Freshmen Girls and Senior Boys

If I could go back in time to a particular age and place, I would go back to the fall of 1979 when I was fourteen years old and a freshman in high school. This was only my second year in that school district and my second new school in the district after enduring a year of middle-school that I would rather have avoided completely!

I had a friend and she and I hung out together during free time, such as before school started for the day. One day, we were walking outside by the chemistry room window and something caught my eye. “Someone” would be a better way to put it. There was a boy in there, a senior boy at that, and he had the most amazing eyes. They were beautiful hazel eyes with a mischievous twinkle and they looked out toward us.

At some point, my best friend dragged me over to that window because I was way too bashful to walk up to him on my own. She talked to him and all I could do was giggle. I didn’t say a word. I did get brave enough to let him touch my hand. My friend had asked him to feel how cold my hands were. Oh no, a senior boy was touching me!

I was very interested in him, but just too bashful to talk, to tell him how I was feeling. I don’t know how long the morning giggle-fests lasted, but it wasn’t for very long. My friend met up with him at a football game and asked him why he didn’t like me. He said something really silly; it was really junior high and it hurt me deeply. My usual way of reacting to hurt back then was to display anger, and to some degree it still is. I wrote him a very unladylike response to his upsetting remark. This is where things would be changed.

If I could go back to that time, I would summon up the courage to find him and confront him about his remark. Instead of staying angry and hurt, I would have found out that he was just a goof-ball and making a silly remark, not being serious or trying to be hurtful. We could have been together much sooner as a couple. Specific other people wouldn’t have entered his heart to come back and haunt us later. I would have had my hall buddy like the other girls did, rather than feeling like a social outcast and outsider all four years of high school.

Just before my eleventh grade year, the summer of 1981, I got a letter in the mail from this boy and in the fall of 1984, he gave me his name. We’ve been together for thirty years now and that is something that I would never change.

What would you change about your life if you had the choice to do so?