The Beginning

This chapter discusses how J.C. and I met, as well as my first thoughts about him.

J.C. and I met via text message on the night of Thursday, March 24, 2011 after his best friend, Fuller--whom I had met about three and a half months before and actually had a little bit of an on-again-off-again crush on--got the bright idea of giving him my number (I later found out from Fuller that it was part of a trade--J.C. handed over his cousin's number in exchange for mine).

 

It was sometime between 10:00 and 10:30. I was texting Steven, a guy who I had spent the better part of that week getting to know and was actually preparing to go out on a lunch date with come that Saturday. When my phone buzzed to let me know that I had a new text, I expected to see Steven's name pop up. Instead, I saw a number that I had never seen before.

 

The message that I received from the unrecognized number was somewhere along the lines of, "Hey, what's up? Fuller told me to text you."

 

As for my response, it was relatively similar to, "Okay, cool. But who exactly are you?"

 

The answer--"Lol, J.C. Naron"--came a few moments later.

 

The rest of that conversation has since faded from my memory; I honestly wasn't even paying very much attention to it while it was actually taking place that night, and I wasn't saving the messages once I replied to them (I was trying to keep all of my phone's message-storing memory free to hold the texts that I was receiving from Steven). I do remember that J.C. and I talked for about an hour...and also that my final thought before falling asleep was that Mr. Jacob Fuller was going to be getting quite an earful (or, since I planned on texting rather than calling, I guess a more fitting term would be eyeful) from me the following morning for seeing fit to hand over my number to J.C.

 

I woke up the next morning and--at around 11:30--headed to hang out with my cousin, Savana, at her house. At that point, I hadn't heard anything more from J.C. I kind of figuring that maybe our conversation had just been a one-night type of thing, and I would be lying if I said that I wasn't relieved by that thought. When I was about a mile away from SSavana's house, however, my phone vibrated in my lap...and guess whose name I saw when I looked at the screen.

 

I remember arriving at Savana's and exasperatedly venting to her about the situation, saying, "Oh, my gosh, I am going to kill Jacob Fuller for giving this dude my number!" Savana wanted to see what he looked like--as well as any other information about him that was publicly available--so we logged onto Facebook to see what we could find out. True to his word the night before, he had sent me a friend request (which, after deciding to continue being nice to him, I accepted).

 

Savana and I honestly weren't too impressed when we got our first look at J.C. There was obviously something...rather out-of-the-ordinary...about his facial features, which both of us pointed out right off the bat. And despite him having told me during our conversation that he was single, his profile claimed that he was in a relationship (his alleged girlfriend's profile was even linked to his)--a revelation to which both Savana and I reacted by exclaiming, "What a jerk!"

 

Upon contacting Fuller, I was informed that J.C. and his "girlfriend" had actually broken up a couple of weeks before; apparently, J.C. just hadn't gotten around to changing his relationship status. I also casually asked Fuller to "tell me a little bit more about your friend, J.C." He gave the typical best-friend response, saying that J.C. was a great guy and things like that.

 

Even after talking to Fuller, I did not automatically embrace the idea of J.C. Savana encouraged me to continue pursuing things with Steven, and I expressed my desire to do so. Maybe this J.C. character and I could be friends or something, but I definitely didn't plan on him becoming a major part of my life or being anybody remarkably special to me or anything along those lines.