I had a crush on this boy, Robby, in high school. He was my teammate Karen’s boyfriends’ best friend, and I’d known him since kindergarten because his house was around the corner from mine. We rode on the same school bus. I was this chubby little mess who didn’t quite know how to fit in with her peers or into her clothes. He was loud and obnoxious, the kind of boy you tried to brush off as a class clown, a distraction. By junior year of high school, though, I just thought that he was the coolest. He had gotten taller (you know, the way that human beings often do somewhere from kindergarten to the 11th grade) and he cut his hair a different way than he used to. He played the bass in a band and he was in Honors classes. When he’d see me reading a book in study hall, he almost always recognized the titles. Obviously, he ticked off all of the boxes on the “things Kate thought were attractive between the ages of 14 and 17” list, and I was engrossed in my need for this boy to like me.
I saw this boy every day for the entire second half of our junior year, as I had been moved into his study hall due to a scheduling change. I mentioned, offhandedly, to Karen, that I thought he was cute, musing as to whether or not he had a girlfriend. He did not, Karen informed me, and I had the brilliant idea to ask him to our junior prom—well, hope Robby would ask me and then decide at the last second if he had not done so to ask him.
Big problem here. I had no idea how to make that happen.
I kept dropping hints that there was a boy I wanted to ask me to the prom, and once, when I was walking with Karen and Robby, he just looked at me and said, “Why don’t you just ask him yourself?”
Hm, no. I couldn’t really do that.
Next thing I knew, he’d entered into a flirtation with another girl on our team who was a grade above us, and it was all he could talk about. I’d pretend to read my book—The Bell Jar, at this point—and I would listen to him talk about her, and then I would listen to him talk about a girl that grade below ours, some girl with a goofy name that I genuinely do not remember. Before I knew it, during my time as a completely incapable human being who didn’t know how to say “Will you go to the prom with me?” a girl asked Robby to be her date.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the girl with the funny name became Robby’s girlfriend, and I was once again pining after a boy who had a girl in his orbit (there had been an incident earlier in my junior year, one in which a former friend “stole” a boy I had a crush on. Lots of tears. Unimportant, really.) If there was any way to make this any more dramatic than it needed to be, I made the executive decision to just not go to the prom altogether. I sat at home and played Monopoly with my grandmother while my teammates and my friends and the boy I had a stupid crush on went to the prom without me.
The Tuesday after the prom—everyone who went to the prom skips on Monday, as is tradition at my high school, even though the prom is always on Saturday—I went on an AP Bio class field trip to the zoo, and before I got on the school bus to go home for the day, someone tapped on my shoulder.
“I missed you in study hall today.” Robby. What the fuck.
“Oh, well, I was at the zoo. You know, bunch of nerds celebrating the exam being over.” Yep, I really said that. I pulled at the sleeve of the shirt I was wearing, an “AP Bio Survivor 2015” t-shirt with a giraffe on the heart, as if I could further embarrass myself.
“I wanna go to the zoo. I’m jealous.” He shoved at my shoulder just a bit. “Anyways, I’m going for a run at the nature reserve later if you want to join me.” That, I definitely wanted to do. I nodded and texted all of my friends to let them know the big news.
“Don’t fall.” Erin replied. Yeah, um, about that.
Basically, the short version of that story is that I tripped over a big tree root on the trail at the reserve, and I scraped both of my arms and the entirety of my left shin, all while Robby ran ahead, headphones blaring with some new song he was trying to learn on his bass. Blood poured from my left forearm, my right palm, and both knees, and he kept running ahead. He didn’t even turn his head. He just kept going.
I brushed the dirt off my mesh shorts—issued by my softball team—and I ignored the blood that leaked from my limbs, running after him with my next steps. My earbuds were dusty, still playing Taylor Swift’s “I Wish You Would,” and I caught up to him. When he stopped running, I stopped chasing, and he noticed the red on my arms and legs.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” He spoke frantically, and I decided to resolve with the fact that he hadn’t even noticed me fall because it seemed like maybe he actually cared. I shrugged it off, but I felt the knots in my shoulders (I was an anxious high schooler, so nothing has changed) tighten.
“You were so in the zone, and I didn’t want to bother you.” He rolled his big eyes at this, and he offered me the water bottle he’d stashed by a tree so I could maybe clean myself off, but I said no. I was far too embarrassed. What an idiotic thing to do, but I didn’t take the water, and I let the blood dry on my arms and legs, let the dirt sink deeper into my wounds.
We walked around the trail for a while after that, and he told me about the prom, how he’d danced the whole night like no one was watching him because his mom told him that people like a guy who does that. I, in a brief moment of courage, wondered what his girlfriend with the funny name, thought of all that. He told me they broke up, and I tried not to smile. I was never one for stealing someone’s boyfriend, so to hear he was free on his own was a nice change of pace. We talked for a while, and he made me laugh, and I made him laugh. We both needed to go home for dinner, so we parted ways at the top of the trail after he asked me one more time if I was okay after my fall. I nodded, and I went home, only for my mother to remind me how clumsy and careless I am. It was a normal afternoon, really, other than the part where a boy paid attention to me. (My mother even said to me recently, several years after this incident, that I am “not used to getting that kind of attention from guys.” Seriously.)
Robby had nothing to say to me on that matter for about a year.
Senior year, the mental health shitshow that it had been, was meant to be smooth sailing after choosing a college. After picking a school, the most stressful thing in my life was the prom. All my friends had boyfriends, or they at least had dates, and I was going alone in a dress I really liked, a color that made my eyes look pretty. The day before, I’d run into Robby in the hallway with Karen and her boyfriend.
“Are you excited for prom?” He asked after greeting me. Karen and her boyfriend yammered on about last minute arrangements with her flowers.
“I guess so. It’s my one and only.” I shrugged.
“I can’t believe you skipped last year.” I shrugged again at that. “Well, I know I’ll see you there.”
“Save me a dance.” I nodded to him before I walked to English class.
After all of the makeup and self-tanning lotion the morning of the dance, I’d properly masked myself and went to the dance looking like someone who isn’t me at all. Robby, the moment he saw me, grabbed my hands and said “Holy shit! You look amazing!” Maybe that should’ve been my first red flag.
We rode on different buses, as I’d planned to take the bus with my friends, and when we got to the hotel and into the ballroom, we sat at different tables. I ate with my friends, and he ate with his, and when the lights went down and the music began to play, someone grabbed my wrist and dragged me over to the dance floor before I even had the chance to remove my shiny silver shoes. Robby. Oh shit, I thought, this is it.
We danced to a Spanish song that I can’t remember the name of, and we kept dancing for maybe 5 more songs before I went to find my friends again, and I told him I’d find him later. We were both sweating, the ballroom too warm for 600 teenagers in expensive clothing to occupy at one time. I danced with my friends to “Fergalicious,” made painfully awkward eye contact with one of my male coaches as I dropped it low to make my friends laugh, and I smiled for a while as I told my friends that Robby actually wanted to dance with me, wanted to spend time with me for the first time in a long time. We’d been passive friends for that year, but he was paying attention to me, aka the biggest “holy shit” I had experienced in quite some time.
Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud,” one of two slow songs that played in the entirety of my senior prom, began playing over the speakers, and I thought this was my big chance. I’d never been kissed, and I’d never been slow danced either, so this was exactly the perfect moment I was looking for.
As was my usual luck, Robby was nowhere to be found, and I danced with my friend, Natalie. Robby reappeared a few songs later, still sweating, his tux jacket gone somewhere and the sleeves of his white shirt clumsily rolled up. A random boy from my graduating class whose name I still can’t remember somehow finessed his way into working up on stage with the DJ, and he played another Walk the Moon’s “Shut Up and Dance” before he played more music no one knew the words to.
I’m a horrific dancer, but my confidence had been building throughout the night, and I danced with Robby for a while with some kind of boldness occupying my chest. That boldness jumped and ran away, however, the moment Robby grabbed my hips with his calloused musician hands and pulled me closer to him. We were way too close to the speaker, and I could feel a headache beginning to pound against my skull. Robby kept looking at me, and I was too close to him to be able to really look away. He was much taller than me, and in the midst of the pair of us swaying our hips in opposite directions, he bent down to kiss me, the very first time anyone had done such a thing.
Now, let’s take a second to think about how I imagined my first kiss. I sort of pictured it like that final scene in Anne Hathaway’s smash hit film The Princess Diaries: pretty dress, a sweet boy I liked who I just couldn’t seem to make it work with until now, beautiful surroundings, being looked at like I was the only girl in the entire world, and the perfect kiss—complete with the “foot pop.”
So, some of these boxes were checked, but here’s how it actually went down. Robby’s mouth crashed into my face, open mouth missing my puckered lips, leaving a vague amount of saliva on my face, sort of hitting the corner of my mouth with his teeth. I felt my eyes become huge, size of the moon décor strewn throughout the old Miss America ballroom where our “Fly Me to the Moon” prom was held, and Robby smiled when he pulled back. It took everything in me to smile back, hiding the grimace that wanted more than anything to take over. I fought against the urge to wipe the saliva from my cheek with my bare-of-clothes-but-glistening-with-sweat shoulder, and I let him take my hand and lead me from the dance floor to the table where his friends were sat with their dates. He poured me a glass of water, and he told me my hand was sweaty. I yanked it away quickly, wiped it on my dress, and downed the glass of water like it was a shot. A few glasses later, he led me out to the hall outside the ballroom, large hand surrounding my much smaller one, as we looked for the desserts and the complimentary souvenirs that our $100 prom tickets paid for.
He wouldn’t let go of my hand, and that should have maybe raised a red flag for me, too. This is probably where they all started to show up, actually. Why do I know that now? I talk an absolute hell of a lot, and I remember a lot of the things that have happened to me, remember a lot of the conversations I’ve had, the words said to me in so many expressions of emotion. In this moment, I said almost nothing, and I don’t remember a single word Robby said to me in the four and a half songs before “What are you doing after this?”
I panicked, and I think I squeezed his big hand a little harder than I meant to. I told him I was going home, as I had an annual Mother’s Day family tradition in the morning. He nodded, explained that he was inviting me to an after party held by a few friends of ours. It was a couples(!) event, and I happened to know that going in. He understood when I declined, and after we took a photo together, he said he’d see me later. When he was out of sight, and I was safely tucked away on my bus back to the high school with my friends, I started to cry. Paige, one of my best friends and my seatmate on the bus, did not ask, and I did not tell until we got into her car. She looked at me as she put the car in drive, taking us in the direction of a diner near the bridge into the beach town we live so close to.
“He kissed me.” I told her the news like I was revealing some sort of life-threatening diagnosis. She looked at me as though to say “And?” and I started to sob. My heart was pounding, and my blue manicured nails were digging into my palms the way they had been for hours. Everything about this boy suddenly crashed into me like a train once again, bigger than it ever had with anyone. Leading up to this, I had never shared a more intimate physical moment with a person than a first kiss, and it felt wrong.
“He kissed me, and he missed.”
Paige laughed, but I kept crying.
“It’s not that bad,” she said. “There’ll be more kisses.”
“Why didn’t he want to kiss me a year ago?”
That shut her right up, and she let me cry and cry the whole way to the diner, where we ordered waffles and ice cream, and the other late-night patrons of the diner wished us “Happy Prom!” I had to stop crying when two of my friends, a couple, were seated behind us. I didn’t want anyone to know what was going on. I wanted to believe that I didn’t understand it, but I certainly did.
I was finally getting something that I wanted with someone that I wanted, and it turned out that I didn’t want any of it at all. I wanted so badly for it to turn out, and I knew it wasn’t going to.
He was my boyfriend for a brief moment, and when he tried to kiss me while dropping me in my driveway after our first date, I turned my cheek, and I caught another spit-filled kiss not pressed to my mouth. Embarrassed, I rushed out of his car and into my house after I told him I’d text him later and I’d see him on Monday. The moment I really knew things wouldn’t work out? We had off from softball practice a Friday sometime after that, and I forgot to mention this fact to him before I drove home and took a well-deserved nap. When I mentioned later that afternoon that I was home early, he was pissy in his responses, shorter than usual.
“You didn’t say you had off.”
“Okay?”
“We could’ve hung out or something.”
I didn’t respond because I felt every relationship-related anxiety I had ever had come back to punch me in the face. I faltered under the weight of something I wanted so badly, and I’d only had it for a moment. I wanted this boy to want me so badly, and when I had finally reconciled that he wouldn’t ever feel the same way about me, I did everything my little high school heart could do to move on. I found new crushes, new boys to want to ask to the prom, new people to talk to books about in study hall. All of a sudden, as I was masked under prom makeup, caked in self-tanner, and clothed in a dress that made me look like someone wholly new (someone I was trying to be but just couldn’t quite find) here he was, chasing after me the way I’d run after him on the nature reserve trail a whole year before.
Only then, it was the same it had been that day on the trail. When he stopped running, I stopped chasing. He looked at me the way I wanted to be looked at, the way every girl wants to be looked at. I thought that was going to be enough, thought that making myself feel the way I felt a year ago could be enough, that someone just giving into feeling the way I felt about them could be enough.
It’s not, and the wipeout on the trail, its scars on my elbows, and the sucker punch of a first kiss are nothing anymore except the kind of stories I tell with a shrug and half a smile, looking back on them with what I wish was only fondness without the addition of chest twinging panic and the emotional equivalent to the lightening of a scar.
