When you’re just sixteen everything is so fucking mixed up in your head. You want to be different and you want to be just like everyone else, both at the same time. And you want to keep to your room where it’s safe and you want be out there and taking risks and being where it’s dangerous.
Kit said he knew where there was going to be a happening and he said we should go. It was going to be really something, he said, and everybody who was anybody would be there. He said it was out of the reach of the police, ‘cept he didn’t say ‘police’, calling ‘em pigs instead, and he spat the word like it was a bad taste in his mouth.
The other thing ‘bout being sixteen is the feeling that nothing can touch you and that you own the world rather than the world owning you. Kit and me, we was dating then. He was crazy one minute and grounded the next. And it was like he was the perfect fit for who I was. When we walked down the street, it was like we were the one creature and we walked in step. Kit said we walked in tune.
Sixteen and never been kissed – not before Kit. And those first kisses count more than all the kisses that come after and don’t let anyone tell you different. Kit said he loved me and he said I was beautiful and he kept saying it over and over. In my head I hear him saying it still. Twenty and some years later and Kit saying I am beautiful is something I sometimes still hear.
We made out once. There was music playing but try as I might I don’t remember what. We were in my bedroom and my parents were out. There was nothing said, it was just understood. Kit was slow and awkward – like he was certain and uncertain all in the same moment. I was the same. I helped him with the buttons of my dress and with the fastening of my bra. He unclipped his belt and unbuttoned his own jeans.
After, and we were laying back, all breathless and lifted up, that’s when he said there was going to be this happening later and he said it’d be really something. I shrugged and said why not. We’d just made out and it wasn’t so bad, so I was up for something else.
It was in this great barn and it was in the middle of nowhere. You could hear the music coming to you through the dark long before you could see the barn. It was so loud it was like it entered you. Kit kept touching me as if he couldn’t believe I was real and every few steps we stopped to kiss and to say again that we loved each other.
Inside, everyone was there, like Kit had said they would be, and coming together like that it was as though we were all made a part of each other and all moving the same. Thousands there were there and all jerking and bouncing to the music like we were just one beast, all hot and sweating and pressing against each other.
Kit was offered something. Pills or some shit. He was flying, you know, with what we’d done in the bedroom – it’d been his first time, too. And the music was thumping inside him and he thought it was the thumping of his heart. He was all filled up with who he was and he wanted to taste the whole world. He took one of them pills. He offered me one, but I shook my head and I said I was ok; in that moment he was the dangerous and I was the safe, and then suddenly we were apart, carried to different corners of the barn by the crowd and the music.
We were sixteen and when you’re sixteen everything is fucked up.
Some days, these days, just out of the blue and for no reason I know, I catch myself thinking about how we were back then, and I hear Kit saying again that I am beautiful, and I remember his kisses and us making out and music playing but not any music I can hang a name to. I love him then and I hate him at the same time, hate him for that pill and being dangerous to my safe, and all in a moment breaking my heart with his death.
Patricia Ann McNair 
When you’re just sixteen everything is so fucking mixed up in your head. You want to be different and you want to be just like everyone else, both at the same time. And you want to keep to your room where it’s safe and you want be out there and taking risks and being where it’s dangerous.
Kit said he knew where there was going to be a happening and he said we should go. It was going to be really something, he said, and everybody who was anybody would be there. He said it was out of the reach of the police, ‘cept he didn’t say ‘police’, calling ‘em pigs instead, and he spat the word like it was a bad taste in his mouth.
The other thing ‘bout being sixteen is the feeling that nothing can touch you and that you own the world rather than the world owning you. Kit and me, we was dating then. He was crazy one minute and grounded the next. And it was like he was the perfect fit for who I was. When we walked down the street, it was like we were the one creature and we walked in step. Kit said we walked in tune.
Sixteen and never been kissed – not before Kit. And those first kisses count more than all the kisses that come after and don’t let anyone tell you different. Kit said he loved me and he said I was beautiful and he kept saying it over and over. In my head I hear him saying it still. Twenty and some years later and Kit saying I am beautiful is something I sometimes still hear.
We made out once. There was music playing but try as I might I don’t remember what. We were in my bedroom and my parents were out. There was nothing said, it was just understood. Kit was slow and awkward – like he was certain and uncertain all in the same moment. I was the same. I helped him with the buttons of my dress and with the fastening of my bra. He unclipped his belt and unbuttoned his own jeans.
After, and we were laying back, all breathless and lifted up, that’s when he said there was going to be this happening later and he said it’d be really something. I shrugged and said why not. We’d just made out and it wasn’t so bad, so I was up for something else.
It was in this great barn and it was in the middle of nowhere. You could hear the music coming to you through the dark long before you could see the barn. It was so loud it was like it entered you. Kit kept touching me as if he couldn’t believe I was real and every few steps we stopped to kiss and to say again that we loved each other.
Inside, everyone was there, like Kit had said they would be, and coming together like that it was as though we were all made a part of each other and all moving the same. Thousands there were there and all jerking and bouncing to the music like we were just one beast, all hot and sweating and pressing against each other.
Kit was offered something. Pills or some shit. He was flying, you know, with what we’d done in the bedroom – it’d been his first time, too. And the music was thumping inside him and he thought it was the thumping of his heart. He was all filled up with who he was and he wanted to taste the whole world. He took one of them pills. He offered me one, but I shook my head and I said I was ok; in that moment he was the dangerous and I was the safe, and then suddenly we were apart, carried to different corners of the barn by the crowd and the music.
We were sixteen and when you’re sixteen everything is fucked up.
Some days, these days, just out of the blue and for no reason I know, I catch myself thinking about how we were back then, and I hear Kit saying again that I am beautiful, and I remember his kisses and us making out and music playing but not any music I can hang a name to. I love him then and I hate him at the same time, hate him for that pill and being dangerous to my safe, and all in a moment breaking my heart with his death.