Page 13 of #Awestruck
“Come on, I’m dying of curiosity. Spill!”
I put the cup down. “I skipped first grade.”
She shot me a “what does that have to do with anything?” kind of look.
“Apparently I used to finish worksheets before the teacher even finished passing them all out and constantly begged her for more to do. The school worried about me becoming bored and wanted to keep fostering my love of learning. They met with my parents and recommended that I be skipped into second grade. Because I was so tall, smart, and mature for my age, everybody agreed. And it was fine. Until I got to high school.”
Nia’s brown eyes were wide, her chin resting on her hand. “And what happened in high school?”
I included the age/grade-skipping thing only because my entire family thought it was relevant to the story. “When I was a freshman, I was thirteen years old. Which made me five years younger than my older sister and her friends, who were all seniors. Including Evan Dawson. My home was the place to hang out for the cheerleaders and football team, and one day while I was in the basement playingMadden, Evan asked if he could join me. I gave him the extra controller, and we played for hours.”
I remembered how we had laughed and joked, the way he’d ruffled my hair when I said something he thought was funny.
While I had thought it wildly romantic at the time, I later realized it was how you’d treat an adorable pet.
“We played video games almost every day. We spent a lot of time together. I thought we were into the same kind of stuff, but he probably thought of me as some kid sister. Then the school year started, and I auditioned to be one of the announcers for the varsity football games. I got the position. When everybody came back to the house to celebrate the wins, I was the one Evan sought out and talked to about the games. He made me feel special. Important.” When he’d talked to me, he’d made me feel like I was the most interesting person in the entire world. That nothing else mattered to him but that moment and being there with me.
And I had convinced myself I was in love with him. Now I recognized it was just a really gigantic crush, but I had deluded myself into thinking we were Romeo and Juliet, only with less dying in the end.
“You fell hard, didn’t you?” Nia asked, and I noticed her expression had shifted from interested to sympathetic.
“The hardest.” I nodded. Back then I had done nothing but think about Evan. My grades slipped, and I didn’t care. I just knew he and I were meant to be and someday would run away together. Preferably after I got boobs.
I took another sip of my considerably cooled-down tea. Nia stayed quiet, just letting me ramble.
“Did you know I’m the one who gave him his nickname? He came running out onto the field, and I said, ‘He’s so awesome,’ in this ridiculously dreamy voice, and it stuck. Everybody started calling him ‘Awesome’ Dawson after that,” I told her. “I was so proud of being the person who’d started it.” I had doodled “awestruck” on the covers of all my school folders. A way to admire him without anyone else knowing.
“I didn’t know that.”
Nobody seemed to know where his nickname had originated. Except for me. “More than anything else I wanted him to take me to a dance. To have that teen romance moment, you know? Walking down the stairs with the handsome guy at the bottom waiting for you, only able to say, ‘Wow,’ because you look so amazing. Homecoming came and went. A couple of others, like an autumn-themed one and the Halloween dance. Still nothing. I even got so delusional that I thought maybe he was waiting for a really special dance to ask me. Like the prom. Then Sadie Hawkins was coming up. If Evan wasn’t going to ask me, I decided to ask him. To finally tell him how I really felt. I thought maybe he was just shy or didn’t know I liked him, too, so if I said it first, it would make it easier for him.”
“Oh no,” she groaned, covering her face with her hands, peering at me from between her fingers. “What did you do?”
“I wrote him a letter. A handwritten letter that was, like, six pages front and back, all about how in love with him I was and how I knew we’d end up together and then inviting him to the Sadie Hawkins dance.” I had poured my little teen heart into those pages. Exposed my soul in a way that had made me beyond vulnerable.
“What happened with the letter?”
“I left it in his locker. I remember how sick to my stomach I felt the entire day, waiting for him to say something, do something. I looked for him in the halls and couldn’t find him. When school ended, I knew he had to have seen it by then. I waited by the locker room, knowing he’d be there for practice.”
Nia let out a frustrated sigh for me.
“He finally showed up and stopped smiling as soon as he saw me. He told his friends to go ahead, friends who were all snickering as they passed me. Which I didn’t really pay attention to because all I cared about was Evan. My voice shook so hard when I asked him if he’d gotten my letter. He wouldn’t make eye contact but said he had. I asked if he wanted to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me. And then he finally looked at me with so much pity in his eyes and said, ‘You’re just a kid, Ashton. It’s not going to happen.’ That was the last time we spoke.” Until last night.
Nia stirred her tea absentmindedly. “I mean, that sucks to get your hopes dashed, but it doesn’t seem that bad. All of us have had our fair share of rejection.”
“Oh, that’s not the bad part. And I wish it was only about rejection. I spent that entire weekend crying my eyes out. The following Monday when I got to school, it felt like everybody was laughing and pointing at me, but Aubrey told me it was all in my head. Turns out it wasn’t. Evan had taken pictures of my letter and forwarded them to the entire school. People kept quoting lines to me and calling me ‘Stalker.’ At first it was funny to them, then it turned mean. Like I became the school’s official punching bag.”
“That is so sad.” Nia put one of her hands on top of mine. She must have heard how my voice turned thick as I fought back tears.
“Yeah. He was the shining star. The prom king. The kid who walked on water, who would take them to state. A god among men at that school, and I was some nobody freshman who didn’t know her place. Everybody wanted to make sure I remembered I wasn’t good enough for him. I tried to talk to Evan about it, to ask why he’d done this to me, but he avoided me. Didn’t come over to my house anymore. Until one day out of the blue, he sent me a text. He asked me to meet him on the football field at the fifty-yard line after the game, at midnight. Said he had something he wanted to say to me.”
I paused, remembering how excited I’d been. How I’d had to sneak out of my house because, given the constant harassment at school, my parents never would have let me go off to meet him. I had convinced myself he was going to apologize, beg my forgiveness, and we’d finally be together.
And that he’d make everyone stop being so horrible to me.
“I showed up a little early and waited. Just after midnight the sprinklers came on. Only somebody had added dyed soapsuds to the tops of the sprinklers, and they covered me and the grass in a bright-blue coating that took a long time to wash off. As I ran off the field, I was being videotaped by Evan’s friends, who yelled awful things as they threw eggs at me. Told me how pathetic and ugly I was, how desperate and sad. A total loser. Everyone I knew saw that video.”
My voice had started to shake. Even though it had been ten years ago, talking about it made it feel like it was happening all over again.
