You're Not Special

by Meghan Rienks

  As you may be able to tell, subtlety was not really my strong suit (and still isn’t). While it didn’t necessarily pan out for me and Brad, new love opportunities did come my way. Brad ended up dating my best friend Mia. He then pawned me off on his best friend so we could go on double dates to Frankie Muniz movies with talking animals. I remained optimistic about my romantic future in the mystical land of middle school: slow dances and coed parties where all the boys smell of Axe body spray and the girls discover the magic of lip gloss. The mid-2000s were magical.

  Did you ever know that one girl who was so incredibly pretty at eleven years old that her face looked like one of those porcelain dolls they sell on TV at three a.m.?

  You know, the one who all the boys drooled over at the playground?

  The one who was great at soccer and long division and even managed to evade the chubby phase, all the while stuffing her face with pizza at Chuck E. Cheese?

  The cool girl?

  Yeah?

  Well, that wasn’t me.

  That was Mia. At eleven years old, Mia was like if Angelina Jolie and Mia Hamm had a baby and gave her black eyeliner and an acoustic guitar. She got any guy she wanted. I got his less cute friend. I realize this may sound bad, but I’m totally not complaining. Otherwise I would have remained “the chubby girl with the weird transition lenses who won’t stop talking about Harry Potter.” Instead, I was able to be “the chubby girl with the weird transition lenses who won’t stop talking about Harry Potter and I think she’s dating Matt?!!” See? Everybody wins!

  I won’t claim to be great at dating at that age. Through those three years of middle school I “dated” three different boys. Like most preteen relationships, we hardly spoke, avoided eye contact, and MAYBE held hands once for .3 seconds. We’d date Monday through mid-Friday; then, during sixth period on Friday, I’d pass them a note, breaking up with them, so I could be single for the weekend, and AIM my (very, very gay) community theater crush. I am fully aware of how horrible this is, and anybody out there reading this should know that I have (almost) grown out of this mindset.

  By the time I was heading into high school, I had this fantasy that when the first day rolled around, an upperclassman with an uncanny resemblance to Chad Michael Murray (à la A Cinderella Story) would spot me across the quad and suddenly fall madly in love with me. Overnight, I’d become the most popular and envied girl in the school! Alas, I wore thrifted Hollister head-to-toe and I still hadn’t discovered the beauty that is skinny jeans… or contact lenses. My dream crashed before it could even get off the ground.

  My first two years of high school went by pretty much boy-free, aside from the time Sam Machado asked me to homecoming, which I must say, Sam, if you’re reading this, I regret everything, because I’m on your Facebook page right now and you are so pretty. Then there was that time when this guy from my homeroom with bleached hair and a puka shell necklace asked me out. But I was, like, his seventh option after every other girl in class rejected him, so I declined the offer.

  I missed the simplicity of middle school when the pool of girls was smaller and teachers forced boys to ask us to dance. High school was all about free will and making your own seating assignments. I knew giving boys those options would never play in my favor. This was still the age I thought I was going to be a Broadway star, so the dramatics were on high. Immediately after entering high school, my friends were all French-kissing boys, and bases now meant something unrelated to PE class. I pined after seniors in the drama department. I swooned as they recited Shakespeare to me in a required class assignment. I lived vicariously through my friends and their romantic hand-holding endeavors and even over-the-shirt accidental boob grazing (gasp!). Then, it happened… just like the Nicholas Sparks books had told me it would. I went to camp in the summer of 2009 as an ugly duckling, and I came back with BOOBS!!!

  With my newly acquired confidence and tits in tow, the ladies and I made our debut at my friend Emma’s barbecue. (Cue the optimistic music and flattering lighting.) There I met an older guy from a different school, and he was athletic and tall and blond, with a face so angelic it belonged on a lunch box from Claire’s. We spent our summer nights eating ice cream at deserted playgrounds. You know, the kind of stuff fifteen-year-old dreams are made of. On the night before my sixteenth birthday (after the Jonas Brothers concert), he kissed me. I, Meghan Rienks, was no longer a kissing virgin. I was ecstatic. He, on the other hand, never called me back.

  I was initially devastated that the angel-faced boy and I would not grow old together, raising obscenely tall blond-haired babies. On the other hand, I owed my newfound confidence in dating to him. I mean, maybe using the word “confidence” is a stretch. Realistically, I was just overjoyed that I no longer had to lie when playing ten fingers. For the first time since I traded in my glasses for contact lenses, I was actually excited about going back to school in the fall. I envisioned myself sauntering through the hallways of Sir Francis Drake High School as a new woman, a mature, cultured female specimen who now had a solid handle on how to make out with a boy. I was unstoppable. I would waste no time before hopping into the bountiful pool of high school dating. The rise in popularity of the Justin Bieber haircut was well represented among my male classmates. My life would feel like one giant Las Vegas buffet, except instead of lobster and a fountain of chocolate, I had my choice of every newly braces-free, floppy-haired, hormonally charged sixteen-year-old boy my school had to offer. I was elated. Elated but also delusional. Despite my deepest fantasies, every boy in my grade looked less like Justin Bieber and more like Coconut Head in Ned’s Declassified. Except for this one guy named Owen, but he told me that I looked like an uglier version of Hermione Granger—and, no, not Emma Watson’s portrayal. He explained to me that I resembled a more heinous version of the bucktoothed, bushy-haired character in the book. I’m still holding a grudge on that one.

  With my standards set about as high as my push-up bra propped my tits, I widened my horizons. I set my sights on the far cuter boys from neighboring schools. Their impressions of me were untainted. They had no memories of my transition lenses or my side bangs phase. It worked. I found my guy. Or, rather, he found me while stalking my friend Emma on Facebook. (Seriously, E, I owe you all my boy experience. Remind me to send you an Edible Arrangement.) She set up a classic meet-cute. She would invite him to attend my school play with her, and she would introduce us after the performance. If this was a movie, I would have been appearing in something romantic like Romeo and Juliet. I would have looked out into the crowd while reciting my final monologue and locked eyes with him, our hearts bursting with love at first sight, as a song by the Script swelled in the background. But this was real life. The play was a rip-off of The Odyssey and I was wearing a sarong. But we did meet after the play, and within weeks we started dating. In the three months of autumn in 2009, I lived what I can only compare to a YA novel come to life. We spent our weekends having picnics in the park, our nights falling asleep on video chat, and our days filled with an excessive number of emojis—every sixteen-year-old girl’s dream. He even once snuck me out of my house to watch a midnight meteor shower on the hood of his car. When he ghosted me out of the blue, I was devastated. He was perfect. I mean, he also came in his pants once when we were making out, but honestly, I was just really flattered. He was one of those too-good-to-be-true guys who ended up being true. I got vindicated a few years later when he told me he’d dump his girlfriend to have sex with me (I declined), so my ego is fine.

  I remained single up until spring. My life seemed to be lived from heartbreak to heartbreak. Pivotal eras of my adolescence were marked by the boys who dumped me at the time. To say I had given up hope would be an understatement. My daily uniform consisted of sweatpants that had “Wildwood, NJ” spray painted across the butt in a neon graffiti font, a men’s Hanes XL T-shirt, and Birkenstocks (before they were “ironic”). I had put a face to the term “not giving a fuck.” Believe me when I say I fell in love by accide
nt. It wasn’t a truck I didn’t see coming. It was the Hogwarts Express appearing out of thin air, plowing straight through Platform 9¾ and promptly smacking my helpless muggle body. It was nothing like the movies I had spent my youth praying would materialize in my small-town life. No, instead it was the outcome of one too many shots of Captain Morgan and a drunken voice mail from my friend Molly informing me that she told my best friend Jasper that I was in love with him.

  Everybody always stands strongly against dating your best friend. They warn that, no matter the outcome, things will never be the same between you two. And they’re right. But does that mean I regret any of it? Do I wish I had played it safe and fallen in love with a convenient classmate, where the only risk was losing a lab partner in physics? No. Because if you play it safe for the rest of your life, you’ll end up like one of those lavender-sweater-set-wearing Stepford Wives living in a house straight out of Sims with a life you hardly recognize. That’s not the life I want. Plus I look horrible in pastels.

  Charlotte York famously summed up my feelings regarding dating in season three, episode one, of Sex and the City, with “I’ve been dating since I was fifteen. I’m exhausted. Where is he?”

  Over my fifteen years of dating I’ve learned which flavors of Ben & Jerry’s contain magical properties that heal a broken heart (Phish Food), what Taylor Swift song should be the soundtrack to throwing eggs at your ex’s car (“Should Have Said No”), and how exactly to converse with your crush without (obviously) drooling. I’ve decided that instead of hoarding all of this to myself and letting my embarrassing flubs go with me to the grave, I’ll share them—maybe it’s educational, or maybe it’s just amusing.

  chapter 3 my first heartbreak

  Jasper and I dated. We broke up. The end. Kidding!

  I mean, not kidding because that’s what happened, but kidding because three short sentences do not count as a chapter. I’m not necessarily dreading writing this because I still have a lot of emotions tied to the person or even the situation. My hesitance about being honest in this chapter about heartbreak is rooted mainly in the fact that pieces of that seventeen-year-old girl are still inside me. (Gross.) Despite that I’m way beyond happy and I wish nothing but the best for him, the feeling of your first heartbreak isn’t something you easily forget. Yes, I can take a step back and look at my life and see how far I’ve come from point A to point B, but point A still exists. When you’re seventeen and your world begins and ends with a school bell, your little reality is the only thing you know. For me, that reality resulted in a terrible breakup and a rebound and feelings that lingered far longer than I care to admit. So, yeah, this is the breakup chapter. In order to get to the end, we have to start at the beginning.

  His name was Jasper. He was smart, lanky, and he liked scarves more than millennium Hilary Duff. Jasper and I met in the sixth grade when he, like every other male and female at White Hill Middle School, fell head over Heelys for my friend Mia. Jasper didn’t even cross Mia’s radar. I’ll admit that Jasper went largely unnoticed by me as well. My sixth-grade notebooks were crowded with doodles of Henry and Matt. But somewhere between starting seventh grade and my first boy-girl dance, Jasper and I became an “item.” I wish I had more of a memory of what sparked our flirtation, but, honestly, my only memories of our seventh-grade fling consist of a typical group “hang” at the mall, where we sat in the bell tower eating burritos, after which I proceeded to hide from him in the Macy’s handbag department. (The reason why remains a mystery to me. Playing hard to get?) There’s also the final preteen memory of us where I avoided participating in the boy-girl “snowball” dance at Winter Formal and hid from Jasper in the girls’ bathroom. The overall theme here seems to be hiding and avoiding my “boyfriend”—you know, all positive signs. Like most middle school relationships, Jasper and I probably lasted for a total of three weeks. It ended as memorably as it began (as in, I don’t remember at all).

  Time passed and our paths naturally diverged as we attempted to navigate the social hierarchy of high school. Just how were we going to identify ourselves for the next four years? Somewhere on that timeline, Jasper decided he hated me. It could have been a long time brewing as the result of our tween romance gone south. Truthfully, I didn’t notice until we were assigned to sit next to each other in AP Composition our junior year. As our teacher read my name and seating assignment aloud, Jasper audibly sighed and tossed an exaggerated eye roll to his best friend, Cody. What the fuck? I was so confused. What in the world had I ever done to this kid except ditch a slow dance when we were twelve years old? When I brought up the awkward encounter to my friends at lunch, I was met with responses of “Ohhhh, yeah. You didn’t know?” “Yeah, he’s always hated you.” “I don’t remember a time when he didn’t hate you!” A lot of people would take this personally—I probably should have—and they’d rack their brains to pinpoint the exact moment that it all went awry. They’d then devise a plan to get back in their enemy’s good graces. I, on the other hand, decided that I would just hate him too. Ha! Take that, Jasper.

  They say there’s a fine line between love and hate. What they don’t tell you is that that fine line is friendship. Somehow, Jasper and I ended up walking that line, and it was all thanks to the death penalty. It was about three months into the school year when fourth-period AP Composition began the debate section of our curriculum. Our teacher created teams solely based on their seating proximity, assigning us topics and an argument to present on. Much to our initial dismay, Jasper and I were paired together to argue in favor of the death penalty. I don’t know what my teenage self was more torn up about: advocating for death or cooperating with my nemesis. We put our less-than-fuzzy feelings toward each other aside as we prepped our unwinnable debate. Our lunch hours were spent in the library sifting through articles rather than scarfing down bagels and bubble tea alongside our peers. We traded in our late Facebook-stalking binges for productive instant messenger sessions rife with links to various sources backing up our arguments. Without even realizing it, we forgot to hate each other. We started to crack jokes and laugh and reference things other than case trials and lethal injections. Any bad blood between us suddenly vanished without question or complaint. Oh—we totally lost the debate, by the way. We weren’t mad. I think I’d be more alarmed if a group of soon-to-be voters switched political and moral leanings solely based on a presentation of facts mostly found on Wikipedia. Plus we might be the only two people able to say that the death penalty brought us closer together. (Too far?)

  We took all the energy we had used for hating each other and channeled it into our friendship. We scolded ourselves for letting petty issues prevent our friendship from rekindling sooner. Come winter, our friends, our classmates, and even our teachers hinted that they sensed something more between us. We were both quick to shut those rumors down and defend our friendship, claiming that we were the perfect example of what it meant for a guy and a girl to be just friends. I honestly believed that. There wasn’t a part of me that drifted off into the what-ifs or dwelled on the possibility of taking it one step further. I just couldn’t see Jasper like that. I couldn’t picture what it would be like to cross that line once again. Until I did.

  It was a cold California night over winter break. A group of us had decided to climb the hill behind our friend Claire’s house, a place we frequented to drink vodka out of plastic cups. High school was glamorous. A few too many shots later, my footing was clumsy and Jasper’s arm was around my waist, steadying me as we crawled through the barbed-wire fence back toward suburbia. As the knee of my distressed low-rise True Religion jeans (gag me) caught the wire, he wrangled me free with a tug that sent my body stumbling into his. I’m not sure if his lips broke my fall or if in that moment I decided that it was the most fitting way of saying thank you for sparing my overpriced white jeans. But it happened. And we never spoke of it again.

  I’ve never been a big believer in love at first sight, mostly because I’ve met Channing Tatum, an
d if I didn’t feel it with him, it doesn’t work with anybody. I mean, I definitely have that instinctive attraction where I find a guy cute right from the get-go and develop an innocent schoolyard crush. But, more times than not, those butterflies fade when I realize he takes shirtless mirror pics and he puts protein powder in his cocktail as a “healthy balance” (true story). That being said, while I’m not gonna marry that douche, I’m not opposed to hooking up. But I’m talking about beyond that initial desire to jump someone’s bones, and beyond that level of drunkenness you need to let your standards slip. I’m talking about those actual real, feelingy feelings. The kind where you’re so far gone and so over your head, you’re past drowning, and no hot lifeguard can rescue you from the black hole you fell down. The slow-burn feelings. The kind that don’t just sneak up on you; they crawl low to the ground like firemen going through a burning building. And you wake up with your lungs filled with smoke and you’re dying because you can’t breathe because this is so beyond a crush. The kind that makes you pay attention in science class because you’re sure something is up with gravity because the weight of it all feels way heavier than any textbook could explain. Do I sound completely bat-shit insane? Good. Because that’s how I felt the day I was told that I was in love with Jasper.

  Even though Sir Francis Drake High preaches an all-inclusive mentality among its students, one of the age-old privileges of prom still remains reserved exclusively for the upperclassmen. So while 75 percent of my junior year revolved around the SATs and the ACTs, the last 25 percent revolved around talk of taffeta versus silk, party bus check collecting, and, finally, the most important, prom-posals. The first step of it all, and frankly the most important, was selecting a date. While attending any other Drake dance with a date was unheard-of and reserved for foreign exchange students or the transfer kids who used to be homeschooled, prom was a whole other story. Getting a date to prom was not optional; it was a prerequisite.