Kids' personalities change when they turn thirteen.

I have no idea what I was wearing when I met my first snog. That’s probably because it was a long long time ago. I was thirteen, and had gone to Scotland on holiday with my parents so that they could play golf. Any excuse, and they whipped out their golf clubs faster than you could say ‘hole in one’. That was the year when my parents began to get on my nerves. I wished I was anywhere, but with them.

One evening, there was a stupid fancy dress competition at the hotel. I went as myself, but my younger sister dressed up as a character from Planet From The Apes. She had never looked so ugly, but she was the one who went up to collect her prize, not me. And, she was welcome to it. I just kept wishing that I belonged to another family, not the boring one I belonged to. (I knew I wasn’t adopted because I had seen my birth certificate).

‘Why are you so round-shouldered,’ Mum constantly interrogated me.

‘Stand up straight. Don’t walk around with your head on one side,’ my dad kept saying.

But I was beyond caring. I just kept wishing they would go away to Timbuktu and leave me all alone. Then, two days after our holiday began, a new family arrived at the hotel, and were seated at the table next to ours in the dining room. I didn’t notice the parents, but I noticed their son all right. He seemed suave and sophisticated and had a floppy fringe, which he flicked out of his eyes from time to time. He kept staring in my direction, and at first I thought he was looking at the girl behind me. But when he gave me a big wink, I knew it was me he was looking at, so I gave him a big wink back. Mum and Dad kept telling me I was self-conscious and unnatural, but he didn’t seem to think so. In fact, he took quite a shine to me, and after dinner, asked me to go for a walk with him along the beach. I was fed up with Mum and Dad accusing me of thinking about myself all the time, so I said yes. Anything to get away from my boring parents, I thought.

Lover boy was called Laurence and was a year older than me. He seemed really grown-up, especially when he lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring in my face.

‘Do you want a fag?’ he asked seductively, but as I didn’t know how to smoke, I sensibly declined. He
kept winking at me and first I thought he had something in his eye, but I soon realised he was a cheeky imp.

‘Let’s lie down,’ he said smoothly, laying his sports jacket on the sand.

I had nothing better to do, so did what he suggested. And, then out of the blue, he snogged me, and I snogged him right back. I think all that practising I did, kissing my pillow, pretending it was my favourite pop star helped me know what to do. Laurence snogged me for a long time, but I didn’t mind even though he tasted of scrambled egg which he must have gobbled for supper. I kept excitedly thinking I couldn’t wait to tell all my school friends I had kissed a boy, because I knew they hadn’t.

But, horrors! Unknown to me, my parents and sister were looking out of the hotel’s bay window and saw me snogging away. I would never have known, but when I staggered into the hotel with sand in my skewiff hair, my sis told me what my family had witnessed. Luckily, my parents were too embarrassed to say anything. That’s probably because they had discovered I was a grown-up, even though I was still a pubescent. Funnily enough, they never accused me of being self-conscious ever again.

Copyright: Frances Lynn, 2006