When Asked To Homecoming Is Equivalent To Being Asked To Get Married

I walked home from school, our house was just three blocks from the high school. I always walked with a purpose, I didn't dilly dally around, my mother watched the clock. That one afternoon in the fall of my senior year a guy walked up beside me and wanted to talk. I ignored him and said i had to get home. He said I was stuck up. Well I was, he wasn't from my part of town, or my church, not a boy I would ever want to talk to, I didn't associate with boys like him.

He pulled my hair to stop me. He said he wanted to ask me a question. Would I go with him to homecoming. I said no before anything else popped into my head. Still holding my hair he kissed me right there on the sidewalk, 'well you are now my girlfriend and you are going to homecoming and that's that'. His finger in my face for me to shut up, he told me he wanted me to wear a real pretty dress.

I told my mother I had been asked to homecoming. She was all over it, and who was the boy? I told her she didn't know him, but I had told him I didn't want to go. I had to sit through a lecture on being polite, when a boy asks you to homecoming and he is the first boy to ask, it is polite to agree. It's the way it is, always has been that way. You never know.

When he came to my house to pick me up I was wearing a pretty dress. He showed up in this awful plaid shirt and jeans and those work boots they wear at the plants. He was all cleaned up, his hair was gooed down and his fingernails were clean. His smile was so false, I felt like crying having to go out with him. He was driving his father's pickup, he had cleaned it out and it was clean, but it was a pickup and I had so somehow get in with my dress while he held the door open for me.

The first slow dance and I was trapped against him, his arm around my neck, and him telling me to never mind his belt buckle, he had won it at the FFA rodeo that summer. And I might as well come out and say it, he kissed me flat out on the lips in the middle of the dance floor in the gym. In the girls' bathroom I was asked what was going on, why had I come to the homecoming dance with him. They had their girls, why hadn't he asked one of them. There is no good answer so I just held back my tears and went back out to him waiting for me.

In his world it was customary for the girl to put her arm around his waist while he kept his arm around the girl's shoulders. Tight. I heard it over and over again that night, I was his girlfriend and he needed me to loosen up. He wanted a bona fide kiss back. After the dance he took me to the IHOP where his kind hung out. I knew some of the kids there who had been in one or other of my classes, but I wasn't part of that crowd. These girls kissed their boyfriends, held their hand over their shoulder so he could gab a boob. One girl told me that if he was anything like his brother Bob he was going to make me a woman that night.

I got home still a virgin. I had to put up with him kissing me in the doorway. He asked politely if he could have one grab at my boob, he promised that's all he was asking on his first date with me. He asked me if I liked his belt buckle when we danced.

I lost my virginity to him, I found out that he was like his brother Bob, you got dated when you put out, if not you stayed home, punished while he dated another girl instead. Fortunately I guess for me I didn't lose my virginity in the back of the pickup truck, it was on his grandmother's living room floor while she was at work. I had to make friends with the girls from his crowd, you know, in case you had to have company when you went to fix your hair and things like that. The gathering place after school was at the A&W, where the senior boys all showed off their pickups to the freshman girls. You also learned all you needed to know about three on the tree and the boys hand on your knee as you drove along on Friday night.

I am one of those girls that marries the boy who got my virginity. Even if it means that I have to learn a whole new language and how to serve the men at Thanksgiving while they watch the Cowboys beat the Redskins. The word wife is just as strong as the word girlfriend was in high school, 'you're my wife' has a sense of permanence to it. And you have a nice little ass now that you are pregnant is a compliment. And if you really want to give him a compliment, 'I always liked your belt buckle' will do it.