We walked to the TV room together, and I locked the door. We were watching The Brady Bunch, which she had
never seen. The episode, where the Bradys visit the gold-mining ghost town and they all get locked up in the one-
room jail by some crazy old gold panner with a scraggly white beard, was especially horrible, and gave us a lot to
laugh about. Which is good, since we didn’t have much to talk about.
Just as the Bradys were getting locked in jail, Kiara randomly asked me, “Have you ever gotten a blow job?”
“Urn, that’s out of the blue,” I said.
“The blue?”
“Like, you know, out of left field.”
“Left field?”
“Like, in baseball. Like, out of nowhere. I mean, what made you think of that?”
“I’ve just never geeven one,” she answered, her little voice dripping with seductiveness. It was so brazen. I
thought I would explode. I never thought. I mean, from Rosy, hearing that stuff was one thing. But to hear her
sweet little Romanian voice go so sexy all of the sudden…
“No,” I said. “I never have.”
“Think it would be fun?”
DO I!?!?!?!?!?!?!”Urn. yeah. I mean, you don’t have to.”
“I think I want to,” she said, and we kissed a little, and then. And then with me sitting watching The Brady Bunch, watching Marcia Marcia Marcia up to her Brady antics, Kiara unbuttoned my pants and pulled my boxers
down a little and pulled out my penis.
“Wow,” she said.
“What?”
She looked up at me, but didn’t move, her face nanometers away from my penis. “It’s weird.”
“What do you mean weird?”
“Just beeg, I guess.”
I could live with that kind of weird. And then she wrapped her hand around it and put it into her mouth.
And waited.
We were both very still. She did not move a muscle in her body, and I did not move a muscle in mine. I knew that
at this point something else was supposed to happen, but I wasn’t quite sure what.
She stayed still. I could feel her nervous breath. For minutes, for as long as it took the Bradys to steal the key and
unlock themselves from the ghost-town jail, she lay there, stock-still with my penis in her mouth, and I sat there,
waiting.
And then she took it out of her mouth and looked up at me quizzically.
“Should I do sometheeng?”
“Urn. I don’t know,” I said. Everything I’d learned from watching porn with Rosy suddenly exited my brain. I
thought maybe she should move her head up and down, but wouldn’t that choke her? So I just stayed quiet.
“Should I, like, bite?”
“Don’t bite! I mean, I don’t think. I think—I mean, that felt good. That was nice. I don’t know if there’s something
else.”
“I mean, you deedn’t—”
“Urn. Maybe we should ask Al Rosy aska.”
So we went to her room and asked Rosy. She laughed and laughed. Sitting on her bed, she laughed until she
cried. She walked into the bathroom, returned with a tube of toothpaste, and showed us. In detail. Never have I so
wanted to be Crest Complete.
Kiara and I went back to her room, where she did exactly what Rosy told her to do, and I did exactly what Rosy
said I would do, which was die a hundred little ecstatic deaths, my fists clenched, my body shaking. It was my first
orgasm with a girl, and afterward, I was embarrassed and nervous, and so, clearly, was Kiara, who finally broke
the silence by asking, “So, want to do some homework?”
There was little to do on the first day of the semester, but she read for her English class. I picked up a biography
of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara—whose face adorned a poster on the wall—that Kiara’s roommate had
on her bookshelf, then I lay down next to Kiara on the bottom bunk. I began at the end, as I sometimes did with
biographies I had no intention of reading all the way through, and found his last words without too much
searching. Captured by the Bolivian army, Guevara said, “Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man.” I
thought back to Simon Bolivar’s last words in Garcia Marquez’s novel—”How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”
South American revolutionaries, it would seem, died with flair. I read the last words out loud to Kiara. She turned
on her side, placing her head on my chest.