One afternoon when I was in the sixth grade, a girl picked a fight with me. I remember I was standing in front of the middle school waiting for the bus when it happened. She just approached me and for no good reason started giving me problems—and she wanted to trade blows.
Now, you’re probably thinking, “So what, a girl picks a fight with you? You can handle yourself.” Right, but this girl, who I’ll call Val, was big, bigger than I was by weight, and she was tough. She had a streetwise attitude, and people were scared of her.
I told Val I wasn’t going to fight her, but I didn’t stand down to her, either. I probably made some wise-ass remark. In fact, it was my wise-ass attitude, or rather the one I was known for, that probably irritated her so much in the first place. We wound up not fighting, but the interaction that day did make me fearful of her.
Anyway, skip ahead a few months, and I’m standing in one of the middle school hallways waiting for my next class to begin. An acquaintance of mine, someone in a grade above me, comes up to me and says he’s got a question for me. Naturally, I ask what it is.
“What do you think of Val?” he says.
“Val, you mean 7th grade Val?” I say.
“Yeah. Do you like her?”
“Do I like her? No, I’ve never thought that.”
“Because she likes you. She wanted me to tell you that she likes you and she wants to go out with you.”
I was truly shocked. The girl who wanted to beat me up a few months prior now likes me? I didn’t know what to say.
“Um, I’m not sure about that.”
“Is it OK if she talks to you today? She wants to talk to you.”
I said OK, and later in the day Val came over to me and asked me if her friend (the acquaintance) had spoken to me. She then asked me what I thought of what he said. I don’t remember what I said, but I felt very intimidated, so when Val asked me if I would go out with her—if I would be her boyfriend—I said yes. I gave her my number and walked away stunned.
That evening Val called me at my house. Though all the details I have thus far related, admittedly, have been kind of hazy, I clearly remember one thing Val asked me during this phone call. (I even remember where I was when she asked it. I was in the bathroom. I have no idea why I was in the bathroom, and even weirder was the lights off. I mean, it wasn’t pitch-black in there, moonlight was coming through the window, but it was dark.)
Anyway, this was the question she asked me: “Now that we’re dating, how far do you think we’ll go?”
Of course what she meant was “Do you think we’ll just kiss, or will there be heavy petting or even sex?”
I told her that I didn’t know—a fuzzy answer that betrayed my true feelings, which were that I didn’t like Val and now felt between a rock and a hard place.
I’m sure you can kind of figure out where things went next, but if you can’t, I’ll help you. After getting off the phone, I realized that what I was doing was crazy, and I needed to break it off.
So the next day that’s exactly what I did. I can’t remember the details of the break-up, only that I was completely sure that it was what I wanted. I also know Val didn’t threaten me or anything like that. It was just the end.
Except that it wasn’t the end. The end was a few years later when I found out that Val had died. There were rumors that her death was due to a drug overdose, or that a drug she had taken had precipitated a medical emergency. But, again, all I have are rumors.
Every now and then I’ll think about Val. It’s strange to think that a person who once found you special is no longer of this earth. I still wonder why she wanted to fight me. Were her actions some warped way of showing that she was interested in me? Who knows. What I do know is that I wish that life hadn’t ended for her so quickly and that she would have been able to enjoy it with someone who cared for her.
