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I had never really forgotten High School History Class Guy (HSHCG); throughout my time at UT, I occasionally remembered him and Googled him, seeking an e-mail address but never finding one. Toward the end of my senior year at UT, I started working on my old website. I put up quotations, recipes, knitting patterns, and stories. Now this of course was in the old days of my website, which in turn was a holdover from when I was in high school and had no Internet access. My stories were borne of boredom in class, so I started carrying around a spare spiral notebook in which to write stories. When completed and with minimal editing, I would lend the notebook to a friend during class. A couple of years later, I finally got Internet access and briefly hosted a shitty Angelfire site which showcased my stories and poetry, meaning my friends could read my work online instead of trying to decipher my handwriting under a desk and risking getting caught. I still wrote during class when I was bored, but I never once got caught: My teachers, believing me a goody two shoes, thought I was especially diligent in my note taking. I maintained the tradition throughout my years at UT. When a professor went on a lengthy tangent explaining some obvious point to the token dunce in the class, I would flip my real notes aside and write stories or other ideas for my rapidly-growing website. So it was that I reached the problem of mentioning HSHCG on my site. I wanted to relate a story mentioning him, but I didn't want to mention his full name on the site without his permission. Of course, therein lay the problem: I had no way of getting in touch with him. Finals were approaching, so I set the problem aside to focus on finishing my time at UT and graduating. The week after finishing UT, possibly before my degree had even arrived in the mail, I took advantage of my newfound free time to set about tracking down HSHCG once and for all. I dug out the Houston phone book and looked up HSHCG, locating a dozen people with the same last name, but nobody with the same first name. I guessed that his parents were probably listed, though, so I methodically dialed each number. After half a dozen wrong numbers and one one hundred decibel blast of static directly into my left ear, I reached his mother. "Hello, have I reached ——?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "Oh good. My name is Lauren Brown, and I was calling to ask if you could put me in touch with ——. Do you know him?" "Yes, he's my son." Realizing exactly how creepy I sounded but totally incapable of doing anything about it at this point, I recklessly plowed ahead. "Oh good. Right. Well, the thing is, I went to school with him, but I haven't seen him in some time and didn't know where to reach him myself. I run a website, and I wanted to mention his name on it, just in passing in the context of another story, but I didn't want to do so without his permission. . . . Do you think he would mind?" "Well . . . what kind of website is it?" "Um." I pretended to clear my throat while I choked back a laugh. I bit my tongue very hard to get ahold of myself and continued, "Well, it's nothing much. I have short stories and poems and recipes and quotations, that kind of thing. You can see for yourself if you want." I gave her the site's URL and my phone number, told her to let her son know about it and to pass on my contact info in case he had any objections, hung up, and cringed. I should have stuck with the Internet. I immediately phoned my friend Justin, who had known from the start what I was up to. "How'd it go?" he asked. "Well, she wanted to know what kind of website it was." Justin joined me in hysterical laughter and sarcastically said, "Kiddie porn!" "I managed to disguise the truth well enough, I think—" "That's good." "—but I gave her the URL." "You what?" "Well, I kind of had to." "Oh . . . well, fair enough. . . . So, that's it? She didn't say anything else?" "Well, actually—she's trying to set me up with her son." "Really?" Justin asked, incredulous. There was a brief pause during which I debated whether I could get away with it, and I decided against it and snorted, "No, of course not." "Oh." A couple of weeks later, I still had not heard from HSHCG, so I could only assume he had zero interest in anything I did. I took that as a "Sure, go ahead," and went ahead and posted his name on the site anyway. Some months later, I moved in with my grandfather in Houston. During that time, I set up my ill-fated MySpace account. I did not last long on that site since it was full of creepy guys, idiots, and spam, not to mention I've seen better site design in a high school computer science class. Not long after I had set up the account, it occurred to me that I should search for HSHCG to see if he had a page on there; it seemed like nearly everybody I knew had one. Sure enough, I found him quickly and sent him an e-mail. He didn't seem too interested in talking to me, which was just as well since it was only after I had emailed him that I got around to actually reading his blog, and holy crap. He was nuts. I don't know what happened to the nice, sweet, somewhat shy guy I'd known in high school, but I was looking at the other side of the coin now. It wasn't just that he hadn't aged well—I could tell by his photos that he had gained some weight and now sported unflattering facial hair—but he had also apparently developed some mental issues in the time since I had seen him last. He talked about how he was bipolar and off his meds, and in many of his entries he described his bouts of road rage. The kicker was that all this had apparently been triggered by him moving about fifty miles away from where he had lived when I had known him. He blamed his parents for uprooting him and setting off all kinds of emotional problems. All I could think was, what kind of pansy comes unhinged at moving a mere fifty miles? The whole time I was living at my grandfather's, I drove that far every day to get to work and back. Thank God he wasn't interested in me. Having come to grips with exactly how unhinged he was, it occurred to me that I shouldn't leave his name on my site. I eventually removed it and hoped he never Googled into it, though it's probably already too late. Oh well; he probably thinks I'm crazier than he is. |