Blue eyes

Fear is a friend who's misunderstood.

--from "The Heart of Life" by John Mayer

I asked a boy to prom my senior year of high school. I knew it was my only chance to go, and it would be the last dance. I hadn't been to any others. I had always said no, afraid of what it would mean to be so close to a boy. But this one was sixteen, tall, with icy blue eyes, and he made me sweat with nerves.

So that we could get to know each other a little one on one before prom, we went to IHOP after church one Sunday. We sat a square table in the middle of the crowd of families. He ordered a big breakfast platter (a growing boy), and I got the smallest stack of pancakes possible and an orange juice. I have no idea what we talked about; we had nothing in common except blue eyes and youth group and marching band. I ate three bites and nearly threw up, hiding gags through the white napkin and nods. It was nerves beyond butterflies; it was fear that this younger boy would reject me after those three or four that I had turned down over the years. Boys always equaled fear, and now they equaled nausea.

But all that summer, past prom and leading up to my first semester of college, I called him every day. I thought that's what you did when you were a semi-girlfriend. I never asked him what he thought of me, and I never told him that I thought the way he'd duct-taped the hood of his car was creative. I never reached for his hand, and he never bent to kiss me.

At the end of the summer he asked to meet me in Carey Park, in the baseball field parking lot. I was up for anything, holding on to nothing but the simple fact that he wanted to meet me somewhere. It poured, but I drove there, thought he'd lead me back to his parents' house and we'd spend another afternoon watching movies I would never remember. It poured, and as I pulled up behind his car he was leaning against it, his white shirt soaked through and head cocked back to catch the rain.

I opened the car door and he met me before I could get out. Heavy drops hit my face and legs as I squinted up at him, smiling.

"Hey," he breathed. "I don't think we should see each other any more."

And as he turned and walked back to that ridiculous blue Dodge 600 that always smelled of dust, I started the car again, picking up the song that was playing when I stopped. I let him drive away before I moved. I let the song finish. I drove home not looking at the road but the drops of wet on the dashboard that had come in through the door. I drove home and threw up, the whole summer gone, wondering how something could end if had never even begun.