Tiffany is 93% sure that the only boy who has ever kissed her is gay.
When Tiffany says Pascal kissed her, she means on the cheek. Tiffany has never had a proper kiss on the lips, but she tells people her first kiss was with Pascal under the neon strobe lights that illuminated the school gym during a middle school dance. Just The Way You Are by Bruno Mars was playing, and Pascal had just told Tiffany that the song was true, and she was amazing just the way she was. He leaned in and planted a huge, wet kiss on Tiffany’s cheek. Pascal had impressively large lips for a white boy who was shorter than the already fairly short Tiffany. His lips were, for whatever reason, always slightly glistening, like the top of an inflated, plastic pool float that reflects light from both the sun and the water on which it floats.
Their relationship was a long and relatively boring, but middle schoolers will find a way to make even the most mundane events dramatic. The relationship began in seventh grade, when Pascal sent Tiffany’s friends on missions to ask Tiffany if she liked him. Tiffany was not sure if she liked Pascal, but she was not the prettiest, most popular, or even smartest girl in her class, so she was in no position to turn down the affections of a boy. Her options were limited. Tiffany attended a small Catholic school with only eighteen students in her entire class, so it looked like she could say she liked Pascal or resign herself to dying alone. (Okay, she wouldn’t have died alone, but her seventh grade brain made the situation that dramatic.) Tiffany told her friends to tell Pascal she liked him, and got his cell phone number from Nicola.
Tiffany spent the weekend switching between texting Pascal and texting her friends to dissect Pascal’s texts. If Tiffany was going to declare her like for Pascal, she wanted a confirmation that they were going out. She texted Pascal that her friends were asking what she and Pascal were, and should she tell her friends that she and Pascal were going out? To clarify, the seventh grade definition of going out is as follows: the couple is allowed to text all the time, look at each other in school, stand near each other, and strike up a conversation alone if they so desire. Pascal did not get the memo on this definition, and immediately asked Tiffany on a date to a bowling alley. Tiffany, startled by this proposition, replied no, she did not want to go out with Pascal, she wanted to go out with him. She then texted her friends that oh my gosh she could not BELIEVE she had to explain this to Pascal. Tiffany’s friends sided with her, of course, and eventually Tiffany and Pascal’s middle school romance blossomed.
Tiffany was grateful to have Pascal when it was convenient, such as during school dances when the DJ would play the dreaded slow song. Tiffany had a built-in dance partner. She would grab Pascal and smugly strut out onto the dance floor, place her hands on his shoulders while his were on her waist, and dance an arm’s length apart from each other. The girls in the class would sit on the bleachers for the duration of the song glaring jealously at Pascal and Tiffany. The boys in the class circled them like vultures calling out obscene things. Pascal did eventually take Tiffany on a date, but their respective parents and siblings tagged along and Pascal talked more with Tiffany’s mom than he did with Tiffany. Their only other planned date fell through, and Tiffany sobbed for hours when it did. The tears were brought on not because she was particularly excited to see Pascal, but because the date had been to see the final Harry Potter film, and Tiffany loves Harry Potter more than she loves most of her relatives.
Pascal dumped Tiffany in the cafeteria while they were in eighth grade. Tiffany had been told it was coming, and handled the break up surprisingly well considering one week before she had told Pascal she loved him. Did she actually love him? No. Why would she tell him she loved him? Because Pascal was, at the time, at the birthday party of a girl whose parties were notorious for games of spin the bottle, and Tiffany wanted to discourage Pascal from kissing any other girls.
All in all, Tiffany is grateful her first real kiss was not with Pascal. It probably would have been wetter than she was mentally prepared to experience.