When I was in ninth grade I started collecting key chains for some
reason I cannot recall. I think I may have acquired one by
happenstance and then decided to run with it until I had hundreds in
a huge ball. My passing fascination with key chains coincided with a
fascination with a girl from my home town that I had not really
noticed before but all of the sudden started paying a lot of
attention to me and that can make anyone more attractive. She had
just broke up with an older boyfriend who was a little abusive and
she had the easy physical contact of a kid from a large family that
is used to sitting really close to someone and not thinking anything
of it. I really liked the way she smelled, like warm vanilla candy,
and I really liked all of the attention she was paying me. She
noticed I was collecting key chains and every day she would bring me
another one for my collection. She did this for weeks on end and
where she came up with them all I don't know and maybe don't want to
know. After several weeks of sitting next to each other on the bus
and getting key chains I felt the relationship was ready to go to the
next level and we should move in together. I didn't have a
locker-mate and she was not really interested in keeping hers so we
moved all of her stuff in and started doing annoyingly cute sweet
things. Between every class whomever got to the locker first would
hold it open and wait for the slower partner and have a cute little
chat and then walk as far to the next class as we reasonably could
together. At some point our locker was overflowing with a volleyball sized clump of key chains and it was time for the ball to move on so I
took it home and decided I should ask this girl to be my girlfriend
for reals. This is how tragically anxious I was though, I was still
too nervous to ask her out because I was not sure what she would say.
I decided to take it slow and see what happened but my plan was to
'ask her out' which was junior high jargon for not much changes.
