My alarm—no longer the old Hello Kitty teacup alarm clock of my childhood but my first iPhone—starts blaring at 4:45 am, the sky still an inky black punctuated by the yellow street lights of my block, and these days, I hardly mind at all. It’s senior year, only a couple weeks into school—Arizona schools are on a year-round schedule, so I’ve been back since late July.
My high school bedroom is painted two alternating shades of purple, but the walls are grayscale as I get ready long before dawn. Much to my mother’s chagrin, I’d joined the cross country team my senior year now that I can finally drive myself to school (she loves me but she simply cannot be getting up this early). You see, since Arizona afternoons are unbearable for running, practice is every day before school.
The first bell rings at 7:20 am, so practice starts at a brutal 5:15 am.
I drive the maroon Honda Civic way too fast, cutting an essential three minutes off my usual ten-minute drive and blur into the parking lot near the track just in time. It’s still dark. My phone is quiet; I’ve had this iPhone for about one year now, a huge upgrade from the EnV2 flip phone I’d been using since middle school. It makes sense that my phone isn’t buzzing yet. Almost everyone I know is still asleep, and even though I’m two hours behind Wisconsin time, where a certain someone I’ve been talking to lives, even he isn’t awake just yet. It’ll be a little bit. My heart skips a beat; I have to take a deep breath and try not to break out into an embarrassingly huge smile. My certain someone.
I already know exactly what he’s going to send me. He does it every single morning. My Daily Odd Compliment of the day. Even though I knew he was pulling them from the internet, I couldn’t help but feel like each one was perfectly hand-picked for me, each one making me feel uniquely connected to him.
They looked like this:
Like clockwork, while I was in the locker room after another incredible sunrise run, endorphins pumping through me to the laughter of the other girls sitting in front of the floor-length mirror with all assortment of curling and flat irons plugged dangerously into overloaded outlets, his text came. Like clockwork.
And so began our usual day of smiling at our phones like idiots. Texting through my first class, Photography III with Mr. McKinnon, was easy; we all sat behind huge Mac computers, and he didn’t much care if we were on our phones as long as our Friday Faves were good. He let us chug coffee in that class too, bless him.
Throughout the day, Henry knew which classes I had to go for and which classes I could get away with texting in. Phone down if I had an exam, always accompanied by a “good luck!” message. Even though many seniors chose half-days, I was an overachiever, so I didn’t get out of school until 2:14 pm. And then I was home free to text him all afternoon long, crossing and uncrossing my legs as I lie on my bed in my wonderfully purple room, alternating between homework and sending the little monkey emoji that’s covering its eyes, in a perpetual state of blushing.
I grew up in Chandler, Arizona, a sprawling suburb of the acquired taste that is Phoenix. I once read on Forbes.com that Chandler was one of the top ten most boring cities in America. I guess I could see that, although it seems more and more developed every time I go back to visit. It’s a middle- to upper-middle-class 250,000-person blanket of identical stucco houses surrounded by artificial ponds that turn greenish in the summer, and nothing but strip malls in between. It’s mostly desert, with a big, air-conditioned shopping mall and four enormous public high schools. My childhood was classically suburban: the dog, the mown lawn, the holidays, the soccer mom, the breadwinning father, the occasional family road trips to Disneyland.
In high school, I was kind of golden. I almost mean that literally, since I had sun-kissed blonde hair and bronze, tanned skin from seasons of high school tennis and cross country, but I mostly mean it figuratively: I was on top of my game. I took all AP classes and outscored my studious male peers in advanced math. In sports, I played hard with a competitive streak. Every report card was a neat row of straight A’s. At 6:30 am every Sunday morning for four years, I volunteered at a local dog shelter, taking abandoned pups on walks as the sun rose over the desert in Gilbert. Extracurriculars? Try Model United Nations, National Honor Society, and Speech and Debate. I got my driver’s license on the first try the day I turned sixteen. Nerd though I may have been, I also went to almost every Friday night football game, dressing to the night’s next ridiculous theme. I made it to Homecomings and Proms, always proud that I’d thrifted my dress at Ross Dress For Less for $17.00. I was well-liked, productive, humble, and happy; never popular, but never unpopular, either. By all definitions, successful. At the end of my junior year of high school, I won Student of the Year in a class of over 800 pupils. People wrote, “You’re going to change the world,” in my yearbooks.
And I was single. I’d always been single.
Frankly, dating had always seemed a little scary but mostly distracting from everything I had going on. If I wasn’t babysitting, volunteering, hitting tennis balls, riding my pink Ripstik around the neighborhood with Maddi, taking pictures for photo class, watching Glee, or gossiping at Coffee Rush, I had my nose buried in an AP U.S. History textbook. While in hindsight I may have intimidated some of the guys at my high school, the truth was that they intimidated me. Sex, boys, love—they weren’t really on my radar. They were part of a wide and scary unknown. It felt like the only love stories I could really enjoy were those so fantastical that they couldn’t be real, like Twilight. I was asked to a couple of dances, and I said no every time. The nerves just weren’t worth it. I wouldn’t have known what to do with my hands, when to lean in for the kiss; or worse, what if he leaned in but I wasn’t ready? Besides, my mother had warned me that most guys wanted only one thing, and that made them scary to me. I had to find the right guy, the guy who would never do that in a million years. And I believed he was out there.
Really, the equation was simple: get good grades to get into a good college. My family is highly educated, so I felt a budding pressure to get into an out-of-state school, even vying for the acceptance of an Ivy League college like my cousins. Every evening I studied until at least midnight, and every morning my alarm got me up early for either my extra ‘zero hour’ class at 6:30 am or cross country practice, which started even earlier. There wasn’t time for flirting, and I wasn’t mad about it, because I also didn’t know how to flirt. Those were the days when phrases like, “I am a strong independent woman who don’t need no man,” were popularized, and I was feeling confident (and let’s be honest, safe) in my solitude. After all, I’d basically always been single—I didn’t know the difference. Albeit small, there was a jealousy of my girlfriends who held hands with their boyfriends at school. I just figured that would happen to me later, when I had time for it, when he was the one. I wanted it to be like the movies: I wouldn’t have to date, breakup, heartbreak over and over again: I’d just wait for the one and I’d be set for life. Like the adults had told me vaguely: when it was right, I would just know.
I had another data point, too; my parents are as close to soulmates as you can get in this life, and they didn’t meet until they were both in their mid-thirties. The idea of meeting my high school sweetheart wasn’t hanging over my head. I figured love would take its time.
If you really want to count it, I dated a guy named Sam in the 6th grade, which mostly looked like whispering to my friends about him on the playground. I think we held hands, like, once. And I did kiss Tyler after a Friday night football game my sophomore year of high school, but I quickly got cold feet and ended it overnight. I entertained the idea of dating Brandon for a while my junior year, but he was busy with Les Miserables rehearsals and church, and it fizzled. We kissed (with tongue, which was major) in my car in his church parking lot one night. And that was it—you’re caught up on the entire extent of my dating life by age seventeen. Two kisses. One “boyfriend” on the elementary school playground. I was inexperienced, to say the least.
Inexperience created a positive feedback loop; I hadn’t tried anything, so I might not be a good kisser, so I won’t kiss anyone, and thus, remain a perpetually bad kisser. Forever. Breaking that cycle was going to take a brand of courage I hadn’t quite developed yet. No guy had been worth the bravery, yet.
Toward the end of my junior year, my English teacher announced that students could apply to attend an out-of-state conference for high school students over summer called the World Affairs Seminar. As a chronic overachiever, my ears naturally perked up. Resume-builder, you ask? I applied, and was accepted, and a Rotary-funded plane ticket was secured for my attendance at the 2013 World Affairs Seminar in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Truthfully, I wasn’t too keen on attending a faraway, educational seminar with strangers during one of my few precious weeks of summer vacation, but the way it would look on my college applications was convincing. I sort of applied on autopilot before I realized what I was actually agreeing to. I’d never been to Wisconsin and frankly didn’t think it sounded like a very desirable place to be. Mostly, I imagined beer and dairy cows. It was probably cold there. The seminar sounded lame, and I tried to change my mind about going as the weeks crept up on me. I remember sprawling on the living room couch, begging my mom if I could back out. But following through on commitment was a strong value to my parents, who rarely let me quit anything. She told me I needed to go—and reminded me that it could even be fun. I understand the lesson they were trying to teach me, about following through on promises, but I also think that the lesson backfired over time.
Sometimes you have to quit that which isn’t serving you.
I remember being in the boarding line at the airport and waving back to my mom with a frown on my face, a pillow tucked under my arms, the other three WAS nominees from Arizona high schools nearby. Don’t make me go, I mouthed to her, half-joking.
If only we’d known.
WAS turned out to be a summer-camp-like weeklong takeover of Carroll University. As serious as this seminar wants to be with its tagline, “Building Strong International Leaders For A Better Tomorrow,” we were still 300 high school students loose on a college campus with only college-aged counselors in charge of corralling us. There were sprawling green lawns, enormous lecture halls with fine acoustics, boys’ and girls’ dormitories, a college cafeteria, and lots of dark corners, hallways, and places to get lost. Plenty of space, in short, for drama, gossip, and romance between solving the global issues of our time.
Each year, a theme is selected for the week. In the greatest of ironies, the theme of the 2013 World Affairs Seminar I attended was Gender Equity and Social Justice.
A number of speakers were organized to present. Wendy Baumann talked to us about the ability to empower women financially through micro-lending; Geneva Johnson discussed the intersection between race, gender, and identity; Sahar Maher El-Issawi spoke of gender issues in the Middle East and her personal escape from hardship; Vice Admiral Ann Rondeau spoke to gender equity the U.S. military. This was my first real introduction to “feminism.” My seventeen-year-old jaw dropped; it was a paradigm-shifting, which-way-is-up kind of week for me.
Only a few weeks before the conference, a guy at school had accused me of being a feminist. I didn’t actually know what a feminist was, not really, but his tone of voice told me it wasn’t anything good, so I quickly told him I wasn’t one. I had to pretend like I both knew what a feminist was and that I was a Cool Girl™ who could hang with the bros. As far as feminism went, the only thing that came to mind was some kind of feminazi who believed women were superior to men; I was all about equality, so I couldn’t be a feminist.
By the end of the conference, I was definitely a feminist.
Between the speakers, there was an elaborate itinerary that included recreational time, small groups, a dance, trivia night, a talent show, karaoke, morning exercises, skits, and of course, mealtimes in the dining hall. We were meant to mingle. I got to know the other students really well. I still keep in touch with some of the students from the group, and even bought one girl’s first novel. For only a short week together, we made some surprisingly intense and lasting relationships.
And there amongst the supposed leaders of tomorrow was a brilliant, handsome, equally golden teenage boy from just outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And he wanted to sit by me.
I met Henry on the very first night. In fact, we ate our very first meal there together, smooshed into half-sitting in a windowsill in the cafeteria because our table was so crowded. From my point of view, he was incredibly attractive—skinny but muscular, cool clothes, windswept dirty-blonde hair. He had a handsome face, strong arms, big hazel eyes, a comforting voice, a good laugh. I had a crush on him almost immediately. The dude was classically hot in the eyes of an eleventh-grade white girl.
Very rarely did the people I had a crush on like me back, so the fact that we got on so well, that we played hangman in the back of the lecture halls and sat together at every meal and texted whenever the boys and girls had to split up, was totally new for me. Normally, my crushes were fleeting. I liked boys so I could have something to add to late-night conversations at sleepovers, not to actually act on them. Every year that I’d gone to summer camp since I’d been thirteen years old, I’d had a crush on some boy, nothing ever happened, and every year I went home to never see that boy again. These crushes were purely for entertainment.
Henry was a seemingly safe, low-risk person to crush on. We could flirt for the week, and then he would go home to Green Bay and I would fly back to Arizona, and he would just be a pretty boy I giggled with while learning about feminism. I could talk about him to the girls on the tennis team back home, but it would always just be a story of the one who got away. A Grease-like summer romance, without all the getting friendly down in the sand.
Outside of my hometown, surrounded by other young nerds, I found myself kind of popular. A cute boy was interested in me. Henry followed me around like a puppy. It’s hard to emphasize how intoxicating that feels after watching your high school crushes ask other girls to the dances for the last three years. Henry and I were the unspoken leaders of our small crew. Having always been used to watching from the outside, I lavished shallowly in this newfound drama and excitement. It was so new. I had never been this girl. The other girls would tap me, giggling. “Ohhh, look who’s coming over to say hello.” Peels of laughter. And there was Henry, across the street, looking at us sheepishly with his hands in his pockets, a half-smile on his face.
The flirting continued throughout the week. Henry and I made inside jokes about how I’d somehow lost at hangman after guessing a whopping twenty-nine letters, a whole three more letters than exist in the English alphabet. I secretly blamed it on how overcome I was by just his warm body sitting next to mine. He played a Chris Brown song on the piano at the talent show, and I swooned. Cora squeezed my leg just as he came on; it seemed like he was singing just for me. The whole week, you couldn’t find us apart. We were like velcro.
My parents had this story about when they were dating in Chicago; their friends called them Vinny and Vicky Velcro because they were so attached. Was this… that? I was finally feeling something akin to the you’ll know when you know and the right person will come when you least expect it and all the other cliches I’d never experienced. Maybe this was it. Maybe it was finally my turn to be loved. Henry was the first boy who seemed to match my wit, my ambition, my emotional intelligence.
Despite the flirting, nothing would actually happen. Although we kept orbiting each other, there was one problem: there was another girl set as his phone background, his girlfriend back home. I asked about her immediately when I noticed her on his phone screen. He told me she was a year older than us; she’d just graduated high school and was now college-bound. Their relationship was rocky, he said, but she was still his phone background, which genuinely means something in teenage relationships and even some adult ones. He justified his behavior with me by insinuating that their relationship was ending since she was going to be leaving. For some reason, I bought it. Life so far had been kind to me; I genuinely couldn’t conceptualize that there’d be any point in lying to some girl at a random conference that he’d likely never see again. Still, he was taken, and he wasn’t quite acting like it.
Even my seventeen-year-old brain could sense the red flag, but I glossed over it because the conference, like summer camp, felt like a liminal space where rules could be slippery. We weren’t doing anything. We were total strangers. Somehow, it felt harmless. I certainly didn’t mind the attention, and she didn’t necessarily seem real; just a pair of eyes watching us from the lock screen of his phone. We weren’t holding hands or anything.
Of course, she was and is real. Of course I still had a scarcity mindset around good men and a competitive mindset toward other women. Of course I wanted to act like she didn’t exist so I could wake up to Henry’s text messages, so I could look for him in the crowd at each event, only to find his eyes clearly looking for me.
The night of the dance—the very last night of the conference—Henry sent me a picture of himself in the suit he was going to wear, a white button up with a black tie and a tan jacket, sticking his tongue out and winking into the phone. I practically bounced in my dorm room twin bed, blinking in disbelief as I secretly showed the picture to the other girls, squealing and trembling. I could not believe a man this cute was sending me selfies like that.
I wondered, electricity going through my heart for a brief moment, if he’d also sent that picture to his hometown girl.
Henry and I never did anything more than flirt, only a little PG dancing the last night to “I love it” by Icona Pop, and when the week was up, I hugged him goodbye and waved from the school bus that would take me to the airport and figured I’d never see him again. The end. It was the inevitable final scene to what had surprisingly been a pretty fun week. Oh well, I thought. It was fun while it lasted. Like my parade of summer camp crushes, I thought Henry was someone I’d quickly forget as I reintegrated into my real life in Chandler, Arizona.
I texted him from the bus, holding back tears; all of our phones were blowing up as we exchanged pictures, heartfelt goodbyes, and each other’s contact information. Henry, however, was somber as we texted back and forth. He confided in me that he was feeling low, not particularly excited to get back to his hometown; he especially wasn’t excited to be in the car with his parents. They sounded cruel from his stories, so I texted him back comforting platitudes, keeping him virtual company on the drive to his house.
I boarded my flight, and put my phone on airplane mode, thinking that was the finale.
But when I got home to Arizona, I was surprised to find that the texting continued. And continued. And continued.
We texted straight through that summer. I had never texted so much in my life. Good morning texts. Jokes. Serious texts. Long-form, essay-like discussions about the way we viewed the world. Religion. Math. Spanish… He was clever, quick, funny, and interesting. I felt like he got me, like he was listening. And it felt like I could understand him, too. He even said so himself.
Although he was allegedly taken that summer, things weren’t progressing well in their apparently doomed relationship, and it appeared they were really going to break up. One week they were together, the next, not so much. I didn’t really know what was going on. At the time, I considered us to be good friends and flirts. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong by texting him back. Our texts were sweet, but not peppered with anything scandalous or overtly romantic.
About two months after we met, I built up the nerve to tell him how I felt. Perhaps this was a breakage of the Girl Code. To rationalize my decision, I thought: if it was ‘True Love,’ I had to fight for it, didn’t I? True Love justified the means. True Love obligated me to take a deep breath in my bedroom one night, laying on my leopard print pillow and say, “I like you as more than a friend. And I need you to know this, even if nothing can happen between us.” It felt dumb and romantic and pitiful and movie-like. It was dramatic in a I-just-have-to-get-this-off-my-chest kind of way. It was just a text message, but it felt like I’d run after him and tapped on his shoulder before his flight took off. My heart raced as I waited for those three little dots to appear on my phone, indicating he was texting back.
I wasn’t thinking of his girlfriend; I was thinking of myself. Still, I didn’t ask him to be my boyfriend. What would be the point of dating, I thought, if he was in Wisconsin and I was in Arizona? Especially as high schoolers with little agency and less money. We were busy—with academic activities, with sports, with school, with applying to colleges. He was still busy with his girlfriend. But I told him how I felt anyway, because I was a seventeen-year-old girl in love and this was the kind of twenty seconds of courage that Tumblr had sold me. I just wanted him to know. My heart couldn’t contain it any longer.
Much to my delight, he felt the same way (as I knew he would), and regular Skype sessions and a few mailed mixed CDs went back and forth. It was over-the-top, with his songs each correlating to a particular memory (even though most of our memories were really just text-conversations) and then I’d send back a CD with my own choice of song correlating to all the moments he’d identified. Senior year started early for me, and we texted throughout my school day while he was still home on summer break. He sent selfies, handsome pictures of himself, sometimes including a bit of skin, his abs, creeping downward. He replied extremely quickly to my messages, showing interest. If his responsiveness was any indication, he was very into me. He and I had jokes about how I rolled my eyes at him so much that they rolled out of my head and down the street and he had to go streaking off after them. The eyeball emoji then took on new meaning, emojis piling up with secret meanings. We made wishes at 10:22, because in military time, that was 22:22, which had twice the power of 11:11. He would send videos of his piano playing, surprisingly gentle. Soon, we had a song that was our song. I hadn’t touched the piano much since I quit lessons, but I re-taught myself “Clair de Lune” and sent him videos back.
It seemed too good to be true. It was cloud nine-and-three-quarters.
Somewhere in there, Henry and his girlfriend broke up. He seemed so interested in me that I had to believe he’d been slowly retreating from their relationship, but I actually have no idea. I made so many assumptions. Maybe he was showing up on her doorstep with flowers, his phone vibrating with my laughter in his back pocket, for all I knew. I imagined that it was college, not me, that came to be the wedge between them. Did they fight about me? Did she even know about me? Either way, they were broken up, and Henry was single going into his senior year of high school.
Finally, in September, there was just no point resisting him; in my head, we were practically boyfriend and girlfriend. I was single only on a technicality; I wasn’t going to do anything with anyone while he had my whole heart in the palm of his hand. I didn’t even think about finding a Homecoming date, I was so smitten. On September 7th, I texted him that I’d like to be his girlfriend. He responded jovially, making some joke, and suddenly nervous and feeling risk-averse, I started to back up, saying that I was only kidding, that maybe we shouldn’t date, it didn’t make sense for us so far apart. It was just wishful thinking. This backing up upset him. He didn’t talk to me the rest of the night, which was so unlike us. I remember getting burritos with my friend at the local joint that evening, nervously checking my phone and telling her what had happened. “I think I scared him off,” I worried, biting my lip. It made me feel lousy, like I had messed something up. My stomach sank. She told me to just go for it.
The next day, he told me that I had hurt his feelings like I’d suspected, and I apologized—the first of hundreds I would utter in the coming years. So instead, we started dating long distance, officially, on September 8, 2013.
I shook off the little miscommunication; September 8th was just as good as September 7th. It was senior year, I was poised to attend a great college, I was taking classes with all my best friends, varsity tennis tryouts were around the corner, and most importantly, I had my first real boyfriend. My toes curled at the thought.
I loved reading every bit of this!! I cannot wait for more