Before you judge me for giving up on the man I’ve loved for almost my entire lifetime, you have to understand something — a girl can only handle so much rejection. And, over the years, I’ve had more than my fair share of it.
First, there was the time in fourth grade when I stole Nate’s cellphone and spent an entire afternoon — practically an eternity, at age nine — locked in my walk-in closet, scrolling through his text inbox and sending eloquent “Dnt txt me! I h8 U!” messages to every girl in his contact list. (I know, I know. Not my proudest — or smartest — moment. But, in my defense, no one told me he’d be able to see them in his SENT folder as soon as he miraculously found his missing phone on the kitchen counter later that night. Oops.) And I can’t forget the incident in sixth grade — well before my boobs came in, mind you — when Parker threw a huge pool party for his sweet sixteen and, jealous of the totally mature tenth-grade girls wandering around with what, at the time, seemed like Victoria’s Secret model bodies in comparison to my mosquito bites, I went into the bathroom and stuffed the cups of my bikini with enough tissues to keep Kleenex in business for at least the next decade.
A mistake — the repercussions of which I didn’t even fully realize until one of Parker’s bitchy girlfriends pushed me into the pool, the impact dislodging my stuffing like confetti from a canon. The two minutes I spent floating in the water, makeshift boobies drifting around me like white, translucent jellyfish as I listened to the older girls giggle, were bad enough; the fact that it was Nate who reached in, pulled me out, and wrapped a towel around my shaking shoulders was worse. Mainly because, as soon as my feet hit dry land, the tissue began fusing to my limbs, clumping on my skin like some grade-school paper maché project gone terribly awry.
Somehow, when I’d imagined Nate seeing my boobs for the first time, I hadn’t reeked of chlorine and they hadn’t been made of paper.
Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
(I seem to lose most, actually.) And yet, even the pool party wasn’t as abominable as the time in eighth grade, when I asked him to be my date to the Sadie Hawkins dance. He didn’t even bother letting me down easy. He just grinned, ruffled my hair like I was an adorable-but-idiotic golden retriever, and walked away, laughing as though the suggestion was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. His rejection stung, don’t get me wrong, but it was the aftermath that really kicked me in the shins. Without Nate as a date, I had no option other than to ask my friend Lila’s older brother, Duncan, to go with me. He was cute in a clean-cut, average kind of way — not dark or dangerous-looking, like other boys-who-shall-not-be-named, but handsome enough to get my fourteen-year-old heart pumping.
Duncan was a charmer when he picked me up in his father’s Porsche, smiling as he slipped a corsage on my wrist, driving with one arm thrown across the back of my seat. Just when I was beginning to think things might not turn out so bad… he downed six shots of whiskey in the school parking lot, which left him so incapacitated he couldn’t even slow-dance with me once during the hour I spent leaning against the wall of the Starry-Night-themed reception hall, watching him gyrate questionably against several unsuspecting girls in taffeta.
When I called Parker to come get me, he — somewhat grudgingly — showed up… with Nate in tow, because apparently the universe thought I hadn’t suffered enough humiliation for one night. Crammed in the backseat next to a moaning Duncan, I listened to Parker and Nate talk about the “hot chicks” they’d had to bail on to pick me up, and prayed to disappear. When Duncan puked in my purse halfway home, I knew my perfect night at the middle-school dance was finally complete.
Ah, memories.