📷 The One Who Ruined Everything: How I Word Vomited on My Crush

💔 The Crush Chronicles: Robby, Part One

Oct 12, 2023

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💔 Robby, Part 1

Rachel Jitsawat

February 28, 2024

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I don’t know when it started, how it started; what I know is I’m a sucker for adorable, geeky guys.

He was intelligent, the proof found in our senior yearbook, handsomely displayed beneath the co-valedictorians on the crisp and glossy page of 208—the spread featuring the class Top Ten. His featured quote was some line from a poem by Robert Burns…but it was going to be me.

“Robby, you ruin E V E R Y T H I N G!”

Thinking back on that moment still stretches my lips into a smile.

The afternoon was warm and sunny, transitioning the Texas heat from spring into summer and thickening the familiar smell of the theatre: old wood, dusty draperies, and that distinct scent of old schools—a scent that is recognizable immediately upon crossing the threshold, but the combination of notes that invades the nostrils always a mystery of infinite combinations.

I was taking pictures of a friend for two extracurricular activities that dominated my high school schedule: yearbook and theatre. The theatre department was putting on a show of The Fantasticks!, and I was doing a story on it while also taking my own photos. I could rarely get our yearbook photographers to meet with me, and since I loved photography, I decided to do it myself.

The actor who was the subject of my shoot, a sophomore named Allan, was one of the Mutes, decked from top-hat to toe in all black, but face painted white like a mime. The production was to be performed on the main stage, my favorite place to be at my high school. I found it cozy from my years of gathering there with peers, despite its 1970s gold velvet curtains and roughly upholstered audience seats of the same color. Allan and I had the entire theatre to ourselves, and as he followed my direction from different areas of the stage and apron, I ran around different sections of the house in attempts to find the best angles, my black Converse shoes skating the brown carpeted floor.

As I settled into position with my finger just triggering the camera, Robby appeared from backstage, unknowingly wandering into my shot of Allan, which was going to be stunning.

Exasperated, and without really thinking about what I was saying, camera dropped to my side and head thrown back, I exclaimed, “Robby, you ruin EVERYTHING!”

My voice reverberated off the walls, smacking back at us from the stage. It was a guttural yell, straight from the diaphragm. Robby halted upstage right, his slender frame looking around with bewilderment as if the open air of the stage would disclose a logical reason this chick was yelling at him.