Preface: I am currently in Costa Rica with my incredibly sexy boyfriend, and we are battling the worst sunburns of our lives. I love him a lot, and I am grateful for him every day.
This post is dedicated to the REAL Jannette and the newborn baby she welcomed into the world just a few days ago. I don’t know if she reads these posts, but I hope she knows that I appreciate everything she did for me when we were younger. She was always a great friend to everyone around her, and I know she will teach her wonderful children to be great friends (and great people) too. Love love love.
Jason Updog started at West Ashley High School right after winter break.
I came back from break serving the kind of cunt only a young girl who has just dumped her boyfriend is capable of mustering, because the only feeling better than having a boyfriend when you’re 12-15 is the feeling of getting rid of him. At that age, I didn’t have enough empathy to be tortured by my decision, so the only things left for me after my split with Caylin were relief and ego.
The performance of sorrow or resentment was necessary, I felt, and so I chose to go about it the way the movies had taught me to; by returning to school looking more killer than I ever had before. The first day back, I had my hair pulled into a tight, high ponytail, I painted my nails my favorite shade of chrome violet, and I wore a brand-new Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask t-shirt (gifted to me for Christmas) and my favorite pair of black skinny jeans. I felt cool and moody, and, for the first time at school, I felt hot. I liked it. I finished the look with some smudgy black eyeliner and mascara, and my signature glittery lip gloss in a deep purple shade to complement my nails.
I might have been doing it to vex my new ex, but it didn’t matter, because over the break, Caylin had gotten his driver’s license, and so I wouldn’t have to worry about seeing him on the bus (or really anywhere else for that matter) ever again. This leads me to my only regret about leaving him— if I had stuck around just a little bit longer, I could have been able to ditch the bus entirely if favor of riding to school with my boyfriend, which in turn would have allowed me to wake up a little bit later and would have also resulted in a good amount of social credit gained amongst the other 9th graders. But I didn’t mind the bus too much, especially now that Wesley and I could go back to sitting together for the entire ride to school.
Although it was January, the second semester of school had not yet commenced. Some administrative genius at the school had decided that the week directly following break was the best time for students to take their final exams. Perhaps the logic was that the students would use winter break to review on their own time, or maybe it was just poor planning (most likely the latter). This meant that for just five more days, our class schedules and lunch periods were the same.
The first day back was saved for review, which meant to us that it was saved for messing around. I was sitting with Jannette and the gang at lunch, and our energy was excited, chaotic, and undirected. We were eager for our schedules to change and our final grades to come out; we were ready for change and nearly bursting out of our skin. That was the state we were in when Emma Jean Hazel, from my APHG class, approached the table with the new kid.
We’d observed her showing him around the cafeteria, stopping at table after table of 9th graders, before they got to us.
“Hey guys!” she said in her overly cheerful manner, then her voice took on a tone that was subtly prideful, “This is Jason Updog, he just started here today.”
She was prideful because Jason was hot— especially by 9th grade standards. It was the first and only thing every 9th-grade girl could agree on. When he got to our table, all of us girls, Jannete, Delilah, and I, leaned in toward him as if pulled by a magnet.
He had dirty blond hair that grew in perfect Harry-Styles (circa 2012) curly-ques. He was tall, maybe even six feet tall (which was taller than almost any boy I’d seen before). He had brilliant hazel eyes that enchanted us and boyish freckles on top of rosy cheeks. His smile was wide and boyish and it revealed straight, white teeth. It was like he was genetically engineered to charm teen girls. A total rarity. He wasn’t just school cute, he was like a Disney Channel Dream-Boat.
We introduced ourselves, each of us attempting to be alluring but not knowing how. Then Emma Jean Hazel ushered him toward another group.
We didn’t need to talk to know what we were all thinking, but Jannette broke the silence for us anyway.
“That guy was FINE!”
All there was to do was nod in agreement. She was right. He was the finest. And the race for his affection was initiated. I knew what I had to do.
I got out a scrap of paper and scribbled down my phone number as quickly and inconspicuously as I could while still managing legible handwriting.
I didn’t expect much to come from what I was going to do next, but I knew that I was newly single and feeling newly sexy. I knew that if any of the other girls at school got him, I would regret not shooting my shot. I could live with embarrassment; rejection was something I’d grown accustomed to early on, but regret was another story.
When he passed our table again on his next lap around, I launched myself out of my seat and across the table. I could have been an Olympic track star the way I moved, but lunch was almost over, and time was of the essence. I felt that if I let him get to another class without making my mark, he would slip through my fingers entirely, and my chance would be gone for good.
I threw the paper at him without context, so he held it in his hand before he even knew what it was.
“You should text me sometime,” I said, trying not to sound too out of breath.
I didn’t care that everyone could see me; I didn’t care that I was actively pissing off Jannette and Delilah. I’d purposefully made the invitation vague enough to give myself plausible deniability. If anyone accused me of acting thirsty or if he decided to toss the number out entirely, I would just fall back on the explanation that I just like making new friends.
But my intentions were obvious to everyone.
He looked down and examined the paper, but before he could say anything, the bell was ringing, and I was turning on my heels, walking in the other direction.
Before I could feel too good about the risk I’d taken, Jannette was by my side, in my ear, saying, “What the hell was that???”
“‘What the hell was’ what?”
“Do not play dumb, you know what I am talking about,” she hissed.
“I…just like making new friends…” I could barely even take myself seriously, so I knew that Jannette, with her keen sense of personality, could see through me like Saran Wrap.
“A.) That is not true at all. You like making new friends about as much as you like going to the dentist. B.) You heard me say he was ‘fine’ first, did you not?”
“Yes…I did… and I agreed with you,” I explained.
“I had ‘dibs’!!” she seethed.
This is another good opportunity to dissect girl code and my flawed understanding of it in the 9th grade. I think now if I heard one of my friends call anyone ‘fine,’ or the like, I would immediately understand it as a signal to keep away from whomever the fine person in question was. I don’t know when I would have learned this lesson if it had not been for this experience with Jannette.
I couldn’t feign ignorance and pretend I didn’t know what she meant when she called Jason ‘fine’. Clearly, it meant she wanted to talk to him. But I wanted to talk to him too, and I didn’t think I deserved to be penalized (at the time) for being more reserved about my feelings.
I felt that if she’d said the word ‘dibs’, I would have understood the weight of the situation a little better. It would have been messed up, but I would have been forced to respect her word. But she didn’t say the word, and so, therefore, I didn’t see anything in place for me to respect.
So I said: “You didn’t say dibs.”
She was fuming, “Obviously, if I say ‘He’s fine,’ that is the same as dibs!!!”
“You say that about all sorts of people, you say that about Alex from Target and Calum Hood. Do you have dibs on them?” I asked.
“If they show up here, at school, you better believe I do!” Never mind the fact that both examples were too old for us to realistically date, but I followed her logic (grudgingly).
“That just isn’t how ‘dibs’ works, and anyway, it’s just my number. You could give him your number, too!” I argued.
“What, so we can compete?”
I didn’t have a good answer to that. I moved on. “I just want to get to know him, that’s all.”
“Sure.” She marched off to fourth period.
I waited for Jason to text me all afternoon, but from him there was nothing, nothing, and more nothing. My messages were solely populated by long missives from Caylin asking if we could make things work, and short, passive aggressive replies from Jannette in our groupchat with Solaria.
The next day, I felt humbled, but also at ease. I still didn’t regret shooting my shot, but I did regret making Jannette upset. I thought that if she found out that he never texted, she would be mollified, and we could get back to normal.
I tried my best to move through the school with an unbothered aura. I shifted my focus to my first final exams. Health class was an easy 100% but the same score on my Biology exam was a nice surprise. I knew that people at school didn’t really care about my As, but the grades were always a nice boost to my self-confidence.
There was no final exam in PE, save for our final mile run, so the entirety of the period was spent walking around the track.
Over time, Brandilee, the preppy girl from my APHG class, had gotten into the habit of walking with Jannette and me around the track. The two of us had formed an unlikely friendship just by virtue of sitting near each other in our AP class. All the 9th graders in the class had this kind of bond.
Brandilee was a secret nerd, so where Jannette and I gained a small amount of clout just by being seen with her, she got the opportunity to talk about the subjects that were off limits to the other popular kids. The situation was mutually beneficial, and I felt special because I got to see a side of Brandilee that was otherwise sacred.
As we walked, Jannette asked, “Did he text you?” meaning Jason.
“No,” I answered. I was a little embarrassed, but I played it up a bit more so that Jannette could really soak it in.
“Who?” Brandilee asked. Hearing our small-scale gossip was one of her favorite pastimes.
I answered with some reluctance, “The new kid, Jason.”
I could feel Jannette wince next to me.
“Oh! He’s cute!” she exclaimed. “You gave him your number?”
I was avoiding eye contact with Jannette now. “Yes.”
Brandilee giggled and hopped up and down. “Oh my goodness! That is so awesome for you, Didi! I didn’t know that you had balls like that!” She could never imagine anyone as disconnected as Jannette and I participating in risky social behaviors, so whenever we did anything interesting, she saw it as cause for jubilee.
“Don’t celebrate just yet— he did not text me.” I placed special emphasis on the ‘did not.’
The second opportunity for Jannette to basque in my humiliation was stepped on by Brandilee’s over-encouraging words:
“I bet he’s just playing hard to get. I mean, you’re cute! Really cute.” She said it with a sort of self-satisfaction, like she thought she might have been the first person to point it out to me.
“I’m really not worried about it,” I said.
Brandilee didn’t hear me, “I could put in a good word for you.”
“Are you two friends?” I asked.
“No, but you know…” The implicit end to the statement was you know my opinion carries a little bit of weight with people in our grade…
“You really, really don’t have to do that,” I persisted.
Though I could see that in her mind, she was already planning out her pitch.
At lunch, I was taking shots to the chin from all my friends about my flop. I would have argued, but for Jannette’s benefit, I took each jab without protest. Things were going well until Jason approached the table again.
Once again, he had Jannette and Delilah enraptured. “Hey, Jason,” they both hummed.
I actively pulled away from his energy.
“Hey,” he answered, but he wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at me. “Didi?”
I let myself look up at him. He was more dreamy than he had been the day before. “What’s up, buddy?”
“I wanted to talk to you…”
As he began speaking, I wondered what had compelled him to come and reject me to my face, instead of just leaving well enough alone. I guessed it was the decent thing to do, but my face felt like a hotplate.
Then I tuned back in.
“That’s why I didn’t text you,” he finished.
“That’s okay, I understand.”
“Great,” he smiled and handed me his phone.
I did not know what he expected me to do with it. I tried to think about what he’d said, but my mind was blank. “I’m sorry,” I said, “what are you asking me to do here?”
His forehead scrunched, and he looked perturbed, “It’s like I was saying, I lost your phone number after you gave it to me yesterday, that’s why I didn’t text you… So I was just hoping you could put it in my phone?”
Suddenly, I was back to not caring about Jannette or anyone else. “Sure,” I answered in a daze.
Jason and I commenced texting that night. I learned enough about him in a few hours to write a novel:
- His birthday was just four days after Jannette’s, making him an aquarius also (I already knew what that meant for me as a gemini).
- He started school a year late, meaning he was about to turn sixteen instead of fifteen— making him several weeks older than Caylin and almost a full year and a half older than me (which unfortunately did something for me, because at fourteen, sixteen felt like an impossibly sexy age).
- He had a complicated relationship with his father (which made me feel very connected to him).
- He was mutual friends with my very own Wesley (through their notoriously cool friends Micky and Roni, whom I did not know, but had heard plenty about from Wesley).
- I found he had a girlfriend at his old school.
That was fine. That was fine. That was fine. In fact, it was good. It was just like I’d been telling myself. I just liked making new friends. And if Jason had a girlfriend, that was all the more reason for Jannette not to be mad at me anymore. Right?
I wasn’t trying to start anything. If he wanted to text me, he must have just wanted to be friends with me, too. All was well.
The following day, Wednesday, he ate lunch at our table. I made sure to reference his girlfriend more than once and loudly enough for Jannette to hear. I wanted to make sure that she knew, and everyone else knew, that he had a girlfriend. We were just going to be friends.
Still… I couldn’t help the way he captivated my attention. The way he held my gaze and the way everything he said became interesting, just from the way he said it.
I told Wesley about him on the bus.
Wesley sighed at the sound of Jason’s name.
“Jason is a good friend to have, but he is an absolute dog when it comes to women,” he explained.
This gave me pause. I considered Wesley to be one of my wisest school friends. When Wesley acted foolish, it was because he enjoyed acting foolish, but his perspectives on the world and the people within it were always sound. If he told me something about someone or something, I had no choice but to believe him.
Despite this fact, there was not a fraction of my mind willing to believe that a boy with such sweet eyes could be anything close to an absolute dog.
“It’s a good thing we are just friends, then,” I said.
“Mmhmm,” and I could tell that not a fraction of Wesley was willing to believe me.
Sometimes, I wish I could text like a 9th grader again.
In the twelve years since I was a 9th grader, I have not experienced the kind of evocative emotional turbulence that my texts in 9th grade could elicit.
For a few days my Jannette and Jason problems had kept me sufficiently distracted from the situation with Freddie and Solaria (who were growing more and more insufferable together by each passing minute). However, on Thursday evening, all of them seemed to be working in tandem to put me in a state of mental distress.
For the previous two days, I’d lied to Jason about my bedtime. I’d told him that I’d gone to bed at 9, because I didn’t really feel like it was wise for me to text him later than that if we were friends. It seemed indecent.
My facade was compromised when Solaria texted to tell me that she and Freddie were engaged.
engaged in what? I answered
engaged to be married, silly 🙂
you are lying. I answered. Freddie was a bit of a liar and a prankster, so I was almost certain he’d put Solaria up to the joke.
i am ded serious.
I was still not convinced, so I texted Freddie.
did you tell solaria to tell me that you two are engaged?
no. He answered,
are you two engaged? I asked
yes. he answered
Fuck!
Suddenly, I was on a mission to talk them out of their premature engagement. Not only because I was in love with Solaria, but because I sincerely believed that they would both ruin their lives if they went through with a marriage. I just couldn’t see them handling big life decisions together, and I certainly couldn’t imagine them starting a family together.
As my friends continued to spin their web, I switched to my messages with Jason for a distraction. I flipped between conversations, supplying Solaria and Freddie with reason after reason to not move forward with their plans to “wed”. Then I supplied Jason with ~fun facts~ from my collection of Snapple Caps, to keep him engaged in our conversation.
Apparently, Snapple Facts are the key to next level rizz, because as the clock moved from midnight to 1 a.m., and Solaria and Freddie finally admitted that they were not en gaged and were only torturing me in jest, Jason gave me something new to fret about.
can i tell u something?
sure buddy 🙂 you can tell me anything.
i love my girlfriend.
Yeah, ouch, but okay. I wondered if I was being too flirty over text. He must have been reminding me where we stood. I played it cool.
that’s great! have you told her that?
yes, but there’s a problem… He said.
what’s wrong?:(
i love my girlfriend, but i have a crush on someone at school….
My heart sank again. I wondered who it was. Probably Jannette or Delilah, but maybe someone I didn’t know at all. I didn’t know which option was worse.
who? I asked.
i don’t know if i can tell u. He answered.
is it one of my friends? I asked.
u could say that… it’s someone you know very well.
is it jannette or delilah? I asked
neither. but she’s in our lunch period.
emma jean hazel? I asked.
no. not emma jean.
I was racking my brain because I knew very few people very well.
Then he put my wondering to an end.
i’ll just tell u… it’s u.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I hated that I was thrilled.
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