In Reality

A Story by Noell Head

You can't help but think that he should be proud of himself.

The first time you meet him, you think that he’s disgusting, vile. He’s acne ridden (you notice, it’s kind of like a beard of acne) and skinny—not slender, he’s skinny, and his stomach kind of hollows in, he’s so skinny. He’s gangly, with limbs that are too tall for him; on that note, he’s short, too, and pale. He’s got a long, skinny, hooked nose and thin lips that are always curved into a smirk. His posture is atrocious. The only thing he seems to be capable is making snarky, snide remarks. But he’s funny, too, when what he says isn’t about you. And he has aquamarine eyes.

He’s skinny and short (somehow, still taller than you, but shorter than all of his friends), but he’s also quick—he’s athletic, surprisingly strong. On the baseball field, he’s in the outfield, with his pelvis jutted out, hands on his hips. You only went to that one game, and it wasn’t even for him, but he stole the show. He was funny, the umpire laughed. You went to say hi, but changed your mind when you finally got another look at him. He’s still skinny and short and pale and pimply and mean.

You live a house down from a church, and your parents tell you to go with them, so you do. You go to the Sunday school in the morning, and he’s there—it turns out, his dad is the unofficial youth leader. You never thought that he’d be one to go to church, because he certainly doesn’t act like it. He doesn’t participate, only interjects to make a cruel remark now and again, and everyone laughs, because they’re glad it was directed at someone else, not them, you think. You laugh, too, nervous.

He’s in your grade at school, but you only have one class with him, and it’s band class. He plays trumpet, and he quickly points out the difference between coronet and trumpet—girls play coronet, he says, boys play trumpet. People laugh, and the female trumpet player smiles at him. Even though you go to church with him, he doesn’t talk to you in school at all, but he does in church. You’re only slightly hurt, because you know it could be much, much worse with him.

Later, in band, probably a couple weeks without public contact with him, he sits by you saying that he has a funny story to tell. You glance up at him nervously, until you see pearls between his thin lips, that are surprisingly white, and it’s almost a smile. You smile at him, and he almost smiles back. He smiles with his eyes, you like to think. The girl trumpeter comes and sits on the other side of him and he raises his eyebrows at her invitingly, and then tells his story. By the end, your stomach hurts and there are tears on your face; he’s excellent at story telling. The bell rings and he disappears, leaving you alone again. The next day, he comes back.

You were kind of close, then, and he talked to you more. But he talked to the girl more than you, and you were jealous. Because his stories were funny and he was funny. You don’t realize that you stopped seeing his pimples and blemishes in both his skin and his personality and you don’t even think of his hair as greasy, anymore. You like to think of each other as friends.

Summer comes, you drift apart, and your family starts going to a different church, out of town. You don’t even think about him for the duration of the summer, and it’s fine. You’re not missing anything, in fact. You’re too busy. When school finally rolls around, you’re too busy thinking out what it’ll be like, this second year, when you actually possibly maybe have friends.

You sometimes see him at the lunch tables in the morning, before you’re allowed to go into the building; the bus comes early, and you have about half an hour of free time. But he has his own friends, a posse of boys and a couple of girls, and you have your friends, girls with fried hair and crooked teeth and too much makeup. You don’t think anything of it, only occasionally saying hi to him, and even then, it’s directed at his entire posse, too, not just him.

Sometime in the year, you stop being friends with these girls with crooked teeth and caked on makeup, and you suddenly have nowhere to sit. So you sit with him and his friends—though, you’re more there for his friends, because now they’re kind of your friends, too, and he doesn’t matter anymore. Until he starts joking with that crooked smile that means that he won’t say mean things to you, until he does. But then he grins again. Throughout the school year, your friends fluctuate, but you see him every morning. Nearly every morning, he makes your day, unless he insults you. But the next day, he makes it all better with a smile and being extra-mean to everyone but you.

In the summer, you make a new friend; she’s really shy, but nice, sweet. Her younger brother—macho, older than you—is friends with him and you see him every day, because you’re at her house every day, and he’s at her house every day. It’s too late, a few weeks later, when you realize that you’re in love with him. The signs are obvious to you, in retrospect, but nobody else notices.

You work to please him, laugh too hard at his jokes. You smile at him constantly, watch his every move like a hawk. You do what he wants. And he seems to return the affection with honest smiles and compliments and little tasks—once, you spent the night, and so did he, and you drank five large glasses of water, just because he got them for you (on that night, too, there are many inside jokes made; he sleeps across from you and wakes you up in the morning with playful pokes). She starts to notice these things and makes little comments about them, which please you immensely.

Later, you come right and say it to her, confess everything—and she confesses back, about another friend of her brother’s. And that’s when it all goes downhill.

You recently started going to youth group and Bible study; at youth group, this tiny faux-blonde with caked on eyeliner flirts with him incessantly; your friend immediately reassures you that she’s trashy, and not classy, but he seems to accept the advances and even return them, and it hurts, even though there’s no reason for it to hurt. Later, he says that he has a secret to tell you, and only you, not your friend, and you get excited; your heart is in your throat.

He doesn’t need to tell you; he and his friend are vacationing. Over the weekend, you confess—rather, she confesses for you—and his friend lets you down easily, saying, he doesn’t like you. You’re puzzled and hurt. She agrees in every sense of the word, with you, and you try to make it better and fail horribly. Things are different, now, and you don’t like it. The thought of him brings you to tears, more than once, and he’s none the wiser.

She tries to reassure you that he’s not worth your time, because he’s skinny and pale and short and pimply and gross, but you can’t see him like that anymore. He occupies all of your thoughts and you can’t even concentrate because it hurts so much that he isn’t normal to you, anymore.

On your last day in town, you take your friends out to ice cream. He ignores you for the duration of the trip; he accepts his ice cream that you bought for him, eats it, and then leaves without saying goodbye. Later, you cry. At one point, back when you were still friends, he confessed that his goal every day is to make his friends cry themselves to sleep at night. You can’t help but think that he should be proud of himself.