Jay Lee was brought to my attention when he was cast as the male lead, Jimmy, in the middle school musical: Thoroughly Modern Millie. Ever since meeting Caleb the summer before, I had been waiting for the school musical to arrive so that I could lay my hands on another young man with a love for the performing arts.
Unfortunately, the pickings were slim. I don’t know what else I expected. I already knew all the boys in my grade; it wasn’t as if some dreamy and poetic goth boy had been looming around the corners, undiscovered by me— I was LOOKING. Though perhaps I’d imagined that I would see some acceptable-looking boy from my grade, and he would reveal himself to have a secret, deep, poetic side, just waiting for me to become his muse.
There was only one boy from my grade: Marvin Martin.
I had nothing if not respect for Martin; our peers unanimously agreed that he was the funniest kid in the school. He had a natural quick wit and a wealth of puns to supplement it, and besides that, he wasn’t mean to anybody, even when the popular kids hyped him up. I thought he looked fine; he was about my height with burnt-orange hair and mischievous features, but I got the sense that he didn’t have a romantic bone in his body.
Aside from Martin, the majority of the other boys were in sixth grade, aside from Jay and his friend Liam. Jay looked kind of like John Lennon if John Lennon was a seventh grader. He had shoulder-length, dirty-blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore shirts for bands like ACDC and Metallica and a gray flannel shirt. He never wore Chinos or Sperries or pastel anything. He was a departure. He was different.
One thing I enjoyed about theater rehearsal was the long, lackadaisical walks home. The walking trail by that point was mostly free of any noise or traffic, so I could meander and sit and sing along to my music for as long as I wanted to. It was a good outlet for me to be weird after a long day of trying to be normal enough. I could hang upside down on the workout stations and swing around on the bars while playing “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” free of judgment. Usually.
One day, maybe halfway through the rehearsals, I was taking my time going home, and I decided to stop by a clover patch. While I was hunched over looking for good luck, Liam, Jay, and Jay’s little brother, Kyle (from the sixth grade), all stopped next to me.
Liam spoke first, and scared me half to death— I’ve always been jumpy, especially around new people, but he didn’t seem to mind at all.
“Hiya!” He spoke like a kid on the Disney Channel and smiled like one too. “You’re in the musical, right?”
I nodded. “You are too,” I looked at Jay, “obviously.”
I felt weirdly starstruck. The most popular girl in the eighth grade, Alexa Galliard, was playing the titular character of the musical, Millie. Even if I didn’t like her all that much, there was a certain star power to her everyday life; so as a result, when she was cast as the lead, it gave her the quality of a celebrity in my eyes. Although I knew nothing about Jay (or because I knew nothing about him), he’d taken on the same quality to me.
“You are obviously in the cast too,” Liam said, “you are a Prescilla Girl— Lucille, if I’m not mistaken?”
I was taken aback and bashful that he knew my character’s name, despite not having any lines of my own.
When I said as much, he responded, “obviously I know all the characters in the play.”
“Are you looking for four-leaf clovers?” Kyle asked.
I told him I was, then I asked what they were doing.
“We’re all walking home. We all walk home this way every day behind you,’ Liam said.
“We see you almost every day, doing your thing,” Kyle added with a little dance.
I could feel my cheeks getting hot. “Why have I never seen you guys?”
“Well, we usually don’t want to bother you,” Jay finally said.
“You usually seem pretty… in it…” Liam added.
“Yeah, so we usually go the long way around at one of the intersections if we see you. But today we decided not to.”
The three of them plopped down next to me and joined me on my clover hunt. It was the closest I’d come thus far to a scene from a John Green book, and I was eating up every single second of it. Jay asked to see the playlist I was listening to, and when I showed him, he said it needed more Weezer— that’s when I was convinced he had to be Mr. Right.
He had everything:
a.) An appreciation for the performing arts.
b.) An alternative sense of style.
c.) An appreciation for the pop-rock and pop-punk of the late 90s and early 2000s.
BONUS: He told me he was trying to learn guitar!
EXTRA BONUS: Even though he was in seventh grade, he had a September birthday, making him only three months younger than me and a full five days older than my best friend, Annapolis Maryland.
EXTRA EXTRA BONUS: He also told me that he’d moved to South Carolina from Philly just two years before. Ergo, we could both find common ground on not being from the South originally.
Everything seemed to be lining up. Our group friendship was developing day-by-day as we slipped into a routine. Each day, I would meet the three of them on the walking trail, and we would all lollygag our way back home, singing the songs from the musical and the songs from our playlists and making up dances. Although I spent most of the time yapping with Liam and Kyle, I was elated to be getting near one-on-one time with Jay. Still, it seemed no matter how much attention I gave him, he was only ever interested in talking about Weezer or Green Day or Blink-182.
After the musical ended, the friendship continued on. After our closing show on Sunday, our group threw a little “cast party” at one of the local parks with a few more kids from the production. We all laughed and played for hours until we got cold, coining bits and inside jokes that would last for months after.
With our newfound free time in the afternoons, instead of all walking straight to our respective homes after school, we all walked to Liam’s house to jump on his trampoline and visit his pets. Their friends Gordon and Marcus joined us, and soon that was customary too. The boys, Kyle and Gordon and Marcus, would all take turns carrying my backpack for me— but never Jay— it was MADDENING!
Nothing I did seemed to work. For starters, Jay and I never had any alone time. On the rare occasion that we did have any alone time, I ran through every method of flirtation I knew: I giggled, I joked, I flipped my hair, I talked about how annoying the boys in my grade were and I asked him if he liked anyone. I was laying it all on the line. I was texting him in my free time, referring back to our inside jokes, I probably even threw a couple “goodnights” into the mix, I was down so bad.
Either he truly never got the hint… or he was trying to be nice and protect my feelings. Either way, I wrapped up 8th grade two short months after the musical ended, and by the time the summer came around, my family had moved from our Daniel Island apartment to a house in West Ashley. Pursuing a relationship with Jay any further, really made no sense at all.
P.S. Liam went on to be the first ever openly gay kid at my middle school the next year. That doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but I’ve always really respected him for that because I know for a FACT being gay at that school SUCKED ASS.
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