Dirty Nails

His nails were dirty.

I hate dirty nails. After greasy hair and fake nails it’s my biggest pet peeve.

It’s ironic that his nails were the first thing I noticed about him, because besides his nails he was pretty much the most perfect person I’d ever known. His hair was cut short, but not too short, his eyes were piercing blue but not so blue that it scared me, his mouth was perfectly shaped and his body was absolutely breath-taking. It was hard to think about his nails once you got a look at the rest of him.

I don’t remember how I started talking to him… and it’s actually quite a miracle that I did. You see, I was notoriously shy, but he had a way about him that made it easy to relax around him. Everyone knew it too, and everyone wanted to be around him, including me. Whenever I noticed that there were one too many girls for my liking that were collecting around him, I just remembered his dirty nails… mostly that helped very little or not at all, but sometimes it took my mind away from the hopelessness of the situation.

Occasionally he caught my eye and tossed me a smile that made my insides clench and all of my teenage hormones swirl through my blood stream making me red in the face. Mostly though, he just laughed and talked with his friends.

The problem was that he was amazing, talented and attractive, while I remained completely and utterly ordinary. I had perfected the skill of subtly letting my long blonde hair fall over my forest green eyes and effectively disappearing from the realm of importance. Most people didn’t even take into account that I was in the room… It’s not that I didn’t have any friends. As a matter of fact I have quite a few very good friends, just not the kind of friends that people like him notice very much.

The friends we had were another problem entirely. He was friends with totally different people than me, and in high school, groups of friends as different as ours were didn’t mesh well together.

Nevertheless, like so many of my previous crushes I was determined to let this one slide. Another skill that I had perfected was the skill of telling myself so many times that I did not have a crush on someone that I very obviously did, and before I knew it, my heart responded to my brain and my crush was completely gone.

A few weeks later I realized that this was not going to be the case with him. Every time I saw him my heart skipped a beat and my insides clenched. Every time he saw me, he smiled brilliantly, and my crush would start all over again… possibly even stronger than before.

I caught myself daydreaming in class, something that I’d never done before… I didn’t even dream during the night, so daydreaming was completely out of character for me. We had Spanish class together, and sat beside each other. I don’t know why he sat beside me, he had other friends in the class, but he seemed to enjoy sitting next to me. He would tease me incessantly about my terrible accent; I would retaliate and tease him about his dirty fingernails. There was no way I could tease him about his accent because he came from Spain and it was flawless.

Finally, tired of torturing myself, I started giving him subtle hints that I wanted to be more than just friends with him. Unfortunately, subtlety was beyond him, and all my attempts went completely ignored. Now you have to realize that beyond the point of subtle hints, I was in uncharted territory. So, I took the easy way out and just decided that he probably wasn’t into me.

However, instead of backing off me, I noticed some changes that were about as subtle as I was being. When he was with his friends his eyes would dart over to me more often and he would occasionally wave instead of just smiling. The hugs he gave me lasted longer than they did at first and there was a new shine in his eyes when he looked at me that wasn’t there before, or at least I had never noticed it before.

Emboldened by this, I decided that it might be time to start giving less subtle hints. I started brushing his arm “accidentally” or even winking at him when I was feeling especially risky. To my amazement, he responded accordingly. When I winked at him, he would blush and smiled slyly at me. When I brushed his arm he would be sure later on to touch my arm gently while he was telling me something.

It was then that I realized that he would give as much as I did. This was a complete revelation to me because as far as I was concerned my experience had been that the man would initiate things. That was how all the fairy tale princesses got their men. This was proving false as I watched him respond to me according to how fast I was willing to take things.

One day, I decided that I’d had enough. We were in our separate groups of friends; going through the same routine… he would look up at me every few minutes, I would smile at him… finally I did what I had been wanting to do for a long time now. I stood up, a little shakily and marched across the room trying to exude as much confidence as I could. I walked right up to his group of friends and in front of all of them I asked him if I could be his girl friend. There was a moment of absolutely stunned silence, in which I had the horrifying thought that he would laugh at me in front of everyone, and then he gave me the biggest smile that I had ever seen on him and said that yes of course, and then he asked me why it had taken so long before he engulfed me in a huge hug.

In that happy moment I knew that it didn’t matter that I was ordinary, it didn’t matter that he had dirty nails, and it didn’t matter that we had different groups of friends, all that mattered was that we were together