I went to buy groceries in the little downtown area of my parents' suburb today. I walked around for a while, ducking the heat as best as I could, looking at overpriced athletic wear and fingering the pretty gingham dresses at madewell. i wasn't dressed particularly well, ugly jean shorts that i stole from my sister's dresser and a big tshirt and my hair maneuvered up in a bun off the sweaty nape of my neck, sweat prickling my hairline. by the time i recognized him enough to regret my choice of outfit, he'd already biked past me. it hit me like a gong being struck: the vague sense of recognition, a split second of cataloguing the face beneath the square sunglasses, the curly hair under the helmet, the shape of his shoulders as he passed me on his bike. i turned around as i realized who it was, following the curve of his back down the street. it was entirely surreal and also entirely predictable. it hadn't occured to me that in going home to my parents' for the summer that i would be locating myself in the last place i'd run into him, a place that he likely would also be. we hadn't spoken since 2019 or 2020, after he sort-of broke my heart and then tried to talk to me at a black lives matter protest in a community library parking lot a year later. i think he matched with my high school best friend on bumble a year after that. i'd googled him every once in a while over the following years, noting that we'd majored in the same thing in college, had similar political commitments, both moved abroad to teach english for a year or two. now, apparently, we were both back in the same suburb we'd grown up in.
he hadn't treated me well at all when we were in school together. we'd become friends in eighth grade - we sat at the same table in english class, traded snarky jokes and book recommendations, felt an unspoken sense of kinship as two undersized, snarky, smart jewish kids of a very certain type, both awkwardly transplanted into suburbia. he was friends with my eighth grade "boyfriend", he asked me to the movies, i said thanks but no, it was understood that there was mutual interest but i was embarassed to like him. he was annoying, everyone said so. i was annoying in the same way, all too aware of it, and didn't want that painful fact reinforced through duplication. no one would have cared, i know that now, but i was thirteen then, and cruel in my own self-absorbed anxiety.
we stayed friends through high school, chatting in ap us history and ap government and french and calculus, flirting idly outside of the classrooms where we stayed after school for debate practice. it was a friendship entirely circumscribed by classrooms, benches, the square lineoleum tiles which lined the hallways. during our senior year, after a particularly humiliating romantic experience with another annoying jewish debater (thankfully from another school), i was feeling both needy--painfully aware of my own desire to be desired--and empowered with the knowledge that i could cultivate it. with my first real romantic and fumblingly sexual experiences under my proverbial belt, i felt like i was evolving, changing, turning into the adult i would become with college on the horizon. six months beforehand i'd chopped my waist-length hair to my chin and gotten my nose pierced. maybe it was obvious, maybe he started flirting with me more, or maybe it was me, who knows. i don't remember the particular parameters, the shape of our teenage flirtation. he'd grown a foot the summer before our senior year, broadened out, and it suddenly felt socially acceptable that i would find him attractive. and i did! i cracked jokes and played checkers with him via imessage and waited for him to walk me to third period.
he would seek me out at orchestra and band performances (i was in the orchestra, he was in the brass section of the high school band, classic!) and we would chat in the band room, dressed up in our concert blacks, not so different from the outfits we dressed up in at 6am on saturday mornings in cold hotel rooms somewhere in the middle of america, in hilton garden inns and marriotts in the suburbs of chicago or boston or minneapolis, ready to drive to a high school to spend our day in spurts of coordinated argument. the hotels looked the same, the airports looked the same, the rental cars looked the same, the high schools looked the same. i would sit with my debate partner, my closest friend at the time (though they loved me, i certainly was not their closest friend, not even in the closest circle, another element of this which makes me cringe with sadness for the awkward and anxious and lonely seventeen year old i was) on the cold plastic floors outside of classrooms in high schools across america, prepping for the next round and hoping that someone would smile at me. this is all very dramatic, and i'm not sure how true any of it is, but i mostly remember it that way. a few years later, i would tell that close friend that i'd thought that all of their friends found me annoying, tolerated me for their sake, that i was probably pretty annoying in high school but i wasn't sure how much of my memory was colored by my then-untreated anxiety disorder. in response, this friend nodded their head, confirming that i wasn't crazy, that i did grate on them. i am far enough away from who i was as a teenager (though i am still intense, neurotic, lonely) that the confirmation of that no longer makes me cry when i think about it, thank god, just sad for that lonely anxious loud girl.
i think that this should give you an idea of who i was at that time, or at least how i remember being. i think my attraction to the boy in question was based in the fact that we were ambitious in the same way. neither of us liked the suburb we lived in, both of us had ambitions to be intellectuals, writers, professors, something a bit grander than the doctor-lawyer-therapist superstructure of the lives around us. he was into greek and roman history (gag), i was into jane austen and edith wharton, it made a bit of sense. we were both terrible at sports and discovering a nascent love of sex, awkwardly clawing our way into the adults we would become. it felt like he understood me, trite as it sounds.
i had a sense, as we approached a debate tournament in one of the suburbs of boston in january of that year, that something would happen soon. he made a vulgar joke at the airport and his mom, who was chaperoning, chastized him. i laughed, smiled at her - she thought i was a nice jewish girl, which i was. i remember driving past signs for revolutionary war battlefields, taking a joking photo with a cardboard cutout of the founding fathers, snowflakes hitting the windshield of the rental car which someone's mom was driving. it continued to snow all night and all of the next day, and eventually the second day of the tournament was cancelled. the snow was up to our knees by then, but someone else's mom took us to the arcade, to the grocery store. we wandered around, tension building.
what i remember of that night: watching youtube on the tv in the hotel room with everyone else, then new girl on my phone in the room i shared with three other girls, my soft red socks, his breath on the side of my neck. the fact that it took so long for him to kiss me. i think i took my shirt off but i don't remember the details. i think i was wearing my favorite red bra with the scallops on the straps. after, running out through the automatic doors of the hotel into the snow to see the full moon with ethan. i think i told him that i didn't enjoy it, that i'd gotten it out of my system, that i'd done it just to see what it would be like. i hope no one else heard me, but who knows. i left my plaque from the tournament, which signified that my partner and i came in 16th or something like that, in the seatback pocket on the plane on the way home.
in hindsight, it's possible that i was just as cruel to him as he was to me: that i pretended, loudly, that i didn't want him when i did; that in my own anxious self-absorbtion and deflection i set the stage for my own hurt.
we hooked up two more times, i think. once at his house while his parents were out to dinner; my dad drove me over, i told my family i had a group project i needed to work on. once at another debate tournament, where we were interrupted. i don't know what he knew, at any point. but after a few weeks, he stopped talking to me. he wouldn't text me, would leave class late to avoid seeing me in the hallway at school, wouldn't even look over at the side of the classroom i sat in during history just to avoid meeting my eyes. i felt like i was going to go insane. i didn't know why. i wonder now if he had heard, if my clumsy attempts to deny my own desire for him had gotten back to him, if i did something so embarassing that i don't even remember now. my memories of this period are unspecific, probably because the more i try to look back, the more painful, puerile details i uncover. this rejection--completely obvious, painfully unsubtle, punishing me in some way for something i didn't understand--was deeply humiliating. (it is astonishing, looking back, just how much of my teenage life was marked by a deep sense of shame and humiliation)
it was the first time that i was really and truly heartbroken, i think. every time i saw him, it felt like there was a cord anchored in the middle of my chest that was yanking me towards him. i think it was likely obvious. i don't think he cared. he started seeing a girl in my french class, who was nice but painfully stupid, and i would torture myself wondering what they talked about. my friends gossiped about how he called her thirty times a day while she was on a trip, and i almost cried. he texted me in april and i held myself aloof, trying to hold it together. at a friend's graduation party in june, everyone was gossiping about some drama from senior week, when we all went to the beach to drink and make bad decisions; someone mentioned that they'd had sex in the house they were sharing with 10 other people, and i had to leave the party to cry. my debate partner walked me down suburban streets while i sobbed, telling me that i should have known better. here, a pattern that has continued into my adult life: devastated at my own inability to read others, a friend telling me that i should have known better.
it felt like i'd relished being wanted, pretending i didn't want him back against the pull in my stomach, just to have the rug pulled out from under me. as an adult (and this is trite, i'm aware), i would feel a sick twinge watching PEARL, watching mia goth scream "i don't understand! i thought you liked me!". murder aside, that's a bit how it felt. when i ran into him a year later at that protest, sitting sweaty on the tarmac in the full force of the may sun while he stood under one of the few trees that shaded the parking lot, the visceral nature of my desire for him astonished me. i posted on my private snapchat story that i was astonished that, nearly a year into a solid relationship with a boy i loved, i would leave him in a minute for someone who'd mistreated me for six weeks in high school.
a few years later, i was happy, secure, settled into my junior year of college, with that same sweet boyfriend and a prescription for lexapro. i was lying on my dorm bed, scrolling idly through tiktok, when i saw a video of a girl warning others about a sexual predator. she tearfully told the camera about being assaulted by someone with the same first and last name as my high school 'friend', then mentioned that he was a junior at the university she attended. in a split second, i went from idle curiousity--oh, i know someone with that name--to sickening sureness. what would it mean to reclarify his behavior towards me--certainly bad, possible manipulative, though not anything approaching assault, easily attributable to teenage-boy-idiocy--as part of a larger pattern of abuse and mistreatment of women? with the exception of a little bit of pressure to do something i didn't want to do (which easily faded into the background in comparison the others who had exerted far more pressure, my first boyfriend at 17 and the first person i slept with at 18) he hadn't hurt me sexually. he'd hurt me emotionally more than anything. it had taken me a full year to accept that i'd been sexually assaulted by that first boyfriend when i was 17, and now at 20 i didn't know what to do with this new information, reconsidering all the ways he'd twisted the knife. i DM'ed the girl who'd posted the tiktok on instagram, told her that he'd treated me badly in high school, and she said she'd been in contact with other girls too, that they had similar stories. i wondered if the girlfriend he'd slept with our senior year knew. i didn't want to reach out and ask her.
it was painful to realize that i was one in a string of girls he probably mistreated. even worse, at some deep part of me, it was painful in a different way to realize that i wasn't special, that i was one in a string of girls, period. i hadn't remembered it quite that way, but now that i think back i certainly was, and i certainly was not special: i was simply there, and available.
it's a bizarre experience, to find out that someone who you once cared about is a sexual predator. i'd written him off as a just a jerk. i'm not even sure if that sexual predator is the right term. i know now that he's probably not a very good person, and the more i try to remember how he behaved in high school, i come up with worse and worse events. i certainly wasn't very well behaved at that point in my life, driven half-mad by a combination of crippling social anxiety, teenage libido, and living with my parents. i probably hurt him, but nowhere on the same scale. i didn't expect that the hold he had on me would reverberate like this through my life, but i suppose it has. i don't know what to do with it.