposed to be secret, soon there were bad plot devices and furious friends and car keys thrown in creeks and I was an idiot. This happened all the time, even with my cool sister, who liked to smoke and swore me to secrecy and soon there were various smoking implements and implications on the kitchen table and our dad simmering and somehow this was all my fault and my sister threatened to snap my pinkies like twigs but thankfully she didn’t, or hasn’t yet.
As I got older the secrets got harder. By the time