The
girl I really wanted to date was a girl from my hometown that was
pretty good looking and pretty fierce. She was highly opinionated and
was not remotely afraid of letting all and sundry know what she
thought and exactly how much she thought it. I had kind of had a
thing for her on and off since the third grade. For most of that time
I was well out of her league but there was a time my Junior year when
we were hanging out with some mutual friends that some second level
flirtation went on that made me think I may be able to finally make a
move. We had driven up to the top of a local mountain and snuck into
the radio relay tower and climbed up to the top and on the way home
she and I sat together in the back seat. We were on a very curvy road
and I was exaggerating the g-force around the turns to squish into
her and the others in the back seat. She was playing along and was
squishing back when the forces demanded it from her side. When we got
down to a level road I leaned against her and she played with my hair
which was pretty long at the time. Whoops! I wrote that last part
wrong it should read, '. . . pretty and long.' Double conditioning
was the key. At the time I was after another girl and she was kind of
dating someone so nothing came of it but the experience gave me
ideas. Now that we were a ways into our senior year she had been
dating a kid that I would call a bit of a steaming pile of human
garbage. Well, I would call him that if I was not as considerate of
others as I am. I had been jealous of him like I was of all of those
rish kids who didn't appreciate the luxuries I could only dream of.
We were in a group of mutual friends that gave me opportunity to run
a little anti-boyfriend static and I did anytime and every time I
could. About Christmas break she had broken up with him because he
was a turd and he started telling everyone that he had broken up with
her because she was 'tight' – slang in our high school for a girl
unwilling to put out sexually. I swooped in to take the chance to woo
her but my best friend then and still my best friend to this day had
the same idea. The chess game of trying to gain her favor while
passive-aggressively trying to sabotage each other had begun.
