Excerpt: Diaries of a Baby Dyke

We eventually grew tired of just reading and talking about kissing though. It wasn’t enough. We had never been kissed, not really, and we wanted to know what it was like. Our teen magazines were always telling us to practice against a mirror or with a pillow. That just seemed silly. There was nothing a mirror cold do to kiss you back, and if you kept your eyes open it just felt weird. And all the magazines said to keep your eyes open so you could watch and see if the person you were kissing was having as much fun as you were. Plus mirrors tasted funny and you had to clean them up. How do you explain to your mom, who was always getting after you to clean your room, that you needed to find the Windex to clean the mirror in your bedroom and no, you don’t care where the vacuum was? Pillows were a different matter altogether though. They were soft, like a person, and you could hold them in your arms. But they couldn’t hold you back, and it didn’t seem like there was very much more response that you got from the mirror other than you weren’t as cold and a pillow didn’t have a pair or your eyes staring back at you, wondering if you were having a good time. But still, a pillow was a pillow and not someone to kiss.