Boys I Made Out With in Eighth Grade

‘90s puberty mixtape, shame alchemy, a little acne

Image by Vinur.

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There are certain songs I can’t hear without spiritually transforming into my 13 year-old self. Know what I mean?

Certain riffs, even. Like the opening guitar strums of “Wonderwall.” Just twenty-two concentrated seconds of my adolescent self hatching within, brought into full horny glory by a sexy cello. It comes in at 0:44.

Or the shaky sociopathy of Alanis Moressette’s voice in “You Oughta Know.” How she sucks in air between words, she’s just that pissed about Dave Coulier and needs all the oxygen she can get to express it. I’m in the eighth grade, I don’t know what I’m pissed about, but listening to that song I am Alanis – she is me – and I hate that bitch going down on Dave in a theater.

Or even the boppy dopamine of “Fantasy,” back when we were all more appropriately reverent towards Mariah Carey’s vocal range. Was Mariah rollerblading? I feel she was rollerblading at this time. As for me, I’m at the mall dangling precariously between the juniors’ and women’s clothing sections, and yet somehow this song makes me feel safe to be exactly there, exactly in between girlhood and womanhood, the precise psychological pinpoint between heart-scrawled passed notes and something more sensually adult.

These songs all came out in 1995, by the way. Kurt Cobain died the year before, two days before my birthday, and don’t you just fucking wish sometimes that Kurt was here right now? If there’s anyone I would like to vocally weigh in on Trump, and MAGA, and all the bullshit that generally characterizes this time, it is Kurt Cobain.

But it’s 2025, not 1995.

And I’m openly biased towards my generation – obviously. The last to enjoy an analogue childhood. The ones who brought you Nirvana and TLC and Tupac, My So-Called Life and Doc Martens and the Delia’s catalogue. You’re welcome. 

We had our problems though. An abject lack of sex education, for starters. A cheesy “just say no” culture that was at first applied to drugs, then to vice more generally. The moralizing was a little lazy back then is what I’m saying, and it’s no wonder Kurt and all of Seattle was frustrated. No one could convincingly answer why gayness was bad, or why marijuana was bad; the “why” didn’t matter nearly so much as the fact that these things were BAD. Period. 

Which might be why my hair stylist laughed yesterday when I told her that at age 43, I – she who has styled herself Miss Sex Positive – felt bad (BAD) for years about hooking up with all these boys in the eighth grade. “Really?” she giggled. 

Really. Somewhere in my mind is a judgmental man holding a frying pan and an egg explaining “this is your brain on drugs” except it’s a PSA about getting felt up and my brain is sizzling. I think about:  

Fumbling, slobbery, eyes-closed kisses. I met these boys at a different school than mine. The braces that scraped my lips. The acne I saw up-close. 

I think about: 

The random places we made out. My neighbor’s front yard, someone’s living room while David Letterman played in the background, a dance, a carnival, a playground at my old elementary school.  

I think about: 

How Christian-ashamed I felt about my eighth grade year, how I blamed myself and my impure heart, how I quietly confessed my sordid past to a youth pastor. So much guilt, and all we ever did was second base. 

I think about: 

How feminist-ashamed I felt about my eighth grade year, after I left Christianity in college. I asked myself: were those boys passing me around? Was I disposable? A joke with breasts? I wondered if I’d been taken advantage of. 

But lately…I’ve been feeling so grateful for those months. 

Because when I put myself back in my body, I remember having a blast, actually. 

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Before we go any further, I think we should pause here, and review the correct way to attend a middle school dance.

You roll in with your posse. That’s the first rule and you should set this up in advance. Next, you walk in, and you don’t go to the dance floor right away; you hang back and let bangers like “500 Miles” or “Ordinary World” set the tone while you reapply your lip gloss in the bathroom. This is to ensure you don’t appear overly eager. The goal is to dance with someone cute or, barring that, dance in a group circle to an extended remix of the Grease movie soundtrack. Let’s go girls. 

But. As I’m walking into the gym of San Antonio Boys Academy, I see someone who makes me forget all about the lip gloss. 

It’s a guy. We lock eyes. Blue eyes, it seems, sparkly one could say, and these eyes stop me en route to the bathroom. 

He smiles shyly, hands in his pockets, about my same small, five foot something height. Cue John Hughes movie music while I respectfully ask: who the fuck is that? 

I’m walking in with makeshift friends, and I think they would admit that, even now. 

All socially adrift girls doing our goddamn best in jellies and Wet Seal outfits. We did love each other – I still remember one of them opening her drawer to reveal an entire square foot cavity of emotional, praising notes we all wrote back and forth – but we hated each other, too. I once made a Pandora’s Box for the Greek mythology unit in eighth grade World History, and it got displayed in the library, and my friends wrote a bunch of mean, slut-shamey stuff on a picture of me and put it in the box. I found it, I cried, I swore them off; I’m sure that in a week’s time, I was writing one of those notes that ended up in my friend’s drawer.

Middle school is so brutal. But those eyes, right?

Like Tina in Bob’s Burgers, I am hormone-riddled and I am 13. Those eyes are my deliverance. I pray, silently to myself, that that boy asks me to dance and when “I Swear” by John Michael Montgomery comes on – he does.

No one is more surprised than me. I am not cool. But this dance is happening at a different school than mine, and this boy is blissfully unaware of my social status. 

“What’s your name?”

“Scott. Yours?”

“Tolly.”

Our sweet nothings are off to a great start. 

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My first kiss with Scott, which is also my first kiss ever, is extremely chaste. 

It’s happening at a friend’s house, and the friends are downstairs. We’re upstairs, David Letterman is flicking a Top Ten list on a notecard, and now that I think about it I’m not sure why I haven’t been bragging this whole time that David Letterman was involved in my first kiss. I’m lying down and so is Scott, propped up on his elbows so he’s a level above. I can’t believe it when he starts leaning in. 

And I can’t believe it still when his lips are on mine, everything before-and-after and fizzy to the touch. Quieter than I expected. Though I swear to God we’re experiencing telepathy and it’s pretty loud: “Do you like this?” “YES.” “Maybe we should pause and regroup?” “Ok, fine.” 

What I actually say to him is: “I’m not ready for sex yet.” 

He laughs and says “neither am I,” and while 43 year-old me is proud to have set those proactive boundaries, 13 year-old me kind of wants to die on this bed for, again, being so profoundly uncool. It’s just that I’d been led to believe that boys are hornier than girls, right? So I had to say something? “Boys will be boys,” “boys only want one thing,” etc. etc. My parents say none of this; it’s more ambient, from youth group to…science. 

(I can’t pinpoint the instances, but I know deep in my soul that from the time I am very young, it’s drilled into me again and again that “according to evolutionary science” men just want to “spread their seed” and speaking of my 43 year-old self, it strikes me anew how condescending that whole thing is to men, like they’re these horny babies, and women are – evolutionarily!! – these nun-like keepers of the hearth. I do love science – big fan – but c’mon. This one’s tired.)

So I’m not smooth. Ok. At least he knows. I know I’m supposed to be the brakes, although unbeknownst to either of us the next eight months will see me braking and accelerating like a student driver. With who? 

All of Scott’s friends. 

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It unfolds organically after Scott breaks up with me, a whirlwind, mostly phone-related romance that lasts six weeks. I’m heartbroken, but Scott’s friends are more than happy to comfort me. 

Where even are we when we’re trying this stuff out? Mostly we’re at their parents’ houses, surrounded by beige and terra cotta walls. Tuscany is a big interior design theme. Lots of plastic grapes cascading out of empty wine bottles, fake ivy dancing across shelves, like it sprouted out of the drywall. I’m looking over a 13 year-old boy’s shoulder mid-makeout and see a talavera pot shaped like a giant cat; we’re heavy petting on a terrifying floral couch. You can choose your lovers, but you can’t always choose your rendezvous spots: this is especially true when you don’t have a driver’s license. 

And each time I make out with one of these boys, I’m learning things. 

Things like…where my hands go while we kiss. Here? On the leg? Or on the chest? Try both; see how he reacts. Does he like it when I kiss harder, with tongue? Or more gently? Again – try both out, feel for the response. Kissing on the neck? Are we doing that yet? Are we old enough for that yet? It seems wildly mature. Kissing on the neck transcends the base system. I’m not sure if it’s a brake or an acceleration. How about where they put their hands on me? No, not breasts yet; that’s too far. Wait. Did I like that? Ok. Go back to the breasts. Not too long! But let’s just try it.   

The thing about putting myself back in my 13 year-old body is that it endears me, the trial-and-error, the figuring it out. 

Sometimes I think the whole reason I write this Substack is a self-acceptance exercise, healing all my pointless shame in real time. 

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Another thing I learn from the boys that year: when it comes to attraction, energy is everything.

Scott’s best friend is portly and charming, greeting me on the phone with phrases like “Hello Miss Moseley” that make me twirl the phone cord. Always throwing in flirty little coaxes, always one step ahead in the chessboard of our conversation. “We can’t have Miss Moseley skipping her homework, now” when I tell him I have to go do math but then, when he says that…it just makes me want to stay. 

“Maybe five more minutes,” I smile, and just like that: the power of a well-timed tease.

Scott has another friend, a boy I know from elementary school. He’s so goofy and disarming I go the furthest with him than any of them. He’s like me – the beta of his friend group – and that’s kind of what I like about him. Loud laugher, fast nodder, overall life enthusiast. The one time we hook up (parents’ house, den, beige walls), we high-five after it’s done and call it a day. 

“I’d just always wanted to know what that felt like,” he tells me, and for some reason this doesn’t make me feel like a checklist item, it makes me feel like he’s being honest and so was I, because I wanted to know what that act felt like too. Now I know. I walk home, stopping for frozen yogurt on the way. 

There was only one boy in the group who did make me feel like a checklist item, like it was his turn.

Nothing weird or scary – it just turned me off – the way he brought me inside without introducing me to his mom, hustling me upstairs to make out in secret. Maybe he was just nervous. Maybe I’m projecting? I think about this guy sometimes, get the strange urge to call him and ask, “dude, what was that all about?” He’d probably think I’m insane. Which, I can live with.

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I heard Wayne Coyne say in an interview once that the songs you liked at age 11, 12, 13, 14 have more sticking power than any songs you will ever hear in your life, because you’re going through such a big change as a human. “She Don’t Use Jelly” came out when I was 11; I nearly cried when I met Wayne Coyne here in Austin. Fun Fun Fun Fest. I think I was 30-something. But really, I was 11.

And I do recommend it, going back and listening to the songs you liked back then. 

To luxuriate in the past, or at least the parts that felt good. And I mean, I can’t say it always felt “good” — the jabby tongues in my mouth, the worry what my friends would say (see: Pandora’s Box), the surreptitious visits to the bathroom to re-apply concealer to my own zits. God. That sweet, insecure child. 

But I can listen to Oasis, or Alanis, or Mariah anytime I want. 

And I can feel something like the birth of hunger in me; it’s not weird unless you make it weird. We all go through puberty. Ok, so maybe those boys were single-minded. Me too. Maybe they didn’t want to be girlfriend-boyfriend. Me neither. Some friends you do stuff like this with. Sometimes, you’re just tongue-kissing a boy on the couch, but you turn up Magic 105 FM to drown it out, and then motherfucking Seal comes on, and it’s vault-locked inside your brain. Forever.

I really do love this song. 

Got a first kiss story? Tell me. ⬇️