Read Feels Like the First Time Online
Authors: Shawn Inmon
“Do you know what my friends call that kind of gum?” We both giggled, and she stood on tip-toe and whispered the words in my ear. The ice was broken in an instant and it felt like we were just hanging out again, only this time in circumstances filled with wonder and possibility. I smiled at her and knew we had reached a new level of intimacy.
When we got back to the theater, we found a place to park right in front since it was still half an hour until the movie started. I was relieved to see the lights in the lobby welcoming us. Once inside, I told Dawn I wanted some Hot Tamales. I didn’t, but I wanted her to feel comfortable getting something too. She said she didn’t want anything, so I was stuck with an unopened box of Hot Tamales rattling around in my pocket all night.
We went upstairs and sat in the balcony, because that’s where I’d always seen other teenagers sit when they were on a date. Once we picked out our seats and sat down, I was so distracted by the nearness of Dawn that the entire movie passed in a blur.
Star Wars
eventually became one of my favorite movies, but by the end of that night I didn’t know the difference between R2D2 and Darth Vader.
I remembered nothing about the movie but everything about Dawn: the warmth of her arm brushing against mine and the feathery softness of her hair against my cheek as she leaned over to say something.
The ride home was happy and relaxed. We could finally talk and enjoy each other’s company, just like we had so many times before.
The songs we heard on the drive home–
Tonight’s the Night
by Rod Stewart,
Feels Like the First Time
by Foreigner, and
Dreams
by Fleetwood Mac–felt so appropriate. It was like the DJ at 62 KGW in Portland watched over us as our own musical guardian angel.
Our tires crunched over the gravel as I pulled into my parking spot between our two houses.
Let’s Just Kiss and Say Good-bye
by the Manhattans was playing softly as I killed the engine.
I wondered what Dawn had thought about tonight. Did she think of this as a date, or did she think I was just being nice to the kid next door on her birthday? I had too many pent-up thoughts and feelings inside me to let there be any doubt. As unsure of myself as I was, and as unsure of what, if anything, Dawn felt for me, I couldn’t let the big hole of doubt exist inside me anymore.
Dawn got out of the Vega and walked toward her house. I threw open my door and met her at the front of the car. I reached out and touched her wrist gently, to stop her there. I had waited forever for this moment, but now I couldn’t wait an extra fifteen seconds to walk her to her front door. She turned to me and we faced each other, standing in the exact spot where we had passed so many after-school hours together.
This time, though, the atmosphere was electric. I drew a long breath in the frosty air. I let go of her hand, reached up and touched her cheek softly. Her wide, brown eyes were warmed with flecks of gold. She stared at me, expectant and serious. I brushed the hair away from the side of her face and smiled at her, but I couldn’t speak.
I moved my hands to her shoulders and pulled her the last little distance toward me and kissed her, softly and slowly. There were explosions in my head, and my heart raced. I felt for a fleeting moment like I was one with another person. It was one of the most perfect moments of my life and I instantly wanted more of that feeling.
We each withdrew a half-step with our eyes locked and fingers intertwined. Dawn cocked her head and gave me her drives-me-crazy half smile. Her bangs were a curtain over her forehead. I sensed satisfaction and a sweet happiness in her smile.
She turned away and walked across the frozen grass to her front door. I watched her until she disappeared around the corner of her house. Neither of us said a word. I stood anchored to the ground, unable to move. I watched her darkened house until the light came on in her bedroom window. Like a zombie, I turned and shuffled into my house, collapsing face first into bed.
I will almost certainly never know what Dawn was thinking or feeling as she went to bed that night. I know I laid there and let that feeling wash over me again and again, replaying the night, the thrill of being next to her in the darkened theater, our kiss, and that indescribable vibration I felt when I was close to her.
Dazed and Confused
It was obvious things weren’t right with her after the New Year. As a long-time veteran of these wars, my plan was to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass me by. With only six months of my senior year left, I could see the finish line, and I just wanted to escape to the rest of my life.
On Friday, January 13th, I was in Mr. Warfield’s Current World Problems class when a runner from the office delivered a letter addressed to me. Receiving mail from the outside world in the middle of class was highly unusual.
Mr. Warfield stopped his lecture and said, “Mr. Inmon, would you care to share with the rest of the class?”
“Um, no thanks.”
“No, please. We’d like to know what sort of mail is important enough to interrupt our class.”
The envelope was lime green, with a return address of Napavine High School. It was addressed to KISS II and Shaun Inmann. I was too excited to be concerned about the butchered spelling of my name. I tore open the envelope as Mr. Warfield and the rest of class watched.
“Dear KISS II members,” I read aloud. “The freshman class from Napavine has made a unanimous decision to ask you to do a concert on February 18, 1978. To discuss all the details for your concert, please contact…”
“Okay, that’ll be enough, Mr. Inmon, you can sit down now,” Mr. Warfield interrupted. I wanted to keep reading. I couldn’t believe a rival school would solicit KISS II. Their freshman class wanted us to come to their school and split the proceeds of a genuine/fake KISS II concert. It felt like we had made the big time.
The offer represented a great deal, since we would have gladly done it for free. Jerry and I were so excited that we were barely able to sit still during the rest of Current World Problems. Thankfully, it was our last class of the day. As soon as the bell rang, we ran out of the school whooping and hollering and acting like the young idiots we were. Jerry and I drove straight to his house to celebrate by making his mom suffer through several hours of
Christine Sixteen
and
Calling Dr. Love
played at increasingly high volume. She told us to turn it down only when the plaster started to shake loose from the ceiling.
After finally wearing ourselves out by pretending to be rock stars, I got in the Vega and drove home to tell Mom my big news. As soon as I opened the sliding glass door to the trailer my mood changed. Walking into the living room immediately doused my excitement. The trailer was completely dark, and the heat was turned off, which meant that I could see my breath inside. I knew Mom was home because her car was in the driveway. When I turned on the lights, I found a note from Mom saying she wasn’t feeling well, but there was a casserole in the fridge for my step-dad and me.
Of course, I was a helpless teenage boy and had no idea what temperature or how long to heat the casserole, so I walked down the hallway and knocked on her bedroom door. I waited a moment and heard her weak, muffled voice. I creaked open the door and peeked inside. The curtains were pulled tight and the room felt dank and clammy.
“Mom, I’m not sure what temperature to cook the casserole.”
“It doesn’t matter. It just needs to be heated up. Go away.”
A bad feeling crept over me. I stared at the floor, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the room and listened to the near-total silence. I had one hand on the knob to leave when I heard what sounded like water dripping. But that was impossible; there was no plumbing in the bedroom.
“Mom? What’s that noise? I hear water running.”
“I told you to leave. Turn around, close the door and go.”
Her voice sounded thin and lost. It didn’t sound like her at all.
I fumbled for her hand in the darkness. It was deathly cold. I turned and flipped the light switch on. The light made me blink and when I turned back around I saw a horror show.
Mom was flat on her back, staring lifelessly at the ceiling. Her left arm extended off the bed. She had cut her arm in three different places, and an obscene amount of blood covered the floor. She must have been laying there for hours before I found her. Blood continued to drip from her arm and splatter into a pool on a blue blanket she had carefully placed on the floor to avoid a mess.
Her eyes were hollow and frightening, and her skin was a ghostly translucent. She looked like she had already died, but she was still moving. She fixed me with a stare and said, “I told you. Turn around. Close the door. Leave.”
I stood motionless, trying to process everything, but my brain couldn’t function. The floor seemed to tip away from me. I grew light-headed and leaned into the door. I felt a hand on my shoulder pulling me back upright. Only Mom and I were in the room, but I felt a firm hand keeping me upright.
I scrambled out of the room for the phone in the kitchen to call an ambulance, but ran face-first into my step-dad getting home from work. I couldn’t talk, so I grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him to the bedroom.
He stood in the doorway, and shook his head in disgust. “If you were gonna do it, why did you have to do it this way?” he asked her.
I returned to find him picking up Mom’s limp frame.
“Go get some towels and sit down in the back of the car.”
I ran to the linen closet, then scrambled out to the Chrysler. He laid Mom across my lap and told me to hold the last of the towels against the cuts to try to stop the bleeding.
“It’s too late,” Mom said. “Just leave me alone and let me go.” She repeated it over and over on the way to the hospital with the same thin, lost voice.
There was a hospital to the east in Morton ten miles away. Instead, my step-dad turned west, toward Chehalis, which was forty miles away. I don’t know if he panicked and turned the wrong way, or if he wanted to give her the extra time to die. I thought I knew the answer, but I never had the courage to ask.
About halfway there, Mom closed her eyes and was quiet. She wasn’t asking me to leave her alone anymore, but I didn’t know if she had passed out or was dead. I didn’t want to know, so when we pulled into the ER I just sat in the car and waited until two hospital workers lifted her off my lap. They put her on a gurney and wheeled her away.
Dad and I spent the rest of the night in the waiting room. I stared at her dried blood on my arms for quite a while before I thought to go into the bathroom and wash it off. Eventually, the ER doctor emerged and told us Mom was going to be okay.
“I’m supposed to report all suicide attempts to the authorities,” he said gently.
“Do what you have to do,” my step-dad said. We walked out quietly and drove back to Mossyrock in silence.
It was after midnight when we pulled back into our driveway. The letter from the freshman class of Napavine High seemed like it had arrived a lifetime ago, instead of the ten hours it had actually been.
“When we get in, you just go to bed,” he said. “I’ll clean up the mess.”
“Okay.” I was incredibly grateful. I sure didn’t want to clean up that mess. My step-dad slept in the guest bedroom after that night.
Mom entered a rehab center in Seattle after her wounds healed. She was forced to enter the rehab in exchange for not being charged with attempted suicide. That was fine with us. Neither of us knew what to say to her when we saw her, and she didn’t say much either.