She didn’t attempt to deny it. Instead, she tried to distract me with flattery.
“I find pleasure in being with you. You are different from other men.”
It was strange. I’d spent my whole life trying to become a man, but when she actually used that word, it made me shiver with discomfort.
“That kind of thing is not normal,” I said.
“But if I didn’t follow you around, how would I get to see you?” she asked. She looked genuinely confused, like everything so far had been part of the early stages of a normal relationship, and the only problem here was my not being comfortable with her entirely reasonable actions.
I decided two things in that moment. Number one, she needed a wake-up call. Number two, I would be her alarm clock.
“Okay, check it out. There are three types of social encounters,” I began. “Number one, a planned encounter. That’s like when you meet someone for lunch or coffee at a set time and place. Number two, a random encounter. That’s like when you just happen to walk by someone on the way to class. With me so far?”
She nodded.
“The third type is a planned encounter disguised to look like a random encounter. That’s like when you stand in the grass and wait so you can wave at me when I walk by on my way to English Lit.”
She was quiet for a while as she considered this.
“So you don’t want to hang out with me anymore,” she concluded.
Um, what? When had we ever hung out?
It was true, though; I had no interest in hanging out. But I couldn’t say so directly. After all, I had experienced my fair share of rejection. I knew how it felt to be in her shoes. In fact, I had made some uncomfortably stalkerish moves myself, what with calling Lilly every day the previous summer. I wanted to believe that calling someone once every twenty-four hours wasn’t quite as bad as physically inserting yourself between a guy and his class multiple times each day. But still, I had to have some sympathy for Stella.
“No,” I said. “I’m happy to talk to you. I just think we should have more of the type-two encounters and less type-three.”
She stood and threw her bag over her shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I will no longer be bothering you.”
She said this in a cool tone, as if I should feel bad and argue with her that oh, no, she isn’t a bother at all—but the truth was, my daily life would be more pleasant without her.
“Great!” I said. “Or, that is, I mean, it’s great that we’re on the same page now.”
The next morning, I enjoyed an incredibly peaceful walk to Statistics, and then another Stella-less journey back to my dorm. If I had known it would be this easy, I would have explained the three types of social encounters a long time ago. But later that day, as I walked by the library on the way to my next class, I shivered as I passed the spot where she always used to stand. She wasn’t there, but I felt sure she was watching me. Maybe I was being paranoid, I told myself. Just to be sure, I looked up at the library and scanned all four floors of windows for her face. Nothing. Whew! I was getting paranoid. I smiled and shook my head as I continued walking. I passed by a tree that had been blocking my view of a few of the windows. That’s when I glanced back at the library and saw her face pressed against the glass on the second story. I was so startled that I literally jumped, nearly knocking over some girls walking behind me. I apologized and then looked up at the window again, but she was gone.
When I got back to my dorm, I wrote her an e-mail. “Watching from windows still counts as a type-three encounter.”
She replied a few hours later with a four-thousand-word e-mail that contained a summary of every conversation we had ever had, including what each of us had been wearing on that day, as well as her interpretations of the significance of the T-shirts I had chosen (e.g., I wore this shirt on that day because it was the same shirt I was wearing when we met). Her e-mail was creepily written in the third person, referring to herself as “the girl” and me as “the boy.” It concluded (eventually) with a promise to neither talk to me nor watch me from any windows ever again.
And Stella was true to her word. After that I saw her only once every couple months, usually at the library if I was there studying or whatever. I’d say Hi, Stella, but she would ignore me. Which was kind of awkward—but honestly, less uncomfortable than when she used to follow me around.
The thing I preferred not to admit was how much Stella reminded me of myself: the social awkwardness, the chance meetings that were not actually happening by chance. I mean, I had gone out of my way freshman year of high school to meet Liza Taylor Smith, right?
The truth is, I only thought of Stella as a stalker because I wasn’t interested in dating her. If I had been attracted to her, I might have thought her tendency to plan her life around mine was cute. That’s the thing about us human beings: If we have a crush on someone, that person’s every behavior attracts us even more. But if we don’t like that person, the very same behavior will annoy us.
Chapter 29
A lot of people want their first kiss to be special. I just wanted mine to be during this lifetime. I had missed my chances for special already. I missed them at the waterfall with Francesca and at prom with Evelyn. I was twenty years old, for crying out loud, and I’d still never kissed anyone. I didn’t care about special anymore. I needed only a pair of willing female lips and a little bit of courage.
I found both late one night when I was walking this girl Katie back from a party. Katie was a friend. But attractive enough. I was still head over heel9 for Lilly, of course, but I needed to get this first-kiss thing out of the way. What if Lilly changed her mind about me and we started dating? Obviously, I would need to have some skills to impress her. I wouldn’t want my tongue flopping around all awkwardly in Lilly’s mouth, revealing my status as a total kissing n00b.
I was sitting with Katie on a couch in her dorm.
“So I would kind of like to kiss you right now,” I said.
“Really?” She looked rather startled. But not uninterested.
“Yeah,” I confirmed.
“Maybe you should give it a try.”
“The thing is…” I glanced at the wall. “I kind of like this other girl.”
She drew back, her tone going cold. “So why would you want to kiss me?”
“Well, I mean, I like you, too. Not quite the way I like her, but, that is, I’m definitely attracted to you. Yeah, you’re really pretty.”
She inclined her head.
“Go on.”
“I’ve always had a little thing for you, and you know, it just feels right.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“So?” I asked.
“So what?”
“Do you think we should kiss?”
“Let’s give it a shot and find out.”
I frowned. “Yeah. About that. So… I’ve never kissed anyone before.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“It’s just that—how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Hmmm.”
“So… does that mean yes?”
And on it went like this for, I am not kidding you, over thirty minutes. Back and forth discussion about whether we should kiss, what implications it might have for our friendship, what our respective friend groups would think about it, whether as a Christian I was allowed to kiss her as an atheist, etc. It was all very scientific and analytical. Just the way I like it. But kisses are not supposed to be scientific. Or analytical. In fact, the longer you examine a kiss under a microscope, the smaller becomes its magic.
“So when are you gonna make a move on me?” she asked.
“Like I’ve been telling you, I really don’t know how,” I said. “You have to get us started.”
We sat in silence for a few moments, and then suddenly there was something wet and slimy inserting itself between my lips, prying open my jaw and exp
loring the concavities of my mouth. I realized that this was… her tongue. We were kissing.
Having never kissed before, I wasn’t aware that you are supposed to close your eyes. Big mistake. Her face was one inch from mine, and at that distance, I could see every pore, every eyebrow follicle, ever wrinkle of melanin-hued epidermis. I shut my eyes in horror.
“I’m not sure if this is allowed,” she said, grabbing my hand and placing it firmly over her breast. For a moment, I was too shocked to respond. Not shocked at her actions, shocked at how it felt. I had always assumed breasts would feel squishy and heavy, like a cross between a stress ball and a water-bed mattress. What I felt instead was unexpectedly soft.
That’s when I realized what I was touching.
“No!” I snapped my hand back. “Definitely not allowed.”
We got back to making out, and by the time I made it home the sky was beginning to turn light.
That turned out to be my first and only kiss in college. I didn’t do much dating there, either, because, as I said, I still liked Lilly. But I tried to keep it a secret. She was in my circle of friends, and I didn’t want to make things weird for her. Only Brad and Kyle and my other close friends knew I still liked her. And they didn’t say anything. That is, until senior year. See, senior year we were all twenty-one. And alcohol, among many other side effects, reduces people’s ability to keep secrets.
One Friday night, my guy friends and I were coming out of a bar. I should specify that this was not a cool bar by any means, but rather the karaoke night at a bar on the first floor of a hotel near campus. But in a small town like Williamsburg, there isn’t always a lot to do, so watching old people sing karaoke at a hotel on Friday night is, believe it or not, sometimes your best option.
I should also remind you that I didn’t drink at all until I was twenty-one, and even after I was twenty-one, I still had a religious hangover that made me afraid of more than one or two beers. So although some of my friends were a bit tipsy, I was pretty sober at this point. We stumbled out into the night air, and guess who was in the parking lot? That’s right, Lilly and some of her girlfriends. Hellos and “What are you guys up to tonights” were exchanged.
Side note: You’ve heard of a stage whisper, right? The term comes from live theater, like a play or whatever, when one actor pulls another aside and whispers to him loudly enough that the audience can hear it. The audience is meant to believe that even though the whisper had enough volume to fill up the auditorium, the other characters onstage could not hear it; it was a private conversation between the two characters who are “whispering” to each other.
Drunk people are prone to accidental stage whispers, inadvertently underestimating the volume of their whispering. Upon seeing Lilly in the parking lot, my friend Ben, who had apparently thrown back quite a few drinks while watching the karaoke, stage-whispered to me in a voice that was clearly audible to everyone in the parking lot—and probably everyone back inside the bar, too—“Dude, it’s your girl!”
Just in case it was not 100 percent clear whom he was talking about, he pointed his finger at Lilly, too, while tapping his other hand on my shoulder. I turned to Ben and whispered in his ear (an actual whisper, not a stage one), “Shut up, dude, she can hear you.” Drunk though he was, he could hear the urgency in my voice, and he shut up. I relaxed a little. It was over.
Or so I thought.
A week later I was hanging out at Lilly and Sadie’s apartment. It was late at night, and there were just four of us there: Lilly, Sadie, Brad (my roommate of three years), and I. We were sitting on the couches in their living room. And then, out of nowhere, Lilly dropped the bomb.
“What was your friend Ben saying the other night?” she asked me.
I was pretty sure I knew what she was talking about. But I hoped, I really hoped, that I did not. So I played dumb.
“What night?” I asked, putting a puzzled expression on my face.
“You know, the other night,” she said.
“Uh… no…”
Sadie and Brad were silent as they watched this exchange play out.
“You know, in the parking lot,” said Lilly. “As you guys were leaving karaoke?”
She had me cornered.
So I tried to acknowledge the night without having to answer her question. “Oh, right, that was a fun night. What did you all end up doing?”
But Lilly was undeterred by my attempt to change the subject. She pressed forward. “So, what did he say to you?”
I was trapped. She was obviously not going to let me off without answering her question. But I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t tell her that he’d said Dude, it’s your girl, because doing so would force me to reveal that I’d still had a crush on her all these years.
But I couldn’t lie. Could I? I am not a big fan of lying. For one thing, I’m not really good at it. I don’t exactly know how to lie, and I am always afraid that I’ll forget which lie I told to which person and get caught later when my stories didn’t match up.
But this, this was an impossible dilemma.
So I did the unthinkable: I lied.
“Oh—oh yeah,” I stammered. “He—he was saying—he was saying how he had forgotten his driver’s license and he had to go back to the dorm and get it so they would let him into the bar.”
See? Told you I was a bad liar.
It was, like, the worst lie ever. Ben had clearly said Dude, it’s your girl, and everyone knew it. I could’ve at least come up with a lie that sounded like a similar phrase. For example, I could have told her that he had said Hats off to the Duke of Earl. Nonsensical but similar. Instead, I made up this lie, which was an absolutely implausible story because, oh yeah, we had just walked out of the bar. Obviously, he had used his license to get inside in the first place.
But mercifully, Lilly did not realize I was lying. Or, more likely, she chose not to call me out on it. She glanced over at Sadie, a glance I couldn’t read but wished I could because I imagine it contained oh-so-much meaning, and then she said, “Oh, okay. His ID. I see.”
I changed the subject, and a few minutes later Brad and I said our good-nights. During the walk back to our dorm, we analyzed the earth-shattering conversation that had just gone down. My adrenaline was still pumping. We wondered: Did she actually know what Ben had said? Did she know I was lying? Did she know I’d had a crush on her for the entire four years of college?
HYPOTHESIS
Although subject never had romantic feelings toward me, it appears she overheard the conversation between Ben and me after our egress from the karaoke bar, and therefore that subject was forcing me either to admit liking her or to lie when she inquired as to what Ben had said.
Further investigation is required to discover her motives.
INVESTIGATION
Chapter 30
I knew that Lilly liked Sam, the football player, not me. I got that. But what I didn’t know was why she called me out that night in her apartment, forcing me to lie about my conversation with Ben. I was also curious whether she knew that I was lying, and whether she knew I liked her during all of college, not just freshman year when we were going on coffee dates.
Up until this time, all the girls I had investigated in this study had been from my hometown, so I was able to connect with them face-to-face while I was home for the holidays. But I knew Lilly from college, and she lived a few states away now. So I tracked her down on Facebook and wrote her this message:
To: Lilly
From: Josh
Lilly,
What’s up? Hope you are well.
So I am doing this life project thingy to seek closure and forgiveness. (Whoooa—is it me or did this message just get weird?!)
OK. So.
One night senior year at W&M we were all standing outside the Hospitality House. My friend Ben, who was sort of drunk, pointed at you and whispered (very loudly) to me, “Dude, it’s your girl.” And I was like, “Shut up, she can hear you.”
A
few weeks later I was hanging out at your apartment at King and Queen and you called me out on it.
“What did your friend say to you in front of Hospitality House?” you asked.
This put me in an awkward position. I had basically had a crush on you for all four years of college, but after freshman year I tried to keep this a secret from you and your friends since we ran in the same circles and I didn’t want to make things uncomfortable for you. Perhaps you suspected this all along. Or perhaps this is the first you’ve heard of it.
Anyway, obviously Ben had been referring to my crush on you, but I couldn’t tell you that, so I lied and told you something about him forgetting his ID. I’m not a fan of lying, so first, I wanted to ask your forgiveness.
Second, I wanted to ask if you remember the incident, and if so: Did you actually hear what Ben said at Hospitality House? Did you know I was lying?
All these years, I’ve wondered if you did.
Anyway, I know this is a very, very strange message, so feel free to just delete it. But if you would like to reply with any insight (large or small) into what you remember of that conversation, I would be most grateful for the emotional closure.
Cheers,
Josh
I held my breath for a couple of days while I waited to see if she would respond.10 And then, one night I logged on to Facebook and there it was:
To: Josh
From: Lilly
josh it’s so good to hear from you! now, as for this lie you say you told me, i can’t say i remember the incident but i am flattered. ah, college. and of course i forgive you—no worries at all!
glad you are doing well,
We Should Hang Out Sometime Page 13
