I was in the school library one day, reading a dog-eared book on Isaac Newton when I happened to notice that a girl sitting at a nearby table had taken a shine to me. I could tell because I spotted her reflection by way of the window and couldn’t fail to note her dreamy eyes, chewed lip, and the bashfulness stamped across her face. No other way of looking at it, someone was infatuated with me.
That was odd, because A, this girl, (tall, ginger, with a bit of a chin) usually shot me a look of complete disdain whenever we encountered each other, which I suppose in retrospect was a defence mechanism.
And B, Jesus, why would anyone take a shine to me? The school had made it perfectly plain that I was at the bottom of the heap, shoved into a pigeonhole marked “Spaz” which the higher-ups gladly pissed into.
Let me explain, I was given a telling off (if that’s the right phrase) by Toby Forbes. He was captain of the football team, often landed the leading role in the school plays, and had a battalion of blushing girls lining up to talk to him. By any measure, he was top of the school’s hierarchy and therefore held the same authority as a teacher, so he had offered me this sage advice: “Christ, you’re ugly, you’re weird and everyone’s laughing at you, just act normal, you fucking tosser.”
Girls and boys are far from perfect, shove them together in that hormonally charged jungle called secondary school and it’s more or less a disaster. Many a time a giggling girl came up to me and said, “I fancy you, wanna go out?” when I’d reply in the affirmative, she’d laugh and say, “Only joking!”
So, the lesson learnt was that I was undesirable, pathetic, and deserved to be alone. Okay, I could accept that, but now all of a sudden, one girl had a thing for me.
Oh, sure I could ask her out and know what romance was like, but the truth was I hated this twist. It felt as if Fate cruel and unusual as it is, wouldn’t even let me enjoy celibacy in peace and had mockingly thrown this love-struck girl my way as a means of letting me know that I didn’t call the shots.
Naturally, I was having none of that, so I spun around and asked the girl, loudly as possible if she could please stop staring at me. This grabbed the attention of almost everyone in the room and caused a gaggle of kids by a neighbouring table to burst into titters.
Humiliated the girl fled the library in tears, and I, satisfied that I had refused to play the dignity-stricken ritual called flirting, returned to my book. I’m sorry to say nothing else happened. Next time I encounter her, she shot me a look of disdain which I could tell wasn’t acting.
