Sing a Healing Song Chapter 13

On our second official date-date, we went to a community pool. Even though he’d been a perfect gentlemen, I could tell he was pretty happy about seeing me in a bathing suit. Not that I minded seeing him in one either ...

This time, we held hands several times, and when he was dropping me off at home, he gave me the first boy-girl kiss of my life.

If you had told me a couple of months before that moment that I’d be kissing a boy, and liking it so much I actually had to hold back from making it a serious make-out session, I would have laughed in your face.

Yet that’s exactly what happened.

Afterward, I realized that I had carried an assumption about girls with me into this new life, mainly that girls didn’t want sex as much as guys do. Somehow, in my mind, I just assumed that boys were the ones pushing for sex, and the girls resisted until they were ready, but if what I felt towards Andrew was in any way typical, I’m surprised that there aren’t a lot more teen pregnancies ...

Fortunately, I found a distraction - a girl named Jacilynn Marie Seewald who had moved from Winnipeg over the summer. I met her at my church, and discovered she was also going to be attending J. Percy Page with us in September. That lead us to exchanging emails and chatting online, and within a very short period of time I felt like we were well on our way to being B.F.F’s - best friends forever ...

I was able to help pay Jacilynn (who liked to be called Jaci) back for being my friend by conspiring with Andrew to get his brother Simon to ask her on a double-date with the two of us, as we planned to go to a theater festival called The Fringe.

She said “Yes” to the date, and we had an amazing time going around to all the sights of the festival. There were jugglers, and clowns, and someone pretending to be a statue, and of course there were plays.

Jaci picked the first play, which turned out to be called “John Cusack”. It was an interesting little piece about a woman who after a really bad breakup goes a little crazy and comes to believe her only hope is John Cusack - the actor best known for the rom-com “Say Anything.” (I know this because the movie was one of those my mom and I watched during our “sleepover”.)

It was an interesting movie, and the play was really kind of neat to watch, especially when I was sort of at the other end of of the relationship go-round with Andrew. I mean, I hope we can last, but I’m realistic enough to know that high school romances don’t often lead to a lifetime commitment.

Next we saw a stage adaptation of a book by a Christian author named C.S. Lewis called “The Screwtape letters.” The play takes place in Hell, where a demon called Screwtape is sending correspondence with his nephew who had just been appointed the official “tempter” of a young man who had become a Christian.

While the Christian worldview is pretty obviously a part of the play, I found it presented in an entertaining way that even a non-Christian might enjoy the experience.

Once that play was over, the four of us decided we had enough time for one more, and Andrew wanted me to make the pick.

I picked a play called “Crips against the law of gravity, because I recognized the name of the author - she had been a teacher’s aide at the school for the disabled I had attended back when I was still a dying boy.

She has cerebral palsy, a nasty birth defect that basically takes away your ability to control your own body. As someone who had been until the beginning of this summer stuck in a wheelchair unable to do much for themselves, I totally got how hard she had it. But what I had admired most about her was the fact that she refused to let her handicap stop her from having a full life. Despite not being able to write or talk very well, she had gotten a master’s degree, and now had written a play about life as a disabled teen.

I am probably a bit biased because I know the author, but I liked the play, and considered it as good a representation of life as a disabled person as the movie “My left foot”, which is about a famous artist who also has cerebral palsy.

So often in media, disabled people are either invisible or portrayed as some kind of noble martyrs instead of as real people who have faults and failures as well as feelings.

While we were watching the play I took the opportunity to kinda snuggle into Andrew, and giggled as Jaci did likewise with Simon.

After it was over we walked around a little more, then called our respective parents to take us home. While we waited for them to show up, I snuck a kiss with Andrew and enjoyed the tingly feeling I got in my breasts (and below my waist too) from kissing him.

After we came up for air, I noticed that we weren’t the only couple enjoying a kiss ...

I giggled so hard that Jaci broke off her kiss with Simon long enough to turn funny shades of red as she looked in my direction.

I pushed past Simon, took Jaci by the hand, and said, “Excuse us, boys, we got to freshen up before the parental units get here.”

I led Jaci into the nearby ladies room, (Yes, this neighborhood has a building that only houses bathrooms for men and women. Its very handy during festivals and the like.) we “freshened up”, giggled over her first kiss, and then went back to join the boys.

Not long after, our respective parents arrived, we said our goodbyes and went home.

I was humming as I sat in the passenger seat. I was thinking that my life couldn’t be better - I was healthy, I had an awesome guy I was getting to know, and I had a friend in Jaci who I could share my adventures in high school with.

Unfortunately, even before school started things were going to change again ...