|
|
Four girls stood collected in a teenage goth clump in the ladies’ room. They were arguing over who should go “out there” to check the situation.
“I know that I’ll be the one to do it eventually, so I’m going now,” Jessie said in a very sweet, jokingly bitter manner. Jessie was the only one of us that was actually sane and to this day we aren’t sure what drew her to the rest of us.
A moment better, she had returned. “He’s still lurking out there.”
We deliberated over what to do next.
...
I was the most awkward thing you had ever seen. Newly in contacts and wearing clothes too small in some sort of a retrospectively pathetic attempt to be “sexy” for a “nerd camp” dance, I was trying to actually avoid a guy. This was precisely the opposite of what I’d been trying for all through middle school.
Lydia had made me sit on his lap and now he was stalking us, me specifically.
...
“I say we just run out the door. Race past him so fast he wouldn’t notice,” Jessie said.
“Look how we’re dressed. We don’t blend,” Elizabeth pointed out. She was a dark princess with ripped fishnets, red hair, and black lipstick.
“This is our only option,” I told her. We prepared and raced out the door, past him, and onto the dance floor.
...
Lydia Barbash-Riley, the unrelated girlfriend of my best friend Ryan Riley, was the coolest girl I had ever known. I thought she was the thing. When she dared me to sit on some guy’s lap, I was just thinking of impressing her, not of the potential consequences of my actions.
...
We had already tried losing him. After that first dance when I took up Lydia’s dare to sit on his lap, he’d decided that I was his soul mate or something awful like that.
He’d sat with us at lunch, trying to squeeze at our exclusive booth and talk to us about how he liked animé and cheesecake (simultaneously). We’d sit there awkwardly wishing for his departure until we found a lull in the conversation to “do our laundry.” The first time we did this, Elizabeth told him (truthfully) that she had to do her laundry, and we all took this excuse to leave with her. After that, every day, one of us would inevitably claim the overwhelming need to do laundry right now. He never seemed to catch on that we were attempting to avoid him. In fact, he once claimed, out loud, that “Gee, you girls seem to do a lot of laundry.” It wasn’t that he was a bad guy, it was that we couldn’t stand him.
...
He spied our attempt to slip by him and lumbered after us.
“What are we going to do?” Jessie cried.
Somehow we wound up hiding under a table, attempting to hide Elizabeth’s extreme whiteface from the dance’s minimal light. He hadn’t seen this evasive maneuver and proceeded to look for us amongst the dancing couples, the patio outside, and the side room. Neglecting to think of looking under the tables, he went back to our previous stronghold, the bathroom, and asked a girl to go inside and look for us.
I can just imagine this: “Excuse me, but can you see if a bunch of goth wannabe chicks are in there hiding from me?”
The girl came out, shaking her head.
...
The poor guy looked confused. He was about six feet tall, sweaty, had brown hair parted in the center and teeth. I’m not sure what about his teeth was important, but I remember “teeth” so I’m going to have to put that in here.
Eventually, we came out from under the table, though that has to the ultimate in guy avoidance experience if I ever knew it.
...
I’ve never seen him again. I’m glad I haven’t, because then I’d have to apologize to him, and maybe explain where we were during that dance in the summer of 1999.