💔 Robby, Part One
The first half of the first chapter of The Crush Chronicles. (a work in progress)
This is memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.
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 of the three 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 almost never 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 1970’s 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!”
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.
Please note that Robby had yet to ruin anything for me, ever. On the contrary, I admired Robby from afar, with his quartzy blue eyes, blonde hair reminiscent of 1999 Nick Carter, and his sexy, smart-boy brain. I always hid any impression that I was smitten with him.
I don’t remember what happened after I word-vomited an outburst on him for walking into my frame. The speckled fragments of my mind that try to piece it together seem to believe that he, I and Allan immediately started laughing, he apologized in some sweet way, despite his confusion, and I confessed that I really didn’t know why I said that.
Because of all the words that could have escaped me, why those? It was probably some underlying, subconscious declaration of my frustrations of not being able to communicate to him that I would like to be more than only conversational acquaintances, and therefore his presence was ruining everything for me: not just my assignment, but also my ability to ebb my feelings for him.
Psychological revelations aside, I was working on that yearbook spread featuring the Top Ten graduates of the class of 2003 a few weeks after I yelled at Robby. I was the Senior Assistant Editor of the yearbook staff, which allowed me the privilege to check-out his photograph while editing the aforementioned coverage of the overachieving GPA-ers. The teenage journalists of Hendrix High School worked over Blueberry iMacs, the bubble-backed monitors of the millennium that came in an array of transparent colors. I stared into the screen with my hand trained over the mouse as I worked.
There were the co-valedictorians, each tied with 5.+ GPA’s. Neatly lined up beneath them were the other eight students. They all were honored with a special solo photo, a brief bio, and a quotation. Many yearbooks allow all seniors to have a quotation under their photo, but not ours.
Robby was number six. I lingered on his section, his bright features lost in the grains of the grayscale image. He was leaning against the revolving black door that lead to the photographers’ darkroom, looking into the lens of the camera as if he didn’t really care to have his picture taken, but was kindly obliging anyway. I used the Blueberry mouse to scroll down, double-checking that everything was punctuated correctly. Having never cared for “To a Mouse,” I didn’t quite get it, but loved the fact that he was nerdy enough to choose an 18th century poem in Scottish dialect:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
I have no idea when my interest for Robby piqued. I cannot remember the first time I saw him, when or how we met. I’m sure we had classes together, but I cannot say what those may have been. Leafing through my past journals, Robby is not mentioned often. There is a brief entry in which I confess my sincere desire to attend Prom with him.
I ended up going with a friend.
I do remember when Robby began shuttering into my realm. Before, I believe our only shared space was classrooms. I didn’t know what Robby was into or if he ever did any extracurricular activities. He must have, because colleges want all that bullshit from already over-stressed kids just because they are entering young adulthood, and Robby was definitely college-bound with a plan to double major in Physics and Philosophy. Swoon.
My realm consisted heavily of the arts: choir, journalism—writing for the school newspaper on occasion, but the main focus was yearbook—and theatre (mostly backstage work). The final semester before summer break and senior year was when Robby began to appear. He joined the choir, but where we really crossed paths was in the journalism room—he editing the newspaper and I the yearbook—and in theatre class, as well as after school for rehearsals. I can only assume that Robby had completed all of his required credits for graduation and was taking “fun” classes for his final year of high school, and he really did seem to be enjoying himself. Every time I saw him, he seemed content: calm, cool, serene.
One day, in the small, fluorescent-lit and windowless journalism room, we were sitting amongst classmates, the smell of newspaper print thick and homey. A few writers dotted the perimeter where the Blueberry Macs sat upon computer tables, clacking on keyboards to meet deadlines, but most of us were in the center of the room because that was where the small, old brown sofa was, it’s back butted against the front of the administrator’s desk—the comfiest seat in the class. Editors usually sat there to edit, which was where I was plopped, my legs likely folded underneath me and lap buried in piles of layouts. Somehow the subject of the Top Ten came up, as well as the quotes that people chose. Robby, who was seated at one of the computers to my left, his chair turned around to face me and the rest of the room, announced that he chose a line from “To a Mouse,” and I told him I knew, because I was editing the spread. Then he said something that surprised me.
“I was going to put, ‘Robby, you ruin everything!’” he said with a laugh. He smiled at me, and I tried to keep it together as I melted into the sofa.
“No you were not,” I replied with eyebrows raised, in disbelief that the idea would even occur to him, but laughing with him all the same.
“I was. That was so funny,” he confessed. “But I decided against it.”
“I’m glad,” I said, returning the honesty. “That is not what you want to remember when you look back on your accomplishments.”
I meant it. For all the years following, I believed that Robby should not have tarnished a momentous keepsake with some random thing a girl he barely knew yelled at him one day in confused, hormone-laced passion.
As I look back at these more youthful years and reminisce about the dopamine-induced moments of yore, I take it back. I wish he would have done it.
Having since left high school far behind me, and not having seen him at our ten year reunion, I have little faith that Robby remembers me. Meanwhile, I think of him time and again (obviously).
“Robby, you ruin everything,” is one of my favorite memories of a crush. If he had made my quotation his, he would have to remember me if or when he ever looked back at that page. We would have some cherished, ridiculous, magical link. Teenage Me didn’t appreciate what that could have been. I was too “by the book,” “anti-sappy,” and had such low self-esteem that I couldn’t fathom that a catch like Robby would want to savor a memory with me, even if it was only friendly.
Knowing that I had the power to edit the spread, Robby even suggested that I change it.
“I wouldn’t do it,” I said. So, that was that.