The summer before my junior year I was hanging out with the usual group—Jon and Adam, when we went out to the Marina. We met up with Rachel and a few of her girlfriends. It was the last night of the summer and we were determined to do something memorable. Boys being boys, they wanted the girls to skinny dip and swim to the floating dock.
At that point in my life, I had kissed a boy, done some minor fooling around, but remained a virgin. None of these guys had kissed me or seen me in anything skimpy, other than a swimsuit. I wasn’t about to go skinny dipping.
Then, Wil arrived with a few friends, infamous for smoking pot. I agreed to take off my jeans and swim to the floating dock wearing my tank top and panties. The guys agreed to swim out with me. So I stripped off my jeans and set them in the sand. Jon, Adam and I started swimming out to the dock, which wasn’t as far as it seemed. We were goofing off, jumping from the dock and such.
Soon enough, we swam back where Wil, his friends and the girls were still hanging out. However, what wasn’t there were my jeans.
Of course.
There I was, I had finally let me guard down in front of the guys and I got my pants stolen.
At first it was funny, but then the guys started to get pissed. They knew I was upset and also knew that I wouldn’t be participating in any late-night pant-less swim sessions any time soon.
I simply assumed someone hid them while we were swimming. I swore up and down I wouldn’t be pissed—I just wanted my jeans back, mainly because they were brand new.
But no matter how hard I persisted, no one said a word. The guys helped me look, but it was dark and my curfew was creeping closer and closer.
If I wanted to keep looking for my jeans, I was going to have to do it—I was going to have to call my mom and tell her that I took my jeans off in front of a group of guys to go swimming and now I was pant-less and wet.
When I called her, she laughed at me.
I kept searching for my jeans, but I got the sick feeling the guys were starting to enjoy the view a little too much. I called off the search and got in Jon’s car for the ride home. That was one of the longest rides ever—not only was I cold and wet, I was sitting next to Adam, pant-less.
When we arrived at my house, my mom was waiting at our front door. When I stepped out of the car, she came out of the house, laughing at me. As embarrassed as I was, I was relieved that I wasn’t in deep shit. The guys rehashed the story to my mom and everything turned out all right.
But I never did find those jeans. I drove back to the Marina the next day to search in the daylight, but had no success.
Nearly a year later, the event came back to haunt me. I was on a first date with a guy I really liked—a star athlete at our school, and very cute of course. We went out to rent a movie for the evening and when we got to the cash register, who do I see? One of Wil’s friends, the infamous pothead. So infamous, in fact, he was wearing an ankle bracelet that night, keeping him on house arrest.
“You on a date with this one?” he asked, nodding in my direction.
“Yeah,” my date said.
“Good luck. She’s a wild one.”
Umm…what in the hell? Great. Now I was going to have to explain to my date why on earth this loserface knew me and why he though I was a wild one.
Thankfully, as I told him the story on the way to his parents’ house, he got a good laugh out of it and I was off the hook for good.
The Bitter Lemon 
Maybe the top read that I read all month 🙂