This is a story that I wrote a long time ago, before I started writing LG.
It's not very good, which explains why I never posted it before. Whereas
Chapter 43 was "a story that I never
thought I would tell", this is a story that I never thought to
tell, which is sort of odd, since it is the story of my first (immature)
relationship with a girl.
BoyD couldn't put his finger on when it had happened, the shift in his
perceptions, but at some point GirlM had gone from being an unattractive
weasel-faced girl who he thought of as "Magot", the name that the other kids
teased her with, to a radiant angel who was the center of his world. He saw
her six days a week; every day at school and on Saturdays at orchestra
rehearsal. Years later, BoyD would look back upon his act of falling for her
with pride, patting himself on the back for having had a first crush which was
based on factors which, surely, had nothing to do with physical beauty.
BoyD longed to hang out with GirlM. As fate would have it, one of his
friends began dating one of her friends, and suddenly his circle of friends
was eating lunch with her circle of friends, and he rejoiced at his amazing
luck.
So BoyD hung out with GirlM, always in the company of both his friends
and her friends. After almost two years, BoyD finally worked up the courage
to ask GirlM out. He wrote her a note expressing his feelings in terms of
how he loved her company and ended it by asking her if she would mind horribly
if they could sort of, you know, "go out" or something. Below this was a list
of check-boxes which ranged from the standard "[] Yes [] No" to the more
unusual "[] Not on your life you twit". That afternoon, as he walked behind
her to the busses, he slipped it into the back pocket of her backpack.
Several days later he got a call from a friend asking if it was true that he
had asked out the Magot, and he knew that she had found the note. The next
day at school everyone was talking and GirlM was mortified. BoyD asked her
what her answer was and she said she wasn't sure. Thinking that she was
hesitant because of the way people were talking, he assured her that people
would talk for several days and then would forget about it. She said yes,
then. BoyD's friends told everyone, much to his dismay; no one could believe
it.
Things were nice for about a week. GirlM wrote BoyD little notes and he
wrote her notes back. After two days of this, GirlM stopped writing him
the notes, but he kept writing notes to her for several months after. Things
were generally disatisfactory. GirlM never spoke with BoyD, not alone and
not in the company of friends.
GirlM tried to dump BoyD once or twice, but always lost heart in the
course of the conversation. BoyD didn't really care that she wanted out of
the "relationship", he was comfortable in the security of not being single.
Over a year later, BoyD decided that he'd had enough of having a girlfriend
who was that only in name. He reached for the phone to call her and, as he
picked it up, it rang. It was GirlM.
"Hi", he said. "I was just calling to let you dump me."
"Really?", said GirlM; "I was just calling to try to dump you."
"Well", sighed BoyD, "I guess I'm duly dumped."
"What will we tell everyone?", she asked.
"They'll never believe it was a mutual thing", he told her, "no one will.
I'll just say that you dumped me, it's easier that way."
"Hey, thanks", she said.
And then it was over.
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