Does everybody remember having crushes in high school? If not, you're missing out on a lot. I'm not saying it's all good, but you are definitely missing something... the way you place your crush on a pedestal and won't acknowledge that her boyfriend's anything more than a good looking shell with no brain inside... the way you can actually be entertained just watching her do anything at all, just because you've convinced yourself that nobody's ever going to come close to her... the way your friend stole some of her magazines as a present to you without consulting you first... the way you've been trying to make up with her for 9 months now... I suppose having crushes in high school is just the hormones' way of telling anybody who's single against their will that life has a set of rules television won't teach you. Well surprise, surprise... I'm 15 and I'm going to be talking about the love story that never happened.

I knew this girl back in 5th grade. She didn't have the most beautiful smile, she wasn't everybody's friend, and quite frankly she was stuck-up. Meet Kristi. I made fun of her whenever I could find a way. I can remember this one brief conversation we had... "Everything happens for a reason." "Then why are you here?" "Because my parents wanted a very beautiful, talented child." "Accidents do happen."

We were both brats. Let's see... one time during sustained silent reading, the teacher left the room to Xerox some worksheets...

Random Voice #1: "Will you shut up?"
Random Voice #2: "You shut up!"
Random Voice #3: "Hey! Shut up, both of you."
Me: "I can feel the love in this room."
Kristi: "Shut up, Stevie Wonder."

Such a loving friendship could never last, though. We ended up going to different schools for 3 years. Then we met up again in our freshmen year. By this time, she'd befriended most of everybody at her middle school and I'd established myself as the smartest kid at my school, leaving her with tons of friends and, consequently, a sparkling personality, and me with a nerdy reputation and, consequently, 5 or 6 friends, most of whom knew nobody outside of our circle. So now there was this complete reversal... she was popular, I wasn't.

We had 2 classes together: German and physics. We ended up sitting across from each other in physics. On the first day, we went from ex-arch rivals to talkative acquaintances. By the end of the first week, I had a crush on her. Hey... she was pretty, smart, outgoing, funny... and best of all, she sat across from me in a class. What better reasons are there to have a crush on somebody? That was a Friday that I decided I had a crush on her. By the following Monday, she had a boyfriend.

I spent the next year attempting to flirt with her, hating her boyfriend, and, with the thought of failure at the back of my mind, at least trying to become a good friend. At the end of freshman year, she told me that guys never write anything creative in yearbooks... that it's always, "Hi, had a good year, have a nice summer, bye." I decided to prove her wrong. Hey... I wrote a journal entry about her at least twice a week, so this wasn't going to be hard at all. I filled an entire page in rather small print over the course of at least 15 minutes. I can only clearly remember one line from it. "If we're not best friends by the end of high school, we're wasting our youth." The schoolyear ended, and, sadly, summer had to follow. 3 months away from Kristi. 3 months to be obsessing over somebody who wasn't nearby.

Over the summer, I let my journal die. Nothing happens to me over the summer... ever. I had 3 friends tell me they were going to be able to go to the beach with me, and I had 3 friends cancel. I ended up at the beach for a week with nothing but a family, a Playstation, some AP chemistry work, and a black notebook. I wrote in the black notebook twice during the week, and both times it was almost completely about Kristi. When I got back home, I started up writing my journal again, abandoning my old stationery to write in the cheap black notebook. Before the summer was over, I met somebody online who kept her journal online. I liked that idea. After about a month, I had my black notebook online, and a month after that I stopped writing in the notebook so I could relay it to my computer. Now the story of my life was online and nowhere else.

Sophomore year started up somewhere in the middle of all of that. Over the summer, Kristi had broken up with her boyfriend (Hurray!) and started going out with a new one.We were in one class together, during which we almost never talked. With my 2 AP classes, I was flooded with homework, so I had to stay up until 4:30am, giving me 3 hours of sleep nightly. Now I'm braindead whenever I talk to her, making me seem so charming. I called one of my friends a psycho, thinking she was talking about somebody completely different, I kept getting frustrated in group discussions when I'd start to say something and nobody would hear, and it all went into my journal.

Enter greed. 3 or so people have my journal's URL, and nobody else has a means of finding it. I started giving my URL out to just about any of my friends, and soon... well... I have no idea who had my page. One of my friends, Angela, really wanted to know who this Kristi girl was. She happened to have a camera the next day at school when I pointed her out. "You want me to take a picture of her." "Oh, yeah. I really want to be a stalker, having a picture of her she doesn't know was taken. Go for it." And off Angela goes to take Kristi's picture. Failed sarcasm. About a week later, she decided to give me a present. She told me about it at lunch, saying that I would love it. I waited out the last 3 periods. and when I got my present I was a little disappointed. "A few copies of Seventeen?" She checked with me to make sure of what Kristi's last name was. "What, is there a model here with her name?" I looked down at the mailing address... that was Kristi's name... and her address... and her magazines. I ended up yelling at her. Meanwhile, Kristi walks by, talking to her friend, adding fuel to the fire. Luckily, she hadn't seen the magazines, but I was still growing more pissed...

That night, I took a midnight walk to think about what'd been going on. I'd had a crush on Kristi for a year and kept it pretty much a good secret. Now I had some friends who knew about it, one of whom was starting to get a little strange over it. Now... I could have her find out from somebody who heard about either the photography incident or the magazine incident, or I could preclude such embarassment by telling her myself. Of course I didn't have the balls to do that, so I sent one of my friends to do so. He gave me a letter Kristi had written, saying it was OK that I had a crush on her, but that she had a boyfriend, so we could really only be friends. And then she left her e-mail address. We started writing back and forth that week. I told her about my online journal... about how I got way too obsessive about her in my writing, how I got pissed off at her boyfriend, even though I didn't know the guy... and I said that if she wanted to see it, I'd give her the URL, but she'd been warned. Of course, she was curious... and the day that I gave her the URL, I didn't get a response. I figured she just hadn't had the opportunity to go online. Not exactly.

The following day, I heard from a friend that she had printed out everything from my page and was in the process of reading it through all of her classes with her best friend, Megan. Oh my god... I wasn't happy, I wasn't sad, I wasn't... well... I wasn't any conventional emotion. Maybe a little bit of everything. Yay, she's enjoying my journal... oh crap, so's anybody else who asks to see a page... what's going to happen next?... is her boyfriend going to find out and want to kill me? I got an e-mail that night from Kristi telling me just about that... if we want to get picky about phrasing, she said that he had been angry, and his friends had agreed that he had a reason to be angry. I wrote back, saying that I hoped nobody did anything drastic. Desperately wanting to get that thought across, I decided to call her. So how did I get her phone number? Somebody'd left it on my guestbook. He'd pretended to be Kristi, saying that there was a possibility of something happening between us when she broke up with her boyfriend. Nice to have her number, I guess... so I called her. Her line was busy. After 5 minutes, I got through. We had a brief, confusing conversation about the letter I'd just sent... turns out that she's been online just in time to receive my letter and had just replied to it, so when I was telling her to go online to reply to my newest letter... well... yeah. Confusion. I apologized one more time for anything weird that had happened because of me, and, for the first time since freshman year, we actually had a conversation. Brief, yes, but a conversation nonetheless. That was October '98. We haven't really talked since.

There wasn't any closure... I can't leave this story with a happy or sad ending... there just wasn't enough closure to call it an ending. We tried e-mailing each other back and forth a couple times, but both times one of us decided not to respond, and the other one decided not to write without responding.

If this story had a closing thought, maybe I'd be able to leave you with it.