So you probably missed, buried among the musings on my crush EK, this line:

Day after birthday/---C
Why do I want him I spent the evening socializing with other choir people. I thought of a new way to do what? I lost my train of thought.

It seems innocuous enough nestled among the hormone-driven sexual cravings of a teenage mind. An evening with choir people could mean one of two things.  Either I was on a bus trip to watch an opera or I was at a collaborative retreat with some choirs from multiple different schools.  Judging by an earlier entry about how I punched someone in the face in the back of the bus on the way to the Opera, this article was the retreat. I could do a whole essay about my weird propensity to bad behavior on buses. I wasn’t angry with the boy I punched, someone dared me to and I was tired of my goody-goody reputation.  However, the comment about evening choir socializing was about a different weekend.

There’s not anything else written in my hand journal about the retreat. Surprising, since that is the only reference in the entire journal to meeting my first "boyfriend." I use quotations there, because I barely saw him.

I met—let's call him Peter—at a collaborative event between a couple of different high school choirs. It was something of a retreat mixing the choirs. I took right away to the naive, but older twins I was bunked with. We’ll call them Sammy and Tammy. They were adorable and innocent. Very quickly their discussion turned to the older set of male twins at their school. One of these young men was in choir with them and both sisters had a severe crush on him.

His name was Peter, just like my oldest brother. He was tall, had shoulder-length curls, and his brother who happened to be dating a girl (not in choir) who attended my school. I acknowledged to the girls that he was cute. Tammy insisted cute was an understatement. Peter and I interacted a couple of times over the weekend, but It wasn't until late Saturday afternoon that I realized he thought I was cute. Their choir’s collaborative retreat culminated in an on-site dance. I think I had a nice pair of jeans, but the twins I was bunked with it had packed dresses and make up. The twins, myself, and a couple of other girls were all getting ready when we heard a knock on the door. When it opened, there was a boy from my choir and Peter. The cabin hushed. It was clear from the expressions on their faces that they planned on asking two of us to go to the dance. The dance consisted of a single light up ball and stereo in a large room literally ten feet away from our bunks. However, the dance was significant now, because Peter was finally going to ask one of the twins (who had been crushing on him for years) out.

Nope.

Peter told me later that he had almost jabbed his thumb in his eye he was so nervous to ask me. I was flabbergasted by the situation. At that point, I had probably had two other people acknowledge I was pretty to my face.

The first was a somewhat similar situation with a girl at summer camp. I caught her staring vacantly towards me in open showers. When I asked if she was alright, she told me that I looked really pretty when I reached up to touch the water flowing through my hair. We decided mutually to go to the costume camp dance together as "Ellen DeGeneres and her new girlfriend." However, the agreement was more about being playful and troublesome for the religious, but open-minded, camp counselors.

The other person to admit he found me attractive was at a party held by family friends. How I spent the whole night not realizing my older siblings were in the woods getting drunk, I will never know. The only thing I really remember about that party was the car ride home with my Mom flushed from drinking, an item of partying she usually hid carefully by relegating us elsewhere for Girl’s Night.

06/19/---C

I know I should write in the other journal. My handwriting sucks and what I want to write about is perfectly acceptable by Mom. Well, maybe she doesn’t approve of it, but she knows about Chris already. It isn’t bad. I just met a guy at the Mad-Dogs [nickname] party last night and gave him my number. Then he actually called me. Jane [my older sister] was the reason the call was explained to my parents. I don’t know what I would have done without her. First, she caught me flirting. Then she figured it out. She now calls me a “Playah.”

Honestly, I thought his name was Craig so I had no idea who Chris Rand was. All’s well that end’s well.

It’s hard to say it ended well. It never really took off. We had a couple of flirtatious conversations before he invited me to his birthday party that involved air-soft guns. I had never played before. Judging by the girls at his party, it was sort of changed to a boy-girl party last minute. It was clear Chris/Craig/whatever his name was only thought I was pretty, because I was unfamiliar.

So, returning to the choir retreat, I felt myself blush as a six-foot-something man skinny as a beanpole asking me to escort him to an insignificant little dance. It was less than two Peter-heights away from the place where he stood hopeful at the door. I looked at the twins knowing how much his question crushed them. Tammy especially.

I knew how wrong it was to say yes.

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Still.

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I did tell Peter to go dance with Tammy during one of the slow dances. She was floating when he let go of her on the last note. Then Peter hurried back to me.

Why?