Approximately six years, to be exact, until both high school and college were fading in my rearview and I was a twenty-two year old woman with a pitiful amount of experience with the male sex, all because my stupid, stubborn heart refused to relinquish hope that someday, my soulmate would wake up and smell the freaking pheromones.
But eventually, as I moved to the city and settled into new patterns in my Back Bay brownstone, as my “real life” started and — alarmingly — began to slip by without anyone to share it with…. I was forced to accept the fact that my reckless, hopeless (and occasionally dirty) dreams of Nate would never be fulfilled.
With that realization, I transitioned from anger into the indifferent phase, where I’ve been dwelling unhappily for nearly a year, now.
The main rules of indifference are:
Don’t think about Nate.
Don’t talk about Nate.
And never, ever, talktoNate at the few family gatherings where our paths cross.
It’s kind of like my own personal Fight Club, except less violent and way more pathetic since I’m the only member.
Before you judge me for giving up on the man I’ve loved for almost my entire lifetime, you have to understand something — a girl can only handle so much rejection. And, over the years, I’ve had more than my fair share of it.
First, there was the time in fourth grade when I stole Nate’s cellphone and spent an entire afternoon — practically an eternity, at age nine — locked in my walk-in closet, scrolling through his text inbox and sending eloquent “Dnt txt me! I h8 U!” messages to every girl in his contact list. (I know, I know. Not my proudest — or smartest — moment. But, in my defense, no one told me he’d be able to see them in his SENT folder as soon as he miraculously found his missing phone on the kitchen counter later that night.Oops.)
And I can’t forget the incident in sixth grade — well before my boobs came in, mind you — when Parker threw a huge pool party for his sweet sixteen and, jealous of thetotallymature tenth-grade girls wandering around with what, at the time, seemed like Victoria’s Secret model bodies in comparison to my mosquito bites, I went into the bathroom and stuffed the cups of my bikini with enough tissues to keep Kleenex in business for at least the next decade.
A mistake — the repercussions of which I didn’t even fully realize until one of Parker’s bitchy girlfriends pushed me into the pool, the impact dislodging my stuffing like confetti from a canon. The two minutes I spent floating in the water, makeshift boobies drifting around me like white, translucent jellyfish as I listened to the older girls giggle, were bad enough; the fact that it wasNatewho reached in, pulled me out, and wrapped a towel around my shaking shoulders was worse. Mainly because, as soon as my feet hit dry land, the tissue began fusing to my limbs, clumping on my skin like some grade-school paper maché project gone terribly awry.
Somehow, when I’d imagined Nate seeing my boobs for the first time, I hadn’t reeked of chlorine and they hadn’t been made of paper.
Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
(I seem to lose most, actually.)
And yet, even the pool party wasn’t as abominable as the time in eighth grade, when I asked him to be my date to the Sadie Hawkins dance. He didn’t even bother letting me down easy. He just grinned, ruffled my hair like I was an adorable-but-idiotic golden retriever, and walked away, laughing as though the suggestion was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. His rejection stung, don’t get me wrong, but it was the aftermath that really kicked me in the shins. Without Nate as a date, I had no option other than to ask my friend Lila’s older brother, Duncan, to go with me. He was cute in a clean-cut, average kind of way — not dark or dangerous-looking, like other boys-who-shall-not-be-named, but handsome enough to get my fourteen-year-old heart pumping.
Duncan was a charmer when he picked me up in his father’s Porsche, smiling as he slipped a corsage on my wrist, driving with one arm thrown across the back of my seat. Just when I was beginning to think things might not turn out so bad… he downed six shots of whiskey in the school parking lot, which left him so incapacitated he couldn’t even slow-dance with meonceduring the hour I spent leaning against the wall of the Starry-Night-themed reception hall, watching him gyrate questionably against several unsuspecting girls in taffeta.
When I called Parker to come get me, he — somewhat grudgingly — showed up… with Nate in tow, because apparently the universe thought I hadn’t suffered enough humiliation for one night. Crammed in the backseat next to a moaning Duncan, I listened to Parker and Nate talk about the “hot chicks” they’d had to bail on to pick me up, and prayed to disappear. When Duncan puked in my purse halfway home, I knew my perfect night at the middle-school dance was finally complete.
Ah, memories.
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture. When it comes to Nate, my life has been one long string of humiliation and horrifyingly bad luck. Before he disappeared, taking my heart with him, I triedeverythingto get his attention.
Okay, noteverything. I stopped short of stripping to my skin and climbing into his bed naked becausehello, I still have some pride left. (Not much, but enough to know that ambushing him in my birthday suit and demanding that he finally remove my pesky virginity — only to be rejected and dismissed with the same detachment he’d use to send an overcooked steak back to the kitchen — is a blow from which my self-esteem would never recover.)
But I’ve tried everythingelse.
Heated glances. Cold shoulders.
Sidelong-looks. Full-frontal stares.
Ignoring him. Adoring him.
And you know what?
Not a damn bit of it worked.
It doesn’t matter what I do — Nate still treats me with the same aloof disinterest he always has, since the day I hit puberty.
In a few days, I’ll be twenty-four, which means I’ve been in love with Nate for more than a decade. And not once in all that time has he shown me so much as a flicker of reciprocal interest. Hell, he doesn’t even check out my boobs — which are now very real, thank you very much — if I walk around in a bikini when he comes to visit Parker in Nantucket. And it’s not like there’s nothing to look at — I’m a generous C-cup, for god’s sake. (Frankly, I think the universe realized it owed me, after the pool-stuffing incident, and bequeathed me with a really stellar set of ta-tas to even the score.)
But, it was with a heavy heart and some seriously neglected lady parts that, two months ago, I decided to toss in the towel for good. I’m not usually a quitter, but it seemed there was no choice other than to lock my heart away in an impenetrable steel box inside my chest and move on — to new men, who actually noticed I was alive and worthy of love. Or, at the very least, a little below-the-belt action. After all, a girl can only wait so long.