Creepsake #26

A memento gained by advancing slowly and often with difficulty

I wrote this creepsake many, many years ago—literally over fifteen. That just gave me a moment of vertigo. 2011 was fifteen years ago? Jesus.

This essay was the first essay I wrote after years of only writing on Myspace blogs or on my late, great personal blog The Suburban Prairie (where I obtained the handle I’ve used online ever since). I began this essay in late December 2011—a blogger I followed did a series of response prompts about “becoming who we wanted to be in 2012,” and I decided to “get serious about my writing at last” (aka begin writing real essays again). It’s sloppy, choppy, and needed WAY MORE TO BE CHOPPED FROM IT to ever be publishable, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, even after years of trying edits on this essay. It’s so old now that I don’t have the heart to hurt it. It’s earned its space, and GOD KNOWS it’s a damn creepsake. There are also like 900 Easter eggs for Teen Queen Training in this essay, so BUY YOUR COPY and then reread this creepsake and you will die just like I did.

Get a cup of coffee or tea and settle yourself in—I present to you:

You Are An Obsession

He’s been throwing spit wads at you. Gummy, wet balls of crumpled notebook paper that hit the side of your arm while you’re sitting in Algebra II, hit your elbow resting on your lap, hit your hand crooked awkwardly on top of your quadratic equation notes while you nervously flip your Bic mechanical pencil back and forth, waiting for something to make enough sense that you can spring into action—you’ve never understood how to look latently casual. How does everyone else seem to know how to do it?

It’s like the eighth graders last year got a tutorial during the high school orientation you missed: wear preppy button-downs, boot-cut jeans, Doc Marten fisherman sandals, and ignore that whole “looseleaf paper” edict on the school supply list—pack spiral notebooks. Your teachers can DEAL. But you moved here clutching your 2 ½” binder against your vintage t-shirt, wearing your vintage cords from Goodwill, your Birkenstocks, your hair a wavy mess with creases along the bottom two inches because the only way you can keep it from frizzing out is to put your hair in a low ponytail when it’s wet. You wear a Flik Flak watch with a rainbow band you’ve had since you were a kid because you think it looks ironic; it was such a hit back in your old town. Not here, where you self-consciously flip your wrist to hide the watch face; you remember wrapping a length of string around your wrist during your measurements unit in third grade, the gasps of surprise your little measurements elicited from your classmates even then, remember thinking, “But I’m still growing.” But you’re not. You’re fourteen, and your body still looks like a third grader’s, skinny wrists and narrow hips and no breasts; you’re as aware of being behind the curves now as you were then.

And like a third grader, he’s throwing spit wads. At first you were like, “Are you kidding me?” but you’ve been reading Seventeen long enough to know that when boys tease you, it’s really because they like you, and since he’s been throwing spit wads at you for two months now, he must be totally in love. You’re frustrated by his antics, but you recognize how necessary it is to masquerade vulnerability with another emotion. You accept the spit wads because he’s the first boy to pay attention to you, teasing you every day with a silent, devoted, dogged attention. It’s like he likes you.

He makes noises in the seat behind you, noises like he’s either snorting or in pain, sounds so strange you turn around, which was the point. But then he stares at you blankly. He starts whispering your name when Mr. W is writing an equation on the chalkboard. The first few times you still turn around, curious, but he does nothing, says nothing, still behaves like he has no idea why you’re interested.

Like the line in the Cranberries song, harassment’s not your forte, but he does it very well, and you know you’re free to decide, free to decide whether or not you should read his behavior as a nuisance, or shyness, or love. But come on: there’s a boy recognizing you as an object worthy of notice, at last; you know what you’ll choose because you believe you know what’s behind his behavior. He’s actually kind of cute, you mean kind of HOT, you mean OH MY GOD SERIOUSLY HE IS FIRE HE IS SO HOT.

So you sit there in Algebra II, your crush leaning forward behind you, a month ticking by as you hold your body in various poses you imagine look languid, your head slightly tilted up like you’re raising your eyebrows saying, “Oh yeah, Mr. W? Are you going to tell me something I don’t know?” and you’ve been focusing so much energy on arranging your body and affecting an attitude of haughty irresistibility that you’ve been doing horribly on your tests. You’ve never been good at math, but you were good enough to wind up here, in a class with half honors-track freshmen and half college-track sophomores, like your crush. You feel slightly superior because you’re smarter than him, even if he is a year older than you.

But knowing you’re smarter endears him to you; you imagine that Seventeen situation where you can offer to study together, and it’ll be at his house, upstairs in his bedroom, and when both of you realize neither one of you actually understand polynomial functions, a thought will zap through both of your heads: WAIT! THAT MEANS WE’RE ONLY HERE BECAUSE WE LIKE EACH OTHER!, and then you’ll turn to look at each other, pupils dilated so wide, and he’ll lean over because he just can’t help himself, kissing you over the algebra books.

From annoyance to interest to fantasies: you have become totally obsessed with him. Obsessed like you call him My Obsession and your friends all know him as Your Obsession and they buy you incense that smells like the perfume Calvin Klein Obsession as a joke. But it’s actually not a joke; you burn it in your bedroom and you think about how AMAZING he looked in that Hot Sweater today. He has a stash of Hot Sweaters (solid-colored with two stripes running across the chest and up the sleeves; your favorite is light blue with a white stripe and two dark blue stripes) and when he wears one, you fall all over yourself. You’ve been tracking his whereabouts and you know there are exactly eight opportunities each day when you can catch a glimpse of him in the crowded hallways between classes. You announce with a sigh, “Only 5 out of 8 today,” and your friends roll their eyes, bored.

You cherish the folded notes from your friends declaring they think he likes you, as if by writing the phrase, it becomes true. You convince yourself that if you read the notes enough times, you will believe he likes you, which will actually make him like you. But you’re also tormented by your friends’ threats— they’re going to tell him that you like him—more accurately, they’re going to tell him you’re obsessed—because he’s supposed to recognize his love on his own terms, not as a convenient echo of your revealed emotions. You cry: “He’s going to think I’m crazy if you tell him I’m obsessed with him!”

But you are crazy, with hormones: you’ve never been kissed. You received no preschool pecks, you’ve never held hands with anyone other than your parents and your siblings. You didn’t get to cash in on five years of perpetual devotion to your First Crush in elementary school—you moved out of state, and your old best friend wrote a month later to tell you he was going out with a girl who was your clone.

And then there was middle school, where the only boy who talked to you with anything other than polite apathy was a boy nicknamed “Bacon” because he unfortunately looked like a pig and, incredibly, actually smelled like bacon. You were so embarrassed that it was better to ignore him than accept a fate as a Side of Bacon.

But no boys ever called you to ask about a homework assignment; you didn’t have a childhood friend who slowly turned into Something More. When you read Seventeen, it was hard to relate to all of the articles about “101 Great Ideas For A Date” or “How You Know When You’re Ready For Sex” or “When To Break Up With Him” because you were still reading and re-reading the article about How To Tell When He Has a Crush On You, trying to believe that there was a boy who could have a crush on you and your gawky childish body. You just started getting your period over the summer, and you’re sure that, now, your breasts will also start to grow—didn’t all the magazines promise that? But those same magazines promised you’d get your period within two years of needing to wear deodorant, and it actually took four. Any further delay on receiving your curves is a self-actualization you can’t afford to wait on.

One day when you’re absent, Kathy calls after school to tell you that Your Obsession asked her where you were. You basically lose your mind—he noticed!—but tell Kathy he probably just wanted to know when you’d be back so he could get back to harassing you. One month later, he gets suspended for a week, which is a massive deal since about the only way you can get suspended from your high school is through fighting, and he doesn’t seem like the fighting type. A rumor goes around that they found crack in his locker, but you never find out if that was the real reason. For the week he’s gone, you’re morose, lamenting the loss of your eight viewings. Your friends tease you by renaming him the Juvenile Delinquent, and you act embarrassed but you love it. You love the idea that you love a juvenile delinquent, because drugs are supposed to make people lose control, and the thought of him high and unable to control his desire to kiss you is enough to fuel your masturbation fantasies for several months: his lust overriding this ridiculous pile of childish antics he’s been throwing at you by literally throwing things at you.

You understand for the first time what the words “turned on” mean. You proclaim to all of your friends how intensely turned on you are by his Hot Sweaters. It’s the first time you’ve ever felt sexual about a crush, and the headiness of it sweeps you off your feet. You turn on “Just Can’t Get You Off My Mind” by Lenny Kravitz ,and you turn on your black-light, and you pretend your Obsession has just entered your bedroom. You imagine him walking toward you and holding out a hand, which you take, and then the two of you start slow-dancing, your head against his shoulder. You believe in this fantasy so hard that you actually go through all of the motions, slow-dancing with the air. Seventeen is always going on about how girls practice kissing their hands, so could practicing slow-dancing with a boy who hasn’t materialized yet really be any weirder?

You never, never once imagine touching his peen. Or him touching your breasts, or your girl-sex. Or actually having sex. You imagine kissing, because the strength of simply being desired is that overpowering, that sexual. You stare at your Obsession in the halls when he isn’t looking at you and you imagine the force of your desire burning into him, making him powerless and solely interested in possessing you. You don’t want him to actually “possess” you; you want him to want to possess you. That’s enough.

You want him so much you can’t focus on anything else. This is a problem since you still see him every second period in Algebra II; he sits behind you and you arrange your body in place and your appendages go numb and your mind goes blank. When Mr. W hands out midterm tests, you’re almost angry at your teacher for interfering—look, you’re trying to work through your emotions, how are you supposed to remember algebra equations? You fail the midterm—a first—and as you steal a glimpse of your Obsession’s returned test, you see he got an 80-something. It’s not fair! You’ve been focusing every class on delicately testing the waters of revealing your crush. How is he able to tune you out?

You plan to join your friends at a football game because Seventeen always swears that Amazing Moments happen at high school football games, like your crush reaches over to hold your hand when your home team scores. Then he lifts up his blanket and you huddle together underneath it. You put your hand in his jacket pocket. Yeah, you’re going to the football game.

Your mom drops you off at Dairy Queen and as you open the door, your crush is on his way out. Your feet go numb, your heart thuds: HE’S HERE. IN FRONT OF YOU. You’ve been dying to see him outside of school, dying to see what he’d do to you without spit wads, without the constraints of a classroom. And he’s HERE. He laughs for a second to one of his friends and sidles out the first door, only the two of you in the entry way, you’re staring at him in disbelief, and he notices you and says, halfway leaning back to his friend, but intending you to hear him as he moves his head forward and continues through the vestibule, looking you up and down, “Shit, baby. Fuck.”

And then he’s gone. It’s stuttering in your head a thousand times a minute; you are inscribing his motions and his words indelibly into your memory because, later, you’re not going to believe it actually happened. He looked you up and down and said, “Shit, baby. Fuck.” He looked you up and down. He called you BABY. He said FUCK.

You keep repeating what happened to your friends when you meet up with them, and they can’t believe it either, but they’re utterly bored by your obsession with figuring out what he meant. “He was probably just mad that he saw you,” Kathy says. “Yeah, mad because HE WISHED HIS FRIENDS WEREN’T MAKING HIM LEAVE,” you retort. You are a wreck, spending the entire football game watching for him somewhere in the stands. You don’t care when your football team loses.

“Shit, baby. Fuck.”

You are actually trembling when you take your seat in Algebra II the next day. What’s he going to do? Is he going to elaborate on what he meant? Is he going to ask you out? When you pulled a strip of paper out of your self-created horoscope box of song lyrics this morning, you got the line you don’t realize how much I need you. It’s an amazing omen. But he does nothing. He doesn’t throw spit wads at you. He doesn’t whisper at you. Nothing.

Your crush on him is at a breaking point, but you feel like he’s made a tentative move toward acknowledging that he’s into you (SHIT, BABY, FUCK). You’re so charged up that on your way to lunch, when you see him leaning against his locker talking to a friend and he says your name, smirking, you actually walk right up to him. You stop right in front of your Obsession and he looks shocked. You cock your head, look straight in his eyes, and respond, like a challenge, “Is there something you wanted?” He ducks his head and looks embarrassed, and in the three seconds before you realize he isn’t going to say anything else, you’re embarrassing yourself, you almost convince yourself that he just wants to look cool in front of his friend; if his friend wasn’t there, your crush would say he’d wanted to tell you that you’re pretty.

Your friends are so tired of listening to you turn every conversation around to your Obsession that you write up a Declaration of (in)Dependence with your rainbow Crayola markers and copy it out three times, once for each of your friends. You proclaim a Bimonthly Day of Silence where you delineate all of the things you won’t do:

• you won’t mention how many times you saw him that day

• you won’t mention anything having to do with Algebra II

• you won’t mention anything relating to the lunch period you share with him

• you won’t mention his friends

• you won’t mention taking any specific hallways

• you won’t mention anything he does to you during that day

• you won’t mention his Hot Sweaters or lack of

You promise that, if you break your vow, they can select their own punishment. You are, of course, hoping that your “punishment” would be them now telling your Obsession that you have a crush on him. You add a caveat that, of course, if something really important involving him comes up, all bets are off. Like, you know, if he asks you out or something.

You fixate on what it will be like when he finally does ask you out. All the boys in your classes will suddenly look at you differently—some boy desired you enough to ask you out. Your friends claim that it’s better to know if he doesn’t like you so you can get on with your life, but there’s no way you agree—if he definitively KNOWS you like him, and then he doesn’t ask you out, you’re afraid your Obsession will keep teasing you, proving he was never interested, proving he was only being an asshole.

So you do everything you can to feel him out without speaking to him yourself. You send your friends to—at this late date—ask him about you, and in the meantime, you work as hard as you can to conceal the depth of your obsession. It’s like a gift you’ll give him when he asks you out. You’ll utterly surprise him, like women always seem to do in those nineteenth-century novels when a man proposes. Like there were never any negotiations beforehand, like a guy suddenly decided he was interested in a girl and to his great shock, the girl reveals that she’s interested in him too, and they’re both so overcome with the delight of having their emotions echoed that they kiss and it all ends beautifully.

Your friends, after they’ve talked to your Obsession about generalized things like homework and Mr. W’s mockable exuberance, tell you that he’s actually really nice and kind of shy, but he is neither nice with you, nor shy. Does that mean he genuinely DISlikes you, or is he also concealing his true emotions from you? You know you should just talk to him, but you can’t imagine how you talk to somebody you’re in love with. What would you say? “I love you, I want you to kiss me, I think you’re really hot when you wear that blue sweater?” You just want to communicate through your kisses, which seems a whole lot easier than trying to think of ways to start a dialogue.

It’s too familiar to use a real friend, so you find a friend of a friend who rides his bus, and she is tapped to finally ask the feared and yet-unasked question: does he like you? The exchange went something like this:

Supposedly, she asked him if he knew you, and apparently, he said, “Yes.”

So then she asked, “So do you like her?” and your Obsession replied, “I like teasing her.”

Which is true, and feels like a sort of victory, because isn’t teasing a sign of a crush? But the fact that he only said that he likes messing with you rubs your thumping heart a little sore. You continue to harass the girl to gather more details about him, and a month later the bomb drops.

He’s going to the Valentine’s Day Dance with Crystal Kelly.

“WHO THE FUCK IS CRYSTAL KELLY?!” you scream, and your heart collapses. Some girl from North?! How does he even KNOW a girl from North?! You are annihilated because Andrea relays the information to you with a smirk and Kathy taunts you, like you deserve it because of all the boring days of Hot Sweater announcements, you deserve to have this happen.

When you get home, you light your Obsession incense and you turn on your black-light mounted beneath the rainbow-colored footprints you painted on your bedroom walls, and you can see the spot on your wall where you did the top half of his initials so subtly only you would know they were there. You put on your mixtape with the songs you dubbed off the radio and you cry as you listen to “Just Can’t Get You Off My Mind.” You get out your notebook and your Crayola markers and you write big fat tearful poems about how devastated you are, how lonely you are, how much you still love him. Because you believe you actually love him. You never told him you liked him; you never said anything to him other than a sarcastic question about whether or not he had something to say to you, and he never did anything besides poke your shoulder in class, whisper your name a few times, throw a few spit wads at you. But you were in love with him.

Your crush on him wears down after the Crystal Kelly announcement; Andrea offers to find out more, but you wince at the suggestion. You stop arranging your posture and you start getting B’s on your Algebra II tests, pulling your grade up to a healthy B- by April. When your former Obsession whispers your name, you don’t turn around to give him a dirty look—you perfect your nonchalance by stretching your arms, leaning down to get something out of your backpack, utterly ignoring that there is anyone behind you. Kathy and Andrea report that he stares at you more often than he used to, like he’s confused by your sudden lack of interest, but you’re like TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE!

You haul out the thick stack of love poetry you wrote about him and carry it to Emily’s house, where you announce that your seven-and-a-half-month Obsession is OVER! You dramatically light the sheets of notebook paper, letting the burning poems fall into the pond. Unfortunately, most of the poems just get charred edges and are still completely legible, so after a few attempts, you wad the poems up and bury them inside a hollow log to let them decompose, just like your love for your Obsession. You rename him The Asshole and your freshman year of high school ends; you don’t see him for your entire sophomore year, and you have enough newly-abandoned crushes and crushes-elect—none of whom kiss you, but do at least validate that you’re worthy of real flirtation—that The Asshole doesn’t really cross your mind any more.

Until the first day of junior year. You’re getting your locker assignment for the year; you take a seat next to Andrea and watch the door. When your former Obsession walks in, you wildly think that he’s in the wrong classroom. That he just came in to ask your teacher where some other class was located. But that’s not what happens. He sits down at the table across from yours, and you and Andrea elbow each other wildly, refusing to make eye contact with each other because it would point out the obvious. You are elbowing her to tell her to SHUT UP and she is elbowing you out of glee.

You can’t believe it—it’s seriously like a Trauma-rama from Seventeen—because your teacher takes attendance and gives out your locker assignments and, like you knew it would be the minute you saw The Asshole walk in, you knew it would happen like this; your last names are too close for anyone to squeeze between: the two of you are assigned lockers right next to each other. For the entire year.

You would have DIED for this two years ago; it would have been proof you were meant to be together. Now you are mortified beyond words, unable to comprehend how this could be happening, embarrassed speechless because you can recognize, two years later, how ridiculous you were. How obvious, and childish, and obsessed. You were obsessed. He must have known everything about your insane crush on him, and he clearly didn’t have a crush on you because he didn’t do anything but torment and harass you. And now you have to confront him eight times a day between classes. EIGHT TIMES A DAY. It’s like a bad joke, remembering your old eight opportunities to see him freshman year—now you’re forced into proximity with The Asshole eight times a day, and you would rather cut your elbow off than let it accidentally bump into his.

You don’t hang out at your locker between classes—you fumble through your combination as fast as you can but you can’t resist, you still try to model-walk away when The Asshole’s there getting his books, just in case he’s looking. The drug dogs race through the hallways, sniffing for contraband, but they don’t stop near your locker, or his. Once, as you were talking to the girl on your other side, mentioning the ridiculous homework you’d been assigned, The Asshole snorted, as if in agreement, before slamming his locker and continuing to his senior classes. But he didn’t throw a spit wad at you.

A year later, when you’re a senior and he’s…well, no longer at South, you’re at a girls-only New Year’s Eve party at a friend-of-a-friend’s house, gossiping and going around in a circle, talking about who you all have crushes on, which boys you want to make out with, who you have made out with. You, of course, talk about your Teenage Love, your first-and-only boyfriend who broke up with you six months ago and is still violently crushing your heart, touching the tender obsessive threads of your mind. Your hostess starts working her way through her paramours from freshman year, and then she says that she made out with your old Obsession a couple of times that summer afterward. But she doesn’t call him Your Obsession. She doesn’t know you staked an obsessive, permanent claim on him the same year that she made out with him, so she doesn’t see the way your body freezes or the hardening of your face, and she doesn’t hear the warning in your voice when you say, barely controlled, “Did you just say you made out with C___ L___? Freshman year?”

She says Yes, and it’s all over. Your other friends uncomfortably laugh as you try to play it cool because you don’t have a crush on him anymore—you haven’t had a crush on him for three years!—but HE BELONGS TO YOU. He belongs to the painstaking frustration of your attempted analyses; to the blank-eyed failure you stared down; to the awakening of your desire, that ghost that slow-danced into shit, baby, but not fucking—not even close—and realizing her fingers were all over him in the aftermath, touching that ache and that crave of your obsession, makes you writhe.

You will be cordial to her for the rest of the evening, but you will hate her for reminding you of that old humiliation. She had casually succeeded where your months of meticulous, earnest longing failed to translate spit wads into swapping spit. You will hunt your hostess down on the internet several years later and find her lying on some internet forum, claiming she was voted as “Sweetest Senior,” which wasn’t even a superlatives category in your yearbook, and you will try to convince yourself that maybe she was also lying about making out with your old Obsession, but the fact that will repeat on an incontrovertible loop is that she came up with his name unprompted. He was a nobody in your high school, a name no one would have known, a lie that couldn’t have been a lie. Right? It’s an obsession you’ll never drop.