1994. Grade 9. I'm painfully shy and awkward as the result of years of bullying, feel miscast in my role as a high school student, have been shunned by all my supposed friends for reasons I don't understand, and hate what I see when I look in the mirror. But when I'm walking to school and my mind is wandering freely, it's starting to occur to me that I might want to kiss a boy someday.
I'm at my locker, and the guy who was assigned the locker next to mine through the magic of alphabetical order is at his locker. I don't know him that well because he's from another elementary school, but he seems perfectly nice, quiet and unassuming, the kind of guy who's getting his puberty on the installment plan instead of an overnight visit from the puberty fairy (although I didn't quite notice that sort of thing yet at that age). We start chatting, I forget what about, and get into a perfectly decent small-talk conversation. This was quite a novelty for me at the time. I hardly ever got to have a decent conversation with anyone, but here I was having a decent conversation with a real live boy! So we have our conversation, then he goes off to wherever he was going.
Just then, the girl whose locker is on the other side of me comes up. I don't know her very well because she'd just moved into town, but she struck me as the kind of girl who might get into fights or might get to dye her hair or might get to drive a car around on her parents' land or might even get to have sex. Nodding towards the boy who has just left, she asks me "Are you two going out?" She didn't sound surprised, she didn't sound judgemental, she didn't sound like she had an ulterior motive. Just a simple straightforward question, "Are you two going out?"
She thinks we're going out! She thinks I could conceiveably be going out with a boy! This girl who meets the exact demographic profile of the people who put icky things in my hair last year thinks I am a candidate for going out with a boy!
"No," I reply, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible, trying not to read anything into her comment or allow anything to be read into my response, "we're not going out..." I was about to follow it up with "We were just chatting about the English assignment" or something else that with 14 years' hindsight would probably have been a mistake, but she interrupted.
"Oh, so you're just friends then."
She thinks I'm the kind of person who could have friends! This girl who dresses and acts exactly like the girls who would walk up to me and say "You have no friends, you know," takes as a given that I could be friends with a boy!
"Yes," I reply, "We're just friends."
The next time I looked at myself in the mirror, I liked what I saw a little bit better.
The boy moved away the next year and he's ungoogleable. I don't even remember the girl's name. But I'd like to buy them both a drink.
1 comment:
Very cool. Thanks for sharing.
It's amazing to me how small moments of affirmation can change our mental or emotional states like that. I have a few memories like that - different specifics, but small, seemingly inconsequential moments that helped me see myself differently, helped me get on better in the world.
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