Sister. It’s their sister. Don’t get too excited, folks. This may sound like the beginning of some deservedly cheap erotic novel but unfortunately it is not quite as excitingly Freudian as that. His sister was in my year. We were both 16. I was comfortable knowing only this about her and nothing else, but we were forced into association through dissatisfying circumstance. We were in the same biology class, but I desperately avoided trying to speak to her. She was not exactly what one would call normal. She would always sit in the back making small paper voodoo dolls out of the pages of her notebook and read/write fan fiction on her laptop. Naturally, this didn’t make the other members of the class like her any more. She did her thing on the back row, and we did our thing…avoiding her on the back row.
A boy, her older brother, had asked me to come to his birthday party. To a 16-year-old, this was an offer that just couldn’t be refused. He was 18, and the idea of older boys at a party was too exciting to decline.The cute little mole near his lower lip was a surprisingly attractive feature to a younger girl. The opportunity of merely being close to an older guy stimulated my romantic imagination enough to tempt me into accepting an invitation. But his sister was much more excited than any of us were. She ended up inviting most of our year group to come and observe all of her brother’s hot friends in action. Sadly,we had all been a bit repressed and the opportunity to view the male sex in their natural environment was far too inviting for us to resist.
So at this party, this endearingly mole-faced boy began to kiss me in the hallway. As our lips locked, I looked up, not to find Cupid with his bow and arrow, but his sister filming the moment on a camera. But she wasn’t using her phone to film. She was using the family video camera. I knew because it was the same one my dad used to film my fifth birthday. It was the kind of camera that flips open on the side, and it had a piece of tape on it with their family last name. The kind you’d associate with happy family memories of opening Christmas presents or riding a bike solo for the first time. No doubt, when his whole family is sitting around on his 21st birthday and decides to whip out the old family video camera to look at some old, vintage, cinematic moments, they’ll find me, sucking the lips off their son. For some reason I feel his sister made 15 copies of it and keeps them buried in different areas in case the house burns down.
I had no desire to become such a hugely noticeable part of family history. As I prised my face off of his and stared into the abyss-like lens of the video-camera, I caught a deeply horrifying glimpse into my own future. I immediately worried that this video would be some tame version of a Kim Kardashian sex-tape, following me around for the rest of my life and prevent- ing people from ever taking me seriously. The reality of what would happen was much, much worse.
As if these video-camera shenanigans weren’t disturbing enough, arriving at school the following Monday, I was ambushed by his sister’s joyful shout. “Now we’re sisters!”, she shrieked to the everyone within hearing dis- tance. She declared our new relationship status to the entire common room. Since we were now practically kin, she would walk me to class, clutching my arm with a vice grip, and wait for me at the school gates at the end of the day. She even invited me on their family holiday. The endearing mole boy and I had only kissed once and had never gone on a date.
The only thing she seemed more interested in than our relationship was Justin Bieber. I seemed to have somehow gained the world’s worst sister-in law, and we hadn’t even been on our first date yet. I knew that were I to date mole boy, the situation would just keep getting worse and worse. Would she hide under the bed and film us during all our make-out sessions?
Would she keep photos of us in a locket under her pillow and look at it every night before bed? With these images in mind, when the date finally came, I took it upon myself to end everything with him halfway through the dinner. When he asked me what had gone wrong, I proceeded to abort all further attempts at conversation and take a very long trip to the toilets in which I rang through all the recent callers on my phone asking for advice. Every- one told me to eat the rest of my meal as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there. I did handle everything with him pretty poorly, I confess, but I console myself that it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. It turns out that his decision to play tonsil hockey with me may have been a very convincing attempt at appearing to be a heterosexual male. By his next birthday party, he was in a relationship with my ex-boyfriend. If we had ended up going out, I think it’s more than likely that he would have ending the relationship saying, ‘It’s not her, it’s her vagina’.
