As a freshman in college she loved to have a good healthy crush. She wasn't interested in a boyfriend, and inevitably scared off any potential suitors due to her social awkwardness and lack of awesomeness. But a crush? That she was good at - a professional really. The beauty of a good crush was that it was the perfect amount of fun, excitement, and commitment. She pretended she wasn't interested in relationships. Those were messy. And the long-term relationship thing? She'd tried that. She much preferred talking about boys that had no idea she existed and whose names she wouldn't dream of finding out.
Reader, let's not assume she was a flirt. Flirting would actually involved talking to a boy, which was outside of her realm. To her, the perfect love affairs were completely one sided and only happened from a minimum of twenty feet away. Every relationship consisted of exactly zero exchanged words, and if by some drastic mistake she was forced to talk to a crush...she would turn ten shade of crimson, sweat from her knees, then rush into the parking lot to duck behind parked cars. That was the way she liked it. It was her version of extreme sports.
Over pints of ice cream her girlfriends would complain about their boyfriends, but she would have nothing but loving words to say about her crushes. She would give her crushes names, like "corduroy pants boy" or "news editor boy" or "hotty scotty" and would talk about what they did that day that gave her such pleasure. Maybe it was tripping up the stairs at the library, or eating an entire order of nachos at the snack bar. She was easily smitten...and not at all particular.
Her crushes were, by society's standards, atypical. They were the boys no one else noticed. They were the boys her friends tried to talk her out of liking. They wore second hand clothing and danced without abandon at parties. They smiled at all the right times and had just the right amount of social awkwardness to make them irresistible.
Then she met Phillipe.* Phillipe was nice and funny and worried about things like prepackaged food that used too much plastic. He played frisbee football, had insanely hairy legs, and probably never showered, but she was smitten. Phillipe became "long haired boy."
Phillipe didn't know of her crush. He couldn't have known. That would clearly ruin everything. She tried to keep it cool while still admiring his flowing locks of hair, but her plan backfired when she found out that she actually liked Phillipe as a person. At night she would bring him and his roommate leftover rolls from her luxurious job waiting tables at Bob Evans. He would bring her and her friends leftover "mistakes" from his job delivering pizzas. They would all sit in their dorm rooms listening to Indigo Girls and devising dangerous plans that involved jumping the train that ran through campus. What was once a crush gradually sprouted into a full-blown friendship, and that is where the catastrophic mistake happened. Because readers, nothing ruins a good crush like friendship.
Eventually Phillipe's high school girlfriend enrolled at the university, and their group of friends became so close that her crush fizzled down into a burning heap of endearing friendship. It didn't help that she began to notice how he never showered and how his legs were super hairy.
The girl was far from heartbroken. New crushes continued to come onto the scene in drips and drabs. She prepared herself for a summer away and her sophomore year.
She could sense that exciting things were edging their way into her future. She knew that the next year would bring new adventures with Phillipe, their friends, and his roommate... Dustin.
(to be continued...) Read on Part 2 Here...
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
*The name has been changed in order to 1. make it sound way more sexy, and 2. to save the writer from total and utter embarrassment, although anyone who knew her in college would likely know exactly to whom she is referring.
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