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It was the spring of 2000, my junior year of high school. In a couple of months, my dad I were moving to Austin, but in the meantime, I still attended Klein High School and suffered the accompanying high school drama. My Algebra II class was arranged in two sections of desks with a wide aisle down the middle. With no seating chart, we arranged ourselves naturally: My friends and I, the quieter and supposedly more serious students, sat on the side of the room closest to the door and farthest from the teacher's desk. The louder, more obnoxious students grouped themselves on the opposite side of the room (the enemy camp, as it were), which the teacher likely didn't mind since the louder students, in avoiding us, placed themselves closer to the teacher's watchful eye. One of the louder boys caught my attention near the beginning of the spring semester. I don't recall noticing him before that; I must have been preoccupied by somebody else, probably the History Class Guy. No matter. Algebra II Class Guy sat with two other class clown types, and together the three of them wreaked havoc daily. Nobody minded that much since our teacher was utterly devoid of a sense of humor. I suppose all three boys were equally obnoxious, but I focused only on arguably the worst of the three, Algebra II Class Guy, to whom I will refer from here on out as ALGII—and yes, he does deserve a nickname reminiscent of algae. I know it's juvenile, but fuck it. This is a story about high school; it's to be expected. That should foreshadow the ending of this story with stunning accuracy. ALGII was, like so many of my failed crushes, from a different social circle than mine. He and his friends were all extremely athletic, and they associated only with the most popular of the popular kids. One of his friends in our Algebra II class was, at 6'10", one of the school's star basketball players who went on to play professionally. ALGII himself played on the school hockey team, of which I was unaware at the time, otherwise I might have said something. Hockey was the only sport I was ever any good at, but no doubt trying to talk to him about would have been a disaster: Like I said, different social circles. If you think that no teenaged boy would ever cockblock himself, you've clearly forgotten how pervasive high school social circles are. Or any social circle, for that matter. So I crushed on him in vain, willing him to say something to me. I thought I had my opportunity a few weeks into the semester. A friend of mine had a class in the room next door to ours, and every day after class, I would wait outside the door for my friend. As it transpired, ALGII also had a friend in the class next door. ALGII and I would wait outside the door after class every day, waiting for our respective friends and awkwardly trying to avoid eye contact. I was too shy to say anything, and ALGII never initiated a conversation. I despaired until I caught ALGII's friend checking me out one day, and then I vaguely hoped that he might ask ALGII about me or try to befriend my friend in his own class or something, but nothing ever came of it. Alas, we were in different classes in more ways than one. Like I said, different social circles. The snobby jock's friend might have thought I was cute, but ZOMG, I was a dorky underling who hung out with punks and nerds. The semester wore on uneventfully, and ALGII and I continued avoiding eye contact after class every day. I still remember the turning point when ALGII and I actually made eye contact. Up until that point, I had been sneaking glances at him from across the classroom and eyeing his shoes in the hallway after class, but we had never actually had any form of contact. Today was different. ALGII and his two friends sat in their usual corner in the back. One of ALGII's friends, whose desk was against the wall, habitually leaned against the chalk tray of an unused chalkboard. Today was the day he inevitably strained it too much, and the chalk tray broke and crashed to the floor, sending chalk dust and small fragments of broken chalk over him. The class erupted in hysterical laughter, tears springing to our eyes and we watched ALGII trying to help his destructive friend repair the chalk tray. They failed and ended up just leaving it on the floor, to our further enjoyment. Our stern teacher never said a word; she just shook her head, tried not to laugh, and kept passing papers back as though nothing had happened. Even ALGII had to laugh, and mid-laugh, our eyes met. We each looked away immediately, still laughing, but it had happened. I knew things would be different now. In a way, I was right. Over the next few weeks, I grew a little bolder with my glances, slightly more confident as a result of the tiny incident. Humor lends confidence readily . . . but unwarrantedly. ALGII and I made eye contact awkwardly every so often now, yet we had still exchanged no words. I unfortunately had increased my confidence without considering that someone might notice—namely, one of his friends. The boy who was to become a professional basketball player had seen me eyeing his friend, and, perhaps intending to do his friend a favor without considering the consequences, informed him that I had been watching him as he walked back to his desk from the front of the room. "That girl was looking at you," his friend said, loud enough for me to hear clearly. Oh snap. "I know," ALGII replied with unbelievable arrogance, positively strutting back to his desk, not bothering to bestow a glance at me as he swaggered past. Words fail me. I cannot convey the level of sheer narcissism he packed into those two syllables. It was utterly despicable. If only he had changed the tone of voice, even keeping the same words, things might have been different, but alas. My crush on him instantly vaporized, crumbled into cureless ruin. From the ashes, like a phoenix, rose a profound distaste. I tasted bile, wrinkled my nose, looked away, and never looked back. His attitude floored me. Far from being flattered at a girl's attention, he took it for granted. Gone was my image of a harmless class clown, replaced with an incurably self-centered jackass. A little cocky is hot. Raging narcissist is not. Raging narcissist is what got Algebra II Class Guy nicknamed ALGII, as in algae, for the purposes of this story. Actually, that's an insult to algae, which is kind of cool, if destructive. I slipped on algae on the rocks on the Clear Lake shores when I was ten and my mother was living on a sailboat. I split my right thumb open to the bone, and to this day I can't bend it as far as my left thumb. Other than that, algae is rather fascinating stuff. My apologies to it for using its name as an insult. More than ten years later, I looked up ALGII on Facebook and found him and his girlfriend. He looked more or less the same, and every photo displayed him either engaged in a sport of some kind or wearing clothing adorned with a team's logo. The only exceptions to those photos involved alcohol. To my horror, one photo displayed him with a dead deer, with the animal's blood in a puddle in the background. He was the exact image of the washed up former high school jock. His girlfriend, meanwhile, looked exactly like what I would expect: big tits, blinding white teeth, fake tan, manicure, and eyebrows plucked into oblivion. A generic bimbo for a generic jock. How distressingly typical. Yes, a decade later and I still think he's a douchebag. My level of irritation with his cockiness can only be expressed by the point above, when I felt it necessary to apologize to the slimy shit—algae, not the guy—for using its name as an insult. It only took two words from him, and my crush on him instantly vaporized and never resurfaced. At this point, this story ties in with the story of the Speech Class Guy. |