Memoirs of an Insane Freshman Girl

Chapter 8: Parties

Chapter 8: Parties

My friend Miranda from Health class was having a birthday party at the Elk Lodge, and she invited me. I chose to wear a black Winnie-the-Pooh shirt over a black and white polka-dotted dress with my favorite black Eskimo boots. This outfit really has no importance on the night, except what happened afterwards with a conversation with my dad that really has little importance, but that’s okay. We all just hung out and waited for more people to arrive. At some point, I remember dancing to the country music playing in the background. When more people arrived, we took our seats at the table. There was a paper tablecloth that was meant t to be colored on or written on as there were boxes of crayons on the tables in the hopes of entertaining some of the younger kids there, I can only assume.

Of course, it entertained my friends as well. I cannot help but add in that Chris and I were not going out at this point, and in fact, it was questionable if Chris even knew that I liked him, but we will touch on that point later. Somehow someone let me use a crayon to write on the table—whoever allowed me to do such a thing should be shot, just kidding. Of course, at this point, I was head over heels obsessed with Chris. I couldn’t deny it—especially with the evidence graffiti-ed all over the tablecloth. Somewhere in the depths of my insane mind, I felt it necessary to write I Chris on the tablecloth. Of course, Miranda knew of my longing for Chris, but other people at the table didn’t necessarily know. If I didn’t want them to find out, I probably should have just stood on the table and shouted it. Then apparently in my insane mind, I found it necessary to write it again—and again and again and again and again. I don’t know what forces where at work in my mind, but I found some sort of perverse pleasure at writing I Chris over and over again all over a tablecloth. And of course, one of the guys who played football with Chris was sitting at the table, and he was like, You like Chris? (Hmmm . . . No! What would make you think that? Oh, the writing all over the table? My DOG is named Chris!) No, I didn’t try to deny it like that because it was obviously written all over my face. Every heart I drew between I and Chris made my heart jump. Yes, this sounds completely cheesy and corny, but I’m just the kind of crazy girl who would find pleasure in writing how she loves her crush all over a tablecloth for the world to see.

Trust me. That’s not the end of all the crazy and insane things I have done. Miranda’s parents had friends who were having a Halloween party a couple of weeks before Halloween, and Miranda invited me to go with her. It was just like the types of parties that I had over at my grandma’s house for holidays, except we never had a Halloween party. It was just basically a fun adult party. There wasn’t a bunch of drunken teenagers spilling all over the place—that’s what I’m trying to say. Backtracking a little bit, as previously stated, I joined facebook to talk to Chris more. We did talk, and then things got a little shaky between us after he had his girlfriend, and we really didn’t talk that much after that. Of course, I could hardly ignore him because he sat right behind me in Literature/Composition. Then there was the only day I’ve ever seen him sad. I had three classes with him first semester—geometry 3rd hour, Lit/Comp 5th hour, and keyboarding 7th hour—and he didn’t say one word the entire day. Of course, my first thought that day was that YES, HE FINALLY BROKE UP WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND!

Of course, that was very bitchy of me, but that’s what was going through my head. Also, another though was that he couldn’t have broken up with her. I didn’t think he could have. Of course, I had never met the girl, and I didn’t know how much they liked each other—and I really didn’t want to know, thank you very much. I just didn’t think Chris would have ever had the guts to actually do something like that. He was a very avoid-any-confrontation-and-problems kind of guy which made me mad a lot of times because when I wanted to yell at him, he was never there to be yelled at and take it like a man. Of course, I’m completely side-tracking from the situation at hand because the wanting-to-yell-at-him part didn’t happen as much until we started going out, but I will go back to him breaking up with his girlfriend. In fact, I didn’t even know that he broke up with her until several months into our relationship. We never talked about it because I didn’t ask—and I really didn’t want to know because that would make it hurt just that much more to talk about it to him.

Somehow in the depths of my insane mind, I just assumed she must have broken up with him—if his sadness wasn’t proof enough that he was affected by their breakup. I will never really know what went down between Chris and his girlfriend because I really don’t want to ask Chris because that would awkward, but my sources tell me that Chris broke up with her to go out with another girl. Actually, it’s kind of funny where I got my sources from because my girlfriend was talking to this girl who went to the same school as Chris’s ex-girlfriend, and the other girl was telling my girlfriend how Chris broke up with Chris’s ex-girlfriend for another girl. My girlfriend told me later that she was thinking, Yeah, I know the girl that he broke up with her for! Apparently, that was me. I never really believed that Chris liked me, though. I don’t know why I was in such denial, but it’s just that I couldn’t believe that a guy would like me—especially the guy that I really really liked. It was just proof that I had changed drastically from eighth grade year to freshmen year.

So basically, my point was that Chris had broken up with his girlfriend prior to this night. Also, that day Chris was sad, everyone kept asking him what was wrong. I knew what was wrong even though he didn’t say it or even imply it. I just somehow knew that that must be the cause of Chris’s depression because he was always telling jokes and saying stupid things that made people laugh. His quietness was just so very un-Chris-like. As I had joined facebook, Chris had his cell phone number posted on his webpage. I took the liberty of programming it into my address book and one night, actually texting him. Our texts weren’t really of any importance, but after that first night I text him, he came into keyboarding telling him how he was thinking about how he was going to text me before that. So it was safe to say that Chris and I had texted before this fateful night that wasn’t Halloween but a couple of weeks before Halloween actually.

For no reason in particular, I decided to text Chris. He had just gotten back from deer hunting, and we talked about that for a while. We talked about more things until I discovered a magical thing—the art of sending and receiving pictures via cell phone. When I had gotten my new phone around the beginning of the school year, I was stoked to find out that it was a camera phone. One night when I was spending the night over at Chelsea’s house, Chelsea decided to mess up my hair by making it stick up all over the place. Then she decided to steal my phone, and take a picture of me in all my hair disheveledness. For some reason that is beyond me, I decided to send Chris this picture of me via multimedia message. He said that he loved that picture because my hair was all messed up and not completely straight. Then he told me to un-straighten my hair; so, it wasn’t all completely perfect like it always was.

Until then, I had blew-dry my hair every day for school in the morning to straight perfection. Chris was the one that made me do my hair wavy about half the time and straight half the time. I still had some “perm juice” left in my hair if that makes any sense—my hair would still go wavy if I French-braided it the night before—so I would make my sister French-braid my hair the night before, and it would fall in beautiful waves down my back the next day, much to Chris’s pleasure. So that night, I sent Chris a couple of more pictures of Miranda and me and just me. For the Halloween party, I was a princess, wearing a pink sparkly dress and a tiara. Miranda was “half-naughty, half-nice” with an angel and devil theme splitting her in half.

Also, that night Chris and I had one of the most important conversations of our relationship—disregarding the fact that at this point, we weren’t exactly in a relationship. Of course, you must be wondering why I would take back—even though we were never technically together for me to “take him back”—after how much of an asshole he was. Yes, he flirted with me, and then poof, I find out about this girlfriend of his that’s not me. Yes, I know it sounds bad. And no, I’m not one of those desperate girls who just has to have a boyfriend because as previously stated, as of this point, I had never had a boyfriend—I will continue to reiterate that David doesn’t count. There was just something between Chris and me, some kind of connection I can’t explain. And just to clarify a little, if Chris ever did cheat on me, I would never take him back. I would dump that boy’s so fast he wouldn’t even see it coming. I don’t know why, but somehow, I knew Chris would never cheat on me when we were in a relationship. He just wasn’t the type of guy going after a bunch of girls—he made it pretty darn clear that the only girl he wanted was me. But back to this huge Chris-and-his-girlfriend debacle that put up a wall in between us. After I found out about his girlfriend, as I said, I was angry, but I couldn’t hate him. Of course, I hated the girlfriend—every girl does. This night was the night Chris explained that the “girlfriend” was his previous girlfriend, and he thought she moved to North Carolina—I think it was North Carolina, but I wouldn’t bet on it because I basically tried to block out that portion of my pathetic life—so they broke up, but then she came back or something like that. I don’t really know all the details, and I really don’t want to know them or dwell on this fact any longer than is necessary. Of course, you must be thinking he’s just a lying asshole. I’m not making excuses for him because that was wrong of him, but he’s just not the type to cheat on his girlfriend. That’s why Chris and I basically ignored each other—to the best of both of our abilities, of course, it didn’t work the entire time since we were so attracted to each other—when he had a girlfriend because we both knew that if we started talking, then we would start flirting, and we wouldn’t be able to stop. But no, it wasn’t all smooth sailing after Chris broke up with his girlfriend. In fact, I think it was worse after the fact than during the month of the “girlfriend”.

That night, I continued texting Chris, even when Miranda fell asleep on the couch sometime before midnight. Chris was asking me if my phone could receive pictures, but my battery was so low that it couldn’t at the time. I had been running on low battery for an hour before my phone finally shut off, after close to four hours of correspondence between Chris and me via texting. It was mildly amusing to the other party guests that a girl, me, would sit on a couch for four hours—I actually only sat on the couch for about two and a half hours because I was walking around outside and upstairs texting Chris, too—texting one guy until her phone died of no battery life. Several of the partygoers offered their phones for my use, but I politely refused because I had already told Chris that my phone had low battery; so, it’s not like he would have thought I just decided not to talk to him anymore that night or anything like that. In fact, if I had accepted someone else’s phone to text Chris, I wouldn’t have known Chris’s phone number. I know most girls memorize their crush’s number immediately, but I never really did until a few months into our relationship. I had always had Chris in my phone book; so, I just tapped on his name without ever having to really know the number. Besides that, that Halloween party was definitely a success in Chris’s and my relationship. In fact, the next day when I went home after spending the night at Miranda’s house, after I charged my phone, we texted nonstop the whole day, also. Apparently, neither of us really had any lives. That day, Chris sent me pictures of him riding home from somewhere in his car, and I still have that one picture of him that’s my favorite of him sticking his tongue out in a very silly manner.

That was not the end of my October Halloween experiences. One of friends from my catholic grade school, Heather, was also having a Halloween party a week or so before the actual day of Halloween—as of Halloween was during the school week. Let me tell you a thing or two about the parties that I attend. I’m not a “party” girl, if it must be said. I’m going to travel back in time a little while to before freshmen year to clarify motives and actions happening in said freshmen year that this story is actually about. Okay, so eighth grade was full of all-class parties, meaning the entire class of sixty-some students were invited. I must say that in eighth grade, if someone was having a party, I wasn’t necessarily going to be invited. In fact, unless it was an all-class party or one of my few close friends throwing it, the odds were that I wasn’t going to be invited. Actually, I really didn’t have a problem with that because I really didn’t like most of my classmates in eighth grade because they seemed to find joy in making fun of me. But that aside because times were much better in freshmen year, it seemed that a lot of people had all-class birthday parties and also all-class graduation parties during the summer.

There is one party in particular that I must describe. So one of the “popular” guys was throwing a graduation party, and none of my best girlfriends could go. I still wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go by myself because I didn’t really talk to that many people from our graduating class. Going against my usual self, I decided to attend. I arrived at this guy’s house, and I sat around listening to other people’s conversations. I wasn’t a complete, total social outcast; I just really didn’t have anything to say to these people. When I say, these people, I mean the people I usually don’t talk to because I really didn’t have that much in common with them, and I had spend most of grade school life separating myself from them; so, neither of us would be in this awkward situation. Of course, it wasn’t awkward for them because they would just as easily politely ignore me, and go talk to someone who actually wanted to talk to them because they were friends. Even though my night’s enjoyment seemed dim, it turned out a pretty decent night. At some point, when we were all roasting marshmallows for s’mores, someone threw one in this one guy’s hair. He went around the front of the house to wash his hair off with the hose. Another guy wanted his phone out of his pocket because he wanted to take a picture of said marshmallow-hair guy because it was funny except he had marshmallow all over his hands because he had been attacked by marshmallows, also, except it was mostly over the back of his shirt. Marshmallow-shirt-hands guy asked his guy friend to get his phone out of his pocket, but then decided against it because it would be kind of awkward for a guy to reach into another guy’s pocket. Marshmallow-shirt-hands guy asked if a girl would get his phone out of his pocket. I just happened to be standing next to him, watching the spectacle of marshmallow-hair guy hosing his hair off; so, I reached into marshmallow-shirt-hands guy’s pocket and retrieved his cell for him. In some sort of demented part of my mind, I somehow started liking marshmallow-shirt-hands guy after that night for really no reason at all except for my demented state of mind that seemed to carry on all through eighth grade.

Just to throw this completely useless information out there, I have to say that I never really liked a guy in eighth grade. When I go back and think about it, sure, I liked guys, but it was always guyS. As in, plural, always more than one guy. I swear, I never liked only one guy the entire year. I was a little immature girl—I’m rolling my eyes now thinking about the things I did and the guys I liked—because I only liked the “popular” guys, except I didn’t really like them. No, I didn’t like them because I didn’t even know them. I just realized that I knew Chris better in a week’s time than I did the guys I had spent three to nine years with in school. Of course, it wasn’t expected that I was supposed to get to know a guy that much in say, third grade because apparently boys had cooties. In fact, I never really talked to guys that much until around seventh grade. Even then, my ratio of girls to guys was completely unbalanced. Really, it wasn’t until freshmen year that I even had any close guy friends.

In fact, at any given time, I liked a minimum of four guys. Really, I couldn’t possibly like any of those guys because I rarely talked to them—and when I did, it was about a math problem or something our social studies teacher said. In fact, there was this one guy—who actually attends McCluer North right now and in fact, ignores me, but I mutually ignore him back; so, it works out perfectly—who sat next to me in math class. We had assigned seats; so, I sat next to this guy. Our math teacher had notes up on the overhead projector that we were supposed to copy at the beginning of class. Then she had example problems, and at the end of class, we would work on our homework. Okay, I know this may sound strange, but this guy asked me for help on every single problem. No, not an occasional problem here and there, every day—every single problem. This kind of concerned me because we were in 8-1—meaning, the more “advanced” class, not advanced per se, but just the “top half” of eighth graders in the department of mathematics. So my thoughts were that either this guy actually liked me and wanted an excuse to talk to me, or he was really stupid. In fact, I carried on my little eighth grade life actually thinking this guy liked me until one day, I woke up and realized that this guy really was just stupid and needed me to explain every single problem to him.

In fact, as eighth grade was full of parties, eighth grade was also full of guy misunderstandings. Somehow, I always made myself falsely believe that a guy liked me because he actually talked to me—this wasn’t completely far-fetched from plausible because guys did rarely talk to me. There was this one guy who now attends a catholic high school who I liked for the three years that I knew him. The only time I ever talked to him was those few months I sat next to him in math—I must note that this is a completely different guy from stupid-guy-who-asked-me-for-help-on-every-problem-and-really-needs-to-find-a-brain. I added Mr. Math Guy #2—a.k.a Pepper, the nickname Chelsea and I gave him because he was just so hot he made us sneeze, like pepper does—to my myspace friends, and I began messaging him using a fake name because I didn’t want to put my real name on the internet. Eventually, I told him it was me, but that just made it even worse. Let’s just say I really don’t want to dwell on those times either because my patheticness doesn’t really get any worse than that. (And yes, Pepper as a nickname is a winner in the book of lameness—don’t even ask, except the funny thing is that he wasn’t even that hot, actually not at all. I think our little middle school brains were tampered with or something that made us have selective eyesight.) Chelsea and I actually came up with more nicknames for the ever-growing population of guys we liked. Chelsea was just as fickle as I was in determining the guy she liked. I usually liked a guy because I somehow convinced myself he liked me or someone else told me that he liked me. In fact, I never really started liking a guy before he supposedly liked me even though it was all illusions and mirages with my mind fooling myself into thinking that; so, as my ex-best friend once said, I was always setting myself up for heartbreak. Of course, I never really liked any of those guys, and they never liked me; so, I was never heartbroken. As of my ex-best friend, she has not been mentioned in this story so far, and she really has no importance in the progression of this plot for freshmen year because we stopped talking during eighth grade year; so, therefore, she will never be mentioned from here on forward.

Of course, this whole synopsis of eighth grade has nothing to do with my experiences during freshmen, except that it really does. If I hadn’t gone through all that crap in eighth grade, then I would have been a completely different girl coming into freshmen year. Back to parties during eighth grade, I really wasn’t the most socially at ease girl—as in, I wasn’t the type of girl to go up and start a conversation, I still didn’t really talk that much to people I had known for nine years. I attended all the parties that I was invited to in an effort to actually be accepted. In the end, that never worked out which is why I was a completely changed girl for freshmen year because I was done trying to impress people and make people like me. I was just going to be myself, and if people didn’t like that, then that was their loss.

Every night before a party, I always had a dream about the guy I liked at the moment. He was going to approach me and tell me his true feelings, taking me in arms and kissing me. Of course, this was fantasy and fantasy only. Of course, the dreams never came true, but I still dreamed a variation of the same dream with a different guy placed in the perfect scenario depending on who I was crushing on that day. So to say the least, from eighth grade to freshmen year, I had definitely changed, especially in the fact that I didn’t dream anything about falling in love with any guys the night before the Halloween party Heather was hosting. Of course, part of it must have been that my heart was already taken with a certain blonde-headed, golden-eyed boy named Chris. Really, there were no astounding events that occurred at that party. I mostly hung out with my best friend Chelsea and my other best friend Ashley who had sadly moved to O’Fallon for freshmen year, but who we still hung out with because we love her. The really only interesting thing that happened the whole night was when I was sitting on the couch next to Heather’s future boyfriend—neither of them knew it at the time—and my phone started vibrating. I must note that since I was a princess, I was wearing a pink sparkly dress, and; therefore, I had nowhere to stash my ever-important cell phone. Therefore, my phone was stuffed away in my bra; so, when I produced a vibrating phone from my bra, Heather’s future boyfriend just looked at me like I was deranged—which isn’t completely far-fetched considering all my insanity. Just as a completely unrelated side note, I have to say that once in my literature/composition class, some guys decided to color half of a guy’s shoe with black sharpie. One of my girlfriends said that it looked like the product of a sharpie. I interestingly enough piped in with a witty comment of and a bunch of mentally deranged teenage boys. That really has no effect or importanceo on anything I’ve been talking about, but I thought it was funny; so, I decided to insert it.

Also, this one guy named Sam happened to call me that night at one point. Sam had called me once before after we had talked on facebook a while. He was the guy who had messaged me saying he thought I was cute even though I had probably never seen him before. He was correct in saying that I had never seen him before because I had never even acknowledged his existence. This was after I broke up with David, and Sam also asked why I broke up with David considering he was a friend of David’s. I never really told him the truth as to why I broke up with David. Sure, I was trying to make Chris jealous, but that wasn’t all. I just got bored of David. If I had really liked David, I wouldn’t have gotten bored of him. I never got bored of Chris. Any of the guys that tried to flirt with me I quickly became bored of because they were really all the same in my eyes. Of course, that is completely judgmental and sexist to think that all guys are the same, but I have to say that I projected quite an interesting image of any guy who liked me.

The truth is that I hated any guy who liked me. Even when Chris and I weren’t going out, I still hated any guy who liked me. Chris was the only guy I liked, the only guy I wanted; so, I became easily irritated by guys that tried to hit on me and flirt with me because I just wanted to scream, I already like a guy, and it’s not you! There is definitely proof of me hating any guy who liked me during my physical systems year, as I demonstrated with Mike and how I yelled at him for bugging me all the time. Even when Chris and I were going out, guys still liked me. Sure, I know that sounds conceited, but it’s true. I’m sure none of them really liked me because none of them really got to know me—pretty much because I didn’t let them get to know me because I didn’t want them to know me because my heart was already taken—but they just wanted to show how manly they could be or something that they could get a girl as “hot” as me to go out with them. Of course, you must be wondering why I didn’t want to talk to any other guys when I liked Chris. It probably still had something to do with my eighth grade derangement where I thought that talking to a guy meant that he liked me, but that wasn’t it. The thing was that I did talk to guys—mostly Derek and Kevin, who I will explain the situations of later—but I didn’t like talking to guys that would just try to flirt with me all the time. Most of them didn’t even care that I had a boyfriend, Chris, because they would still “get with me”, which just turned me off to them so much more. My solution to this problem of endless stalking and flirting of guys who I didn’t want to talk to was to blatantly ignore them.

My last and final Halloween party was at a girl’s house from Incarnate Word Academy who was friends with my best friend Chelsea. I had hung out with the girl a couple of times before when Chelsea invited me to a couple Incarnate mixers and other events. The funny thing was the guys I talked to in my Spanish class first semester asked me what I was doing for Halloween, and I was told them the truth, I was going to a party. They thought it was something big, but it turned out only a half dozen or so of us girls hanging out. We went trick-or-treating, and I was a fairy for the actual Halloween night because while my room was completely messy, I had stepped on my princess tiara and broken it into a dozen pieces. In fact, on the actual day of Halloween, I was sick. My throat was killing me; so, my mom let me stay home from school. It was kind of funny because that was the first day I had ever stayed home from school during freshmen year, and then I went to a party that night. I wasn’t like deathly sick, but it would have been nicer not being sick. It was a really fun time playing hide-and-go-seek in the dark and just hanging out, trading our candy. I’m glad I didn’t go to some big party with a bunch of people I didn’t know because I had a lot of fun just hanging out with my girls.