Junior High Years
There’s a new girl at church. We’ll call her...maybe, Heather.
Meeting another girl could not be more scripted. If his mom met her first then she’s “cute”, but, well, if Nick meets her first then she’s subject to FBI background check, which is just not worth it. If there’s an initial conversation then it seems hopeful, for something, God knows what, and then that’s generally about the extent of it. Sometimes it seems there needs to be more, God knows what, and in this case he finds himself looking for it under every rock till his spyglass starts down another trail.
Many many times though it’s just that haunting, after being in the same room with her a few times, even if no eye contact, an undefined yet wistful knowing, sometimes nagging...awareness? But, what to do?
Once in a while there’s some sort of visual, like, well, not so much tight jeans, but those looser fabrics, if they drape just right on her backside as she walks and there’s a jiggle, oohh, maybe on her hips, or the lobe of her buttocks that it catches just right. But that usually only applies to the confident, mainstream babes who soar like eagles in a different realm and speak an entirely different language. Moving on.
What are the words, what does this situation want him to do about it? The most unlikely ones seem to share that secret shame, the burny kind, just makes you wanna rub it all out in the shower once and for all but it keeps coming back, dammit. But then, it seems the ones that trigger the burny stuff tend to be the kind that are a little too confident with guys and smell like a hint of cigarette smoke, and maybe the rumors that they have experience to share.
The vibe is often the worst part, that uneasy, yeah, awareness, the overachieving daemon of empathy with its overloaded, half-baked sense of anticipation, expectation and excitement for something that never seems to materialize, at least into anything worthwhile. Some girls you can be friends with and there’s not much intrigue, but who needs the intrigue? When there’s intrigue she’ll talk to you for a while then move on, get quiet, is she listening or just fickle? They always let it linger, waiting for you to make a move.
For some it’s not knowing what to say, but what if you just don’t feel like it?
That’s just it; she expects you to speak a language – do you have to be born with it, like some NVRAM chip programmed at the factory? Tim sure as hell doesn’t have that, given his luck.
Other than that, blossoming intrigue can be good for novelty, but it gives way to a lot of waiting and little to engineer, except, ultimately, disappointment.
And so Heather mingles some with the other girls, sits with her parents, and may or may not throw a vibe of sorts that hints she’s interested, or curious, whatever. This goes on for a few weeks until she’s just not around anymore for whatever reason, along with her family if that’s the case.
Then sooner or later, at one level or another, it begins. All over again.
- - - - -
One summer Wednesday night finds Nick at the back of the sanctuary during a prayer meeting, which makes him engaged by association despite drawing a schematic on the back of some paper from the announcement rack.
There aren’t enough teens for a teen group so this is the default. The only others near his age are seated at the other end of the pew. There’s the compact, curly-haired and bespectacled Tanya along with her punk cohort Gin (don’t ever call her Ginger…) and their endless cacophony of giggling.
For Nick this situation is purely a familiarity fix. He’d pretty much grown up at this building at least twice a week since his mom had found victory around his forth birthday, as the story goes, with Ned finding, well, evidently some purpose more than anything else. The air was always crisp and cool, the water fountain equally so, and it all triggered a Pavlovian craving for Double Mint gum. Nick had given up on bugging Ned to switch to what Tim dubbed as Juicy Fart, since it wasn’t strong enough. Plus, by now Nick was getting the hint that Devil Mint had played a big part in Ned kicking the cigarettes a while back and so, yeah.
But tonight there was no gum, and no Tim (who as usual found an alternative source of spiritual enlightenment) but just the giggling They didn’t look his way, far as he knew, or cared. One time a rather ragged fellow came in toward the end of a service, presumably to see the pastor about some practical help in some form, and sat in the next to last pew. At the end all were to stand and Nick was a tad embarrassed at the way the duo burst into laughter – presumably at the fellow’s disproportionately large head, which would only be amusing in a different context. Didn’t they have any sense of dignity?
All this tended to negate anything interesting about either of them. That Gin seemed to constantly be at war with herself and half of everyone else, although she filled out her denim nicely, although Nick could never figure out what color her cropped and moussed hair was trying to be since the ends were often darker than the roots. Then Tanya...not Tonya, with the reliable O, of which there were many at school, actually has a nice pouty figure. She tends to wear those well matched outfits that make it tempting to sneak a feel, but thanks to his older brother’s indiscretions over the years Nick has an idea what kind of war that would start.
But her snotty attitude most of the time, especially around certain others – well, except his own mother who nudges him to be nicer to Tanya.
“Maybe you could meet her at the diary stand, it would be fun.”
Bleh.