A Taste of Honey

When I was fourteen, I was fully focused on experiencing my first kiss. To ensure I was prepared for the moment, I practiced on my pillow, the mirror above my dresser and my stuffed animals. I wrapped my arms around the spindles of my four-poster bed, leaving a trail of Bonnie Bell lip gloss on the antique white wood.

  I was rarely allowed to go to parties where there were boys. But I was allowed to go to the junior high school dances in the clammy cafetorium that reeked of Love’s Baby Soft, Drakkar Noir, and hormones. If ever there were a chance for a kiss away from the eyes of my ever-watchful mother, this was my shot. If only I had someone to dance with.

Oh to have someone to dance with!

  My girlfriends and I clustered together under the disco ball dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” trying to catch the eye of an eligible bachelor with our booty pops. But when the Heatwave’s “Always and Forever” came on, the dance floor quickly cleared, revealing only couples swaying back and forth, the popular girls in their Vidal Sassoon jeans resting their feather-haired heads on the shoulders of the jocks in their Izod shirts. I’d slink off to the bathroom so as not to get pegged as a dorky wallflower.

  My fantasy was to someday be on that dance floor in the arms of Skip Fontaine. Skip was a ninth grader who wore his brother’s high school letter jacket, surely foreshadowing his future as the star quarterback. He was East Cary Junior High School’s Leif Garrett. If I could have had a photo of Skip printed and enlarged, he’d have been on my bedroom wall right next to Tiger Beat poster boys Scott Baio and Shawn Cassidy. I mean I’d regularly re-route myself past the ninth-grade building, risking being tardy for eighth-grade math, just to catch a glimpse of him heading to woodshop. I could just see myself staring into his blue eyes under the glittering mirror ball as the Bee Gees crooned “Nobody gets too much heaven no more...”

  Well, in the weeks before Halloween, orange, black and gargoyle green signs plastered the hallways announcing the costume dance. Halloween was on a Friday night that year which meant trick-or-treating and rolling houses with toilet paper would have to wait until after the big dance.

  Dressed as gypsies, my friends and I were excited to be wearing lots of make-up, since most of us weren’t allowed to leave the house with anything but lip gloss on during school days. So, I felt prettier than usual in my blue eye shadow and mascara as well as the extra cotton balls I stuffed in my bra because my gypsy was curvy under her strings of pearls and mardi gras beads. We walked the jack-o-lantern-lined path leading to the cafetorium, passing a dozen princess Leias, a couple Luke Skywalkers, several Bionic Women, a Rocky Balboa and all four members of KIIS in plastic masks with elastic strings.

  We did the Monster Mash and the Time Warp, but when Don Henley started singing "Witchy Woman," the floor began to clear of the single but yearning crowd of wanna-be princesses, Starskys and Hutches. The line for the girls' bathroom snaked out the door. There was no chance of hiding in there. I passed Raggedy Ann and Andy smearing their make-up with sloppy kisses over by the vending machine, and I headed toward the dark library hallway to hide my wallflower shame.

  It was quiet out there, lit only by the orange glow of a plastic jack-o'-lantern covering the hallway lamp. I leaned against a row of lockers, closing my eyes, grateful to avoid the humiliation of not being chosen yet again, and humming along to the faint vibrations through the metal lunchroom doors.

  "Hey," said a voice.

  I opened my eyes and standing right there, hands casually resting in the pockets of his brother’s letter jacket, was Skip Fontaine. Could it be that he was hiding out, too?

   "Line's too long in there," he said, nodding toward the cafeteria.

  "Yeah," I squeaked, my throat suddenly dry.

  "What are you supposed to be anyway?” Oh shit. That was a stupid thing to say.

  “The star quarterback of course,” he smiled. “Wishful thinking, I know.”

  Hmm. Maybe he wasn’t as arrogant as people said.

  The music shifted. The opening chords of A Taste of Honey’s Boogie Oogie Oogie pulsed through the cafetorium doors and my heart pounded with the possibility of every romantic movie fantasy that had ever played out in my head and I couldn’t help myself as my shoulders inadvertently moved to the beat.

  Skip looked at me, his dreamy blue eyes catching the dim orange light. "You want to dance?"

  My heart stopped. The air felt electric. And here I was thinking he was too cool to boogie.

  "I don't really know how to dance to this one," I lied, my mind racing back to doing the bump with the spindle of my four-poster bed.

  "Just follow me," Skip said. He stepped closer, taking my hand. We started to move.

  It wasn't the awkward, rigid sway of the jocks and the popular girls under the Disco Ball of my fantasies, and unfortunately the rest of the school wasn’t looking on with envy like I imagined in my fondest dreams, but Skip actually had rhythm. It was pretty obvious he’d paid attention in Cotillion class as he guided me down the empty hallway and we grooved past the trophy cases and bulletin boards.

  With every step, the nervous wallflower inside me began to melt away. Maybe it was the make-up. Maybe it was the padded bra. Maybe it was just a case of right place right time. Or maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t the lonely loser I thought I was, cause Let me tell ya, you are no exception to the rule. 

  I forgot about the math classes I almost missed, forgot about the cool girls in their Vidal Sassoons, and I stopped worrying about the flattened feathers of my mousy hair hiding under my grandmother’s polka-dotted gypsy scarf.

  As the Boogie-oogie-oogies indicated the song was ending, Skip spun me out, and pulled me back in fast dipping me like he was Tony Mareno and I was Stephanie Mangano in Saturday Night Fever. We ended up laughing, breathless, right under the gaze of a cardboard Dracula taped to the outside of the cafetorium door. Could this be my shot at a first kiss, I thought - briefly - until the song faded out, and the rowdy cheers from the cafetorium signaled the end of the night. Skip let go of my hand and winked as he headed back inside to join his friends from the football team.

  I stood in the hall for a moment, listening to the chatter of students pouring out toward the parking lot. I didn't feel like a dorky wallflower anymore. I knew there wasn’t much of a chance of him even remembering who I was come November. But I walked out into the cool October evening air, eager to tell my friends what had just happened and certain that my first taste of honey kiss was only a junior high dance - or maybe three - away.

As shared at Story Salon on August 5, 2026 and at the Wicked Wolf in Long Beach

for the Gen-X Summer Storytelling series on August 16, 2026.