My Top 5 Rejections. Number 2.

Ripping the band-aid from my youth’s hairy arm of embarrassment to bring you a feeling of superiority. Read away, sickos.

If you need some structure in your life, you can start with: Number 5, then go to Number 4, then Number 3.

Number 2.

My friend Ben seemed to have the magic touch. In high school, I was amazed by him because he had a never-ending stream of dates, it seemed to me. He dated girl after girl in our large suburban, brick-clad high school of 3,000 kids. He dated the cheerleader, the geeky girls, even the Spanish foreign exchange student, who was oddly tall, and while cute had a poor complexion. In high school, Ben looked like he was 30 years old, could pull off a beard, and often carried himself in mature, low key manner. I don’t know if those were the secret ingredients, but whatever the ingredients, I wanted them.

One girl he dated briefly in our junior year was a girl named Carrie. She was pretty. Not pretty as in a cute-high-school-girl way, but rather pretty in the objective way you would appreciate a Renoir. She had long brown, wavy hair that never seems to go out of style. By contrast, the rest of the high school girls had big hair, curly “perms,” and these super big, blow-dry, claw-style bangs. The early 90s was a bad era for fashion, it would seem.

While Ben was dating Carrie, I was only vaguely her acquaintance through him. I didn’t try to get to know her better because I felt I wasn’t in her league, and well, why bother getting to know her well when Ben would be onto someone new in a week or so. So ended my Junior year, as far as Carrie was concerned.

In my high school, we didn’t have study halls, per se. You could simply had free modules, or half periods, and they would dump you in the lunch room if you didn’t have a proper class to attend. The lunch room was huge, loud, raucous, and smelled of bad food. If one of the kitchen staff dropped a big pan or otherwise made a loud noise, she would get a loud and long standing ovation. No kidding. It was quasi-chaos. You couldn’t leave campus, so you were stuck. As an alternative, you could go to the relatively more comfortable environment of the library where you could talk to someone at a normal conversational volume.

Early in my senior year, my buddy GK, Stoner Joe and I got into a routine. We would eat lunch, then head to the library to shoot the shit and read Rolling Stone and Time magazine. One day, Carrie asked if she could join us for lunch. In the stupid teenage boy mumble-speak I am sure we employed, we allowed her to sit down. She also tagged along to the library. It became a regular thing. Every day it was the four of us, and it was nice to have this little group. We had a good time, just talking amongst the four of us, day-in and day-out. It was like a little break from the hell that was high school.

With the relatively high level of time spent with her (as compared to the non-existent time I spent with other girls), I started to develop something of a crush on Carrie. I still felt she was out of my league, but crushes know no caste system. I secretly and silently started to pine for Carrie. It was during this time I wrote a letter to my best friend Rob, who had moved to Florida, professing my intense “like” for Carrie. In the letter I admitted I thought she may have a crush on my buddy GK however. (If you’re, say, in your teens and are looking for some girl advice, I can only advise one thing: save yourself humiliation and never make proclamations of love to a woman in writing. It will only come back to haunt you, trust me. Twice it has bitten me. Rob- Eff you.)

A few months into the school year, I started to notice clandestine conversations between GK and Carrie. I was growing desperate. They maintained they were just friends, but I noticed little secret communications between the two. It was agonizing. It became clear that something was going on and I was being left out. I tried to insert myself into their goings-on, but to no avail. I was thrashing about trying to get to the bottom of it, and my despair was pretty obvious.

After what felt like forever, but was probably only a week of the conspiracy, the three of us got together outside of school. I think we went for pizza, and they we’re acting like they had something to tell me. I got the sinking feeling that they were going to inform me they were a couple. She reached into her bag and pulled out a gift-wrapped box. It was a couple of days before my birthday, and they had been planning what they were going do for me. GK said, “This is what we didn’t want to tell you. We wanted to surprise you.”

It was a shirt from the Gap, not a cheap gift either, considering our feeble teenager income. It was the beginning of the 90’s and plaid was just starting to come into style. The shirt was an earth-colored plaid, but not to be non-preppy, Gap had subtly inserted geese flying into the pattern. Geese flying into plaid, how Gappy. In a nightclub, with the black light, it looked like the geese were dried leaves and people would always say, “Hey, you got something on your shirt” and I would have to explain, “No, man, it’s part of the pattern of the shirt.” But I digress.

Upon opening the gift, I knew I had been acting like a heel and it was obvious to everyone at the table. I had made a fool of myself in my jealous attempts to butt into their friendship. My overtures toward Carrie didn’t escape her notice and she politely declined my advances, in a “Rejection-Lite” way. It became clear she didn’t want to date me, and I gradually accepted this fate. We all managed to stay friends throughout the remainder of the year, and even to this day I still feel very good about the time spent my senior year in 9-10 mods.

My buddy GK kept more in touch with her after high school. I didn’t really talk to her after graduation, but I kept the shirt until 2006, partially out of guilt for acting like an ass. A long time after graduation, Carrie wrote GK a letter saying that she is doing well and living in a trailer park in some rural area with her 7 children, and her busted-down pickup truck and her no-good deadbeat of a husband. A fate of which she is totally undeserving.