A while ago, my high school debate team went to a debate conference at a college. We go to a few of these each year, and the conference lasts a few days. We stay overnight in a hotel, and the trips are usually quite fun, and when a couple of my friends on the team suggested that I try debate and go on the trip, I said sure. I didn’t really know much about debate and wasn’t very good, but my friends told me not to worry about it. My friend Jack told me, “It doesn’t even matter whether you try or not. Some of the kids from other schools are so good that they always win the awards; we don’t have a chance. Let’s just have some fun there and not worry about it. Besides, the real reason to come is for the dance.”

After a bus ride that took about four hours, we arrived at the hotel. Our school only had brought about 30 people to the conference, but looking around I saw that there must have been a couple thousand high school kids in the hotel. We checked in and headed up to our rooms. I was staying in a room with Jack and a couple other friends, Chris and Alex. We had a few hours to waste until the conference started, so we mostly just sat there and chilled in the room. I thought back to what Jack had told me and since Chris and Alex had also been in debate for a couple years, I asked them what Jack had meant about the dance. They just laughed and told me, “Well, it’s not like our school dances. Not at all.” Now, we lived in a rather small town that was pretty conservative, so there wasn’t a whole lot of sexual activity between us and the girls. The school had strict dress codes, and even when we weren’t in school the girls dressed pretty formally. I had only had one girlfriend so far, but we never did anything more than kissing, as was the normal for kids our age. Chris piped in, “The girls here aren’t like the girls we know. Just look at them—I’ve never seen anyone looking so slutty. Short skirts, tight shirts, they come from a whole different part of the world. And they grind like hell. They’ll dance with anyone, and do so pretty exciting stuff.” I was still a little unclear about the situation, but I decided I would see what happens when the time came.

The next couple days went by rather uneventfully.