First Times: Megan by Natalie Deschain

I lost my virginity to a band.
    Don’t be impressed. You’ve never heard of them. Here’s what happened.
    I was just starting my first year of college. I’d enrolled in a state school about a million miles from home, away from my parents and brother. To call them, ah, conservative would be an understatement. I had to fight with them to wear pants, and I lost. I carried a pair of jeans in my backpack and changed in the bathroom after I got to school, then back into my ankle-length skirt before my father came to pick me up. Dating? Out of the question.
    You wouldn’t believe what I went through to assert myself and choose my own school. My family hated everything about it. The university itself (a state school) the location (as far away as I could get) my major (biotechnology). I think my mother would have sent me to a nunnery if she could get away with it.
    I saved my allowance for years before I left for school. I kept the clothes they bought for me. I kept them in the bottom drawer of my dresser and bought a new wardrobe as soon as I was sure they wouldn’t turn around so my father could launch a surprise inspection of the dormitory. The check-in process was about the most groan-inducing process in my entire life, between my parents moralizing at everything that moved and my brother openly checking out every piece of college ass that walked by (even though he’s married and about ten years older than I am) and they generally made me miserable. So I guess you could say I was glad to be free.
    For a while. I was crying my eyes out the first night, silently weeping on my bunk bed, much to the annoyance of my roommate. It was what I wanted, but it was too much, too fast. There was no way to retreat to my comfort zone. I was stuck there.
    I could dress the way I wanted, talk the way I wanted, my classes were fun and interesting if a little intimidating, but I was in pure misery until I met Jessica.
    She blew into my life when it came time to find a lab partner.
    I believe in the devil for a sole reason: His Infernal Majesty inspires college professors to spout the phrase, “Let’s all pick a partner.”
    For all my rebellious bravado, I wanted to curl up and die when it came time to pick a lab partner for the semester. I was tempted to demand of the professor why he couldn’t just draw names from a hat or something and had to inflict this kind of social torture on his students. That was when Jessica grabbed me.
    She was everything I wasn’t. Buxom, tall, raven-haired (although the tips of her hair were dyed alternating strands of sky blue, indigo and plum) and able to wear her eccentric outfits with a natural ease that came from an excess of self-confidence. She was the kind of girl that wraps everybody around her finger with an imperious look. Boys want her, girls want to be her. That kind of thing. Why she picked me, I’ll never know. She didn’t walk, she strutted, she grabbed my arm and waited for me to gather up my things and follow her to her station in the lab.
    I barely managed to squeak out a “Hi” after five minutes.
    “Hi yourself,” she smirked. “You are…”
    “Megan.”
    “Jess. You’re my lab partner.”
    “Okay.”
    That was it. Portentous, I know.
    Lab was twice a week, two nights. It started when she insisted on taking me out after class. Neither of us was old enough to drink, you see, but Jessica had interesting ideas and legality and a source on fake ID’s. I didn’t ask, she didn’t tell, and she turned a small portrait I provided into a astonishingly realistic looking driver’s license, as if by magic. It was from the same state as our school, so it was probably double-illegal. Carrying it around in my purse made me feel like a master criminal. It became a kind of talisman, until the first time I was called on to use it. I was nervous as hell, lucky I didn’t drop it from sweaty palms. Jess took me to a local dive bar, and the bartender carded me, but not her. I guess he knew