When I was a junior in high school, there was an attractive, I made the acquaintance of Becky Moran. I didn’t have any classes with her, but she had previously dated this other guy that I knew named Steve Celtaine. I knew him through Todd Derracks, who I also didn’t have any classes with but who I knew from junior high. Why I couldn’t make better friends with the people that I actually did have classes with escapes me but is probably symptomatic of the same disease that prevented me from ever dating anyone that went to my high school. Of course, there were other factors in the latter phenomenon, as Becky Moran demonstrates.

Becky was a notably attractive tall redhead. She wasn’t modelesque or anything, but she was somewhere in the mid-to-upper twos. She was tall and leggy with an outstanding figure. Had she cleaned up nicer, she could have been at home on a Hollywood set. But she didn’t clean up particularly nice at all, nor did she seem to want to. She was in the ROTC with Todd and Steve, where femininity wasn’t particularly valued. That’s probably why she hung out with the ROTC crowd anyway, because they didn’t ask her to be someone she wouldn’t have been very good at being anyway.

Becky seemed to hone in on me very quickly at the lunch table where Steve, Todd, a couple other ROTC guys, and I ate lunch for a short while. She seemed to keep drawing me into conversation, but she and I really didn’t have much of anything to talk about. Not long after she started to eat with us, another ROTC girl joined us at the table. This is a story unto itself, but the site of the other ROTC girl, who seemed like a perfectly pleasant individual and wasn’t hideous in any obvious way, made me physically ill. I had to find some other place to eat lunch. After that, Becky started tracking me down in the hallway and periodically where I was hiding at lunch.

The most convenient place for her was after sixth period on our way to the bus. Every day when I left my last class, she was always right there in the hallway waiting. She would tell me about her day and ask about mine. After a week or two, she started putting her arm in mine as we walked down the hall. After a month or so, she made a habit of kissing me on the cheek when we parted ways. She started inviting me to parties that she was attending, but I always declined because I wasn’t the partying sort, I had doubts if I would fit in with her friends (Steve and Todd notwithstanding), and I figured that the girl who made me physically ill would probably be there, too. The she asked for my help studying, which was an offer I couldn’t refuse due to Will Truman’s First Rule of Female Interaction (the subject of another post).

Not long after we started making study plans, she disappeared. I later found out that she had gotten suspended from school. At first I was relieved because it meant the pressure was off. I no longer had this person clinging oddly close to me. Then, after a couple of weeks, the thought occurred to me that she might maybe could have possibly been romantically interested in me. Like, for real.

I won’t say that the thought never crossed my mind before that epiphany, but I always dismissed it pretty quickly. Girls as attractive as that are not interested in guys like me. Girls with temperaments with hers aren’t interested in squares like me*. She had two metric tons of male friends and she’d dated guys like Steve that were more obviously appealing than myself. But as I thought about it after her disappearance, I realized that she had never, ever displayed the affection for any of them that she did for me with the exception of Steve and that was more clearly of the hug-because-we-hug sort of interaction rather than putting her arm in a relative stranger’s as she did with me.

It very well could be that my initial instincts were correct and that she was just being overly friendly to someone that she did not consider as more than a friend, but the more I’ve learned about women over the years the less likely that is. One big thing that I didn’t realize at the time is that I’d become thin. I still viewed myself at the time as the fat kid that girls didn’t really ever want in any romantic capacity. I’d also, without realizing it, become a much more sociable person. I learned how to interact with people. I didn’t realize that some of the biggest barriers that were holding me back romantically had been lowered.

Becky Moran came to my mind due to a thread in Bobvis on the subject of sexual harassment. Even if I had realized what Becky was up to (assuming that she was up to anything), nothing ever would have come out of that relationship (except, as Steve mentioned when he suggested that I ask her out, the loss of my virginity). There are a couple others that I think might have been baiting me to ask them out that things might have worked out with (at least for a while), but not really her. Nonetheless, it stands as an example of all that I didn’t know when I really wish I had known it.

* – Not true, in high school anyway. I discovered later that my squaredom combines with a relatively open and tolerant attitude (by the standards of my surroundings, anyway) can be rather appealing for particular sorts. I had an unusually high number of freak female friends. Even if they weren’t interested in me romantically, I seemed to draw a lot of them. My first technical relationship was with a girl very similar to Becky in that regard.