After that night, I saw her on occasion at school. But everything had changed; it had become impossible to believe she could be interested in me, even in my most optimistic of daydreams. During our brief conversations in the hall at school, as I tried to maintain eye contact, fighting the visual gravity of her perfect body, I was distracted by my assumption that she was distracted. I was sure she must be replaying her memory of the Young Life meeting, thinking about how I couldn’t participate in the pumpkin relay because my own body was irrevocably broken.
HYPOTHESIS
Subject may have held romantic attraction for me, as evidenced by handwritten correspondence written with sparkly pen.
Further investigation is required to determine for certain.
INVESTIGATION
Chapter 9
Let’s be honest here: I’d always been intimidated by Liza Taylor. I mean, even after I was finally allowed to date girls when I was sixteen, I never asked her out. Why? She seemed out of my league. Sure, I still saw her around at school from time to time, but after I had gotten into the swing of things at public school, after I understood the social hierarchy and where I fit in it, I never considered dating her.
So how could I ask her to have coffee with me ten years later, even if the reasons were entirely scientific? Even if I merely wanted to determine whether she had had any interest in me back in freshman year? Even if I just wanted to clear things up for myself, to get the story of my life all straightened out?
But fate intervened. I went to the mall to do some last-minute Christmas shopping, and I happened to run into her in front of Bath & Body Works. Even as we hugged hello, the artificial chemical-based reproductions of mountain breezes and ocean mists wafting in through my nostrils, I felt my blood filling up with adrenaline. To compensate for my nervousness, which can often lead to side effects like stuttering and/or looking down at the ground, I overcorrected with way too much enthusiasm.
“Man, I can’t believe we just ran into each other like this!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, crazy.”
“I haven’t seen you since high school graduation!”
Each of my sentences ended in an exclamation mark.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
She had the same droopy eyelids, the same inviting smile. My mind was going a million miles a minute, racing through the questions I had for her, the things I’ve always wanted to know: Why did she write me that note? Did she have a crush on me? Was she disappointed I never asked her out?
I made an attempt to turn the conversation in the direction of my investigation.
“I always look back on high school and wish I’d spent more time hanging out with you,” I said. “You were one of the coolest people in our grade.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said, in a tone like she was embarrassed. But she wasn’t blushing. It was only an act, a well-trained response to compliments by a girl who got them all the time. Either that, or I was just making her uncomfortable.
Whatever, I had to take the risk. I had to find out if she had liked me. So I pushed the conversation to the breaking point.
“Certainly,” I added, with all the sincerity I could muster to compensate for the cheesiness of what I was about to say, “you were one of the most beautiful girls in our grade.”
“Well… thanks…” she said, actually blushing this time. I clenched up, hoping against all odds that she would respond with something about how I was supercute, too, and remember that note she wrote me? She totally had a crush on me back in high school, and what was I doing tonight for dinner?
“You were… certainly…” She struggled for words. “One of the most interesting guys in our grade.”
The word “interesting” came out of her mouth so slowly and carefully it sounded like the screech of nails on a chalkboard. It was shudder-inducing: The best word in her vocabulary to describe me was… “interesting.” “Interesting” is the word you use to describe the color of month-old Chinese takeout noodles in your refrigerator. It’s the word you use to describe your superweird aunt and uncle who live in a bombproof nuclear-fallout shelter with a stash of automatic weapons and a twenty-year supply of canned goods.
I briefly considered asking her about the note, asking her why she had written it if I had been merely “interesting.” But I realized that if this was how she felt about me, she wouldn’t even remember the note. I mean, let’s be honest: A girl writes hundreds of notes during her high school career. She only remembers a few of them once she’s an adult. And the ones she remembers are certainly not those written to boys she found “interesting.”
There was nothing else to discover here. That one word answered all my questions.
“Okay, cool, well, nice to see you,” I said, faking a smile.
“You, too.”
And we walked our separate ways, annoying ding-a-ling holiday music echoing all around us.
FRANCESCA MARCELO
BACKGROUND
Chapter 10
Geometry class, first day of spring semester in eleventh grade. The room was filling up and there was one desk left open. The one right in front of me. The seconds were ticking down before the bell would ring. Somebody was going to walk in and take this seat, and I would spend the rest of the semester staring at the back of the head belonging to this particular somebody.
Please, God, let it be a hot girl.
The reason I cared so much about who sat in this seat was that I had just recently turned sixteen. Sixteen, meaning I was finally allowed to date. I had a pretty sweet ride (a Toyota Camry, one year older than I was) and a girlfriend-shaped hole in my heart. That’s why, sitting there at my desk, I was praying that whoever would fill that seat might also happen to be, you know, girlfriend-shaped.
Then, in walked Francesca Marcelo. Let me say that again in case you missed it:
Francesca. Marcelo. Walked. Into. The. Room.
Yes, people, there is a God.
Francesca was hot. Really hot. But she wasn’t queen-bee, alpha-female-cheerleader hot; she was art-class, vegetarian, hemp-jewelry hot. Unlike most girls her age, she had this aura that suggested she’d already found herself and was content with what she’d found. She was cool enough to hang out with the popular kids but chose to merely float in and out of their circles, sometimes gracing their lunch table or weekend parties with her presence, sometimes not. As far as I knew, she’d never had a boyfriend. She just made guys nervous—even the popular guys, the ones with cool cars manufactured in the current decade.
As I said, Francesca was hot. But I was attracted to her because she was more than that. She was a mystery, an enigma, a challenge. I might not have understood pretty girls, but I did understand challenges.
But I couldn’t carry on a conversation longer than Hey, did you do that fun homework assignment yet? To which she’d just say, Ummm, fun?
Winter turned into late spring. Then it was almost summer. I knew I had to make a move. But if it was so difficult to talk to her about normal things that I knew a lot about (read: math homework), how could I ever will myself to articulate a series of words that would ask her out and therefore risk rejection?
The same people who tell you The worst thing she can do is say no will also tell you Even if she does say no, she is rejecting you only based on surface reasons. She doesn’t know the real you. Surface reasons like what, exactly? My personality? That I’m not funny enough, or confident enough, or interesting enough, or intelligent enough? Or do these surface reasons concern the way I look? That I am not handsome enough, or thin enough, or muscular enough, or that I have an abnormally shaped body, or that my haircut isn’t expensive enough or my clothes stylish enough?
Are these the “surface reasons” we are talking about here? Surface or not, take away my personality and appearance and I’m not sure what is left. I’m not sure what the “real me” would be apart from them. But I know one thing: There aren’t a lot of girls who would date a guy with no personality. Or body. Surface or
not, I’m of the opinion that these things do matter, at least to some degree, and therefore a rejection of them can’t be trivialized.
So I reject your attempts to downplay the pain of rejection, well-meaning advice givers. You can’t rationalize this one away. I mean, you can try. You can try to say that it’s a numbers game, that you need to get X number of rejections before you finally get a yes. Or that every person has a preset chemical affinity for people with other predetermined chemical characteristics, an explanation that would in theory at least suggest you can make a formula for it, that fate has already been determined by the inevitability of the numbers. You can try to approach it this way. I know because believe me, I have.
But this is where you run smack into the outer limits of numbers and theory and enter the domain of emotions, an irrational wasteland of dangerously unpredictable weather patterns. You can throw all the numbers at it that you want, you can shout theories all day long, you can draw graphs and make flowcharts until you run out of paper, but in the end, rejection is just pure pain, and fighting emotion with logic is like bringing a calculator to a knife fight. You’re going to get stabbed in the heart, and there’s nothing your precious numbers can do to protect you.
Chapter 11
Like cancer, war, and acne, the best way to avoid the pain of rejection is to take steps to stop it before it starts. That’s what I was thinking about on the last day of my junior year of high school. Francesca and I had lockers on opposite ends of the same first-floor hallway. After the last exam period was finished, I could see that she was cleaning out her locker, getting ready to go home for the summer—taking down photos and Post-it notes from her BFFs, all that. This was it. My last chance.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi,” she said.
“Good times in geometry, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“No more geometry now, though.”
“No, I guess not.”
I took a deep breath and then unleashed the line that I had been rehearsing all morning.
“So… we should hang out sometime.”
Boom. I want to pause here and acknowledge how that line may have blown your mind with its sheer awesomeness. If you need to take a break before you keep reading, I’ll understand.
Okay. Hopefully that was a long enough break.
We should hang out sometime is so perfect because it’s nearly impossible to say no to. That’s how I first thought of it: I was looking for a way to ask out Francesca without any possibility of rejection.
Let me explain why it’s rejection-proof. First of all, it’s a statement, not a question. If you ask a girl a yes-or-no question like Do you want to hang out sometime?, you are opening the door to rejection. But by making a statement instead of posing a question, you are just sharing an opinion. And any well-mannered person knows it’s rude to disagree with someone else’s opinion to his or her face. For example, let’s say you walk up to a girl and say, I really like Tuesdays. What’s she going to say? No, I don’t think so? Of course not. She has to acknowledge that you’ve shared an opinion. Oh… yeah.
The second reason this line is so chock-full of win is that it’s general rather than specific. If you say, We should hang out next Thursday at seven o’clock, all she has to do is say, Oh, sorry, that’s when my favorite Bravo reality show, Next Top Singing Chef Model, comes on. But by using the word “sometime,” you are setting such a vague and general parameter that her only way out of it is to claim she’s already booked for every hour of the rest of her life, which would obviously be a lie. And if she’s a liar, she’s not good enough for you anyway, is she?
Finally, the line sounds casual, maybe even platonic. You’re not asking her to dinner and a movie or a walk on the beach at sunset or some other activity with a blinking neon DATE! sign on it. You just want to hang out, like, you know, friends. And if you’re just trying to be friends, it would be impolite to say no.
So I threw down the line We should hang out sometime. And Francesca was like, “Yeah, totally.”
“Okay, cool,” I said. “I’ll give you a call.”
So that’s what I did, just called her out of nowhere a week later. How’d I get her number? I looked up her parents in the phone book. Totally not weird.
“Hey, it’s Josh Sundquist. Remember me?” In high school, I always opened my calls to girls this way. Just to make sure.
“Um, yeah, of course.”
“So when are we going to hang out?”
“Well… whenever,” she said in a surprisingly agreeable tone.
“How about tomorrow?”
“All right.”
“You ever played golf at the par-three course in Bridgewater?”
“No.”
“You know about it?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Well, it’s awesome.”
“Okay.”
“So you want to go there?”
“Sure.”
I added, to clarify, “With me?”
“Sure.”
The next day, I washed the outside and vacuumed the inside of my seventeen-year-old Camry. I got one of those cardboard Christmas tree things to hang from my rearview mirror, too. New-car scent. Which, as it turned out, smelled disgusting.
I will never, ever forget how Francesca looked when she was walking down the stairs at her house. I had just rung the bell, and I could see through the window in the front door as she appeared at the top of the staircase. She was wearing sky-blue nylon surfer-girl shorts with a white spaghetti-strap top. The straps on the shirt crossed diagonally in the front, forming an X beneath her neck. Her short brown hair bounced with each step as she descended. She took my breath away. Literally. And in the instinctive human response to not being able to breathe, I started panicking. Our date was going to be a disaster of awkward silences and nervous stuttering. There was just no way I could talk to her. Not without hyperventilating, at least.
Just as she opened the door and stepped onto the porch, I thought of a lifesaving idea.
“Hi,” she said, smiling.
“Hey,” I said. “So I was… uh… wondering.”
She raised her eyebrows while I composed my words.
“Do you have any, you know, like, awesome music we could listen to in the car?”
Boo-ya! Such a good idea, right? If there were any awkward pauses on the car ride, I could just drum my fingers on the steering wheel and it would seem like I was entranced by her music instead of running low on preprepared conversation topics.
See, when it comes to girls, I’ve always believed in being prepared. You can’t leave something as important as conversation up to chance. Fact: The first time I ever called a girl, at age thirteen, I wrote a page-long list of possible conversational questions before dialing her number from the phone book. I took notes on her answers. I intended to refer back to them when we started dating once I was sixteen. As it turned out, by that time she had a boyfriend. But I still had the notes.
So anyway, I asked Francesca for a CD. She was like, “Sure, hold on.” She returned with an Ani DiFranco CD.
“She’s my favorite.”
That was Francesca speaking, not me. Because I had never heard of Ani DiFranco. Ani DiFranco’s songs, as it turns out, are best described as guitar picking played as background music while Ani, an angry, dreadlocked feminist lesbian, spouts diatribes against men. The music created that perfect mood of politically charged man-hating that I always go for on a first date. Ladies, if you’re looking to start a date off right, you can’t go wrong with Ani.
“What do you think?” asked Francesca of the music.
“Oh yeah,” I said neutrally. “Really… interesting.”
Par-three golf on a municipal golf course is an ideal first date. First of all, it’s free. That’s key when you’re sixteen years old and your primary source of income is your allowance, which has never been adjusted for inflation.
Things were going well for Francesca and me—I made some jok
es, she laughed at at least one of them, and most importantly, there were zero awkward pauses—until the sixth hole.
That’s when disaster struck.
Chapter 12
To understand exactly how this date fell apart, you need to know two things. Number one—as mentioned, this was a par-three golf course. In case you’ve never heard of par three, let me inform you: It’s basically extended Putt-Putt. You could take your local mini-golf course, get rid of the ten-foot-tall windmill, add in a few sand traps, move the holes back a foot or two, and you’re done. You’ve got par-three golf. Number two—I was wearing my artificial leg, and prosthetic limbs come preprogrammed out of the box to malfunction at the worst possible moments in your entire life.
So I took this shot off the sixth tee, and it was perfect. It arced up into the air, pausing for a moment, suspended at its vertex, and then dropped down onto the green. It was a beautiful parabola, a perfect y = −x2 arc. Stopped maybe twenty-four inches from the hole. I got all excited and started jumping around, because I figured that a display of athletic prowess of this magnitude would totally make Francesca fall desperately in love with me.
Anyway, one second I was pumping my fist in celebration and the next I was falling backward in slow motion, arms flailing behind my head. I landed on my back and glanced up to see Francesca staring at me, all deer-in-the-headlights. I’ve seen the look a million times. All right, maybe not a million, but a few. Because let’s face it, I’ve fallen down before. Fake legs aren’t the easiest things to walk with. And people never know what you’re supposed to do when the one-legged guy falls down. Are you allowed to laugh at him? Should you help him up? Maybe take him to therapy? Francesca did one of those half-laugh, half-sympathy things you do when you see a cute little baby trip and land on his diaper while he’s learning to walk.
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