Homecoming dance

I got the Eau Fresh cologne in the mail yesterday. It’s the discontinued drugstore perfume that I bought to wear to the Homecoming Dance my junior year of high school. Other than the box and paper padding reeking of stale cigarettes, it was just as I remembered. It’s funny how scents can take one right back to a certain time. The smell of Eucalyptus leaves always reminds me of riding my bike (I didn’t have a car) on my way to and from classes at UCSB.

Anyway, it’s not a scent I think I’d buy now, but it’s special to me.

See, I was actually in love with this boy. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was. Or, at least as much as one can be at that age. I was not a woman of the world by any means. Naïve is what I was. Inexperienced.

When I’d met him my first year in high school, I thought I couldn’t stand him. I had lots of friends who were boys, I had a brother, but no one made me as self-conscious and as uncomfortable as this boy did. He sensed this in some way, and teased me relentlessly. He was a real player at school, and dated everyone but me. Looking back, this probably meant something, but at the time it was not comforting.

He was not what anyone would call handsome in the traditional sense. He had something more than that. Charisma. He could and usually did, charm anyone into doing whatever he wanted. He loved being the center of attention (just as I did), and was successful at it. He was smart, and challenged me. He loved words as much as I did.

Over the years we developed a friendship of sorts; albeit a competitive one. By 16 I had the first major crush of my life. As for him, I can’t exactly say. I think he was more comfortable putting me into the “annoying kid sister” role, but every once in a while, he slipped and showed he cared more than that for me than perhaps he wanted to.

Anyway, about a week before the dance, I called him to talk about going out to dinner with some other friends before heading off to the decorated school cafeteria, and he had completely forgotten the “little high school dance.” I was crushed. I had built all my hopes on this one night; imagining his being floored by my beauty and poise, and he hadn’t even remembered we were going.

Then I got sick. Two nights before the dance, I had a fever of 102. My mother said there was no way I was going to get better enough to go to the dance. I was crushed yet again.

However, my will was stronger than the virus, and by Friday afternoon, my temperature was normal. Mom said if it didn’t go up again in the next 24 hours, I could go. Yahoo!

Dinner was at a fancy restaurant that burned down several years ago; I can’t remember the name now. Seven couples ended up going together, and dinner was great. Mostly great. All of a sudden, the boy who treated me much of the time as a pest had decided to have manners.

And decided my manners weren’t good enough. He yelled at me when I tried to open the car door on my own (never mind that I opened my door every Sunday when he gave me a ride to church), corrected me at the dinner table when I was putting the vegetables from my plate onto my friend’s plate, and told me that I was too loud when talking across the table.

Yeah, I guess that part wasn’t too good. But it was weird. He had never acted like this before with me. I couldn’t figure it out. Even in hindsight, almost 30 years later, can’t quite get a handle on it. I mean, I don’t think I embarrassed him that much, but it’s possible. Calm has never been a word that described me…