Speech Class Guy

It was the spring of 2000, my junior year of high school, shortly before I moved to Austin. I had a speech class that semester, and near the beginning of the semester, I noticed Speech Class Guy (SCG). I had seen SCG before—we had attended the same middle school—but I had never really noticed him.

Now, as a sixteen-year-old girl, I definitely noticed him. I noticed his cuteness and his sweetness. I knew he hung around a lot of jerky guys, but he himself seemed exempt from their behavior. He sat quietly in class, did his homework, and acted like an all-around nice guy. A goodlooking guy who hung around popular kids and wasn't a jerk? It was unfathomable. Intrigued, I started to pay attention to him. Scarred from the awful schoolyear before, I harbored deep suspicions toward all popular kids, especially the ones who hung around jerks. I eavesdropped on his conversations, waiting for him to say something incriminating and reveal himself to be just as nasty as all his friends were. Yet he never said anything.

I was simultaneously crushing on the Algebra II Class Guy and the History Class Guy, and I couldn't decide whom I liked best.

My crush on HCG festered, and then my crush on ALGII crashed and burned in epic fashion:

"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. . . . I tasted bile, wrinkled my nose, looked away, and never looked back.

Still smarting from this newest lesson in boys, I fretted that SCG would turn out the same, but I didn't know how I could possibly find out.

I got my opportunity soon enough. Almost immediately after the humiliating episode with ALGII—only a few days later, in fact—I suffered an almost identical mishap in speech class.

SCG was talking to our teacher at the front of the room, and I had been watching him discreetly—or so I thought. He returned to his desk a moment later, and I ducked my head as he passed by. Alas, keeping him from seeing me didn't keep his friends from seeing me.

"That girl was looking at you like she wants you," the guy who sat next to SCG told him. I died a thousand deaths.

"Really?" SCG asked, fascinated.

What?

I blinked rapidly, "casually" tugging a few strands of hair over my rapidly-reddening ears and stolidly refusing to turn around. But . . . but . . . Where was the arrogance? The conceit? The mockery?

Huh.

SCG had sounded interested, disbelieving, flattered. I didn't know what to make of it. It was such a stark contrast to the disastrous outcome of my crush on ALGII . . . I was utterly befuddled and crushed all the more intensely on him. His sweetness and shyness was endearing.

Eager to avoid (further) embarrassment, I took care not to stare so openly at SCG again after that. He may have cast a few curious glances at me (that I, out of sheer mortification, missed), but he never said anything to me. Had he planned on saying something eventually, I don't know, because I moved away only a few weeks later.

I have often wondered at the near-otherworldly convenience of these two parallel stories occurring so close together. The one so egotistical; the other so modest. If SCG had possessed an ounce, just an ounce, of the arrogance of ALGII, he might have had the confidence to ask me out without seeming jerky, but alas. I don't suppose it would have worked out with either one of them, but at least I learned the importance of the right amount of arrogance.