📷 The One Who Ruined Everything
💔 Robby, Part One
The first half of the first chapter of The Crush Chronicles. (a work in progress)
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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.
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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 would take deep breaths, set my shoulders, and cool my expression, never wanting to leave 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 seem to believe that he, I and Allan immediately started laughing, he apologized in some sweet way, 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’s 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 a conversational acquaintance, and therefore his presence is ruining everything for me: not just my assignment, but also my ability to ebb my feelings.
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 mouth-bursted 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.+ GPAs. 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 led 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 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 in 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 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, 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 mostly crossed paths was in the journalism room—he editing the newspaper and I the yearbook. We also crossed orbits 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 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 papery 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. That was where the small, old brown sofa was, its 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 my lap buried in piles of layouts. The subject of the Top Ten came up, as well as the quotes that people chose.
“I just did a line from ‘To A Mouse,’” Robby announced, unimpressed with his choice. He was seated an arm’s length away at one of the computers to my left, his chair turned around to face me and the rest of the room.
“I know,” I answered, slapping a pile of newly edited layouts down on the cushion next to me before readying the next one. “I was editing the spread.”
“I was going to put, ‘Robby, you ruin everything!’” He laughed as a set of quartzy blue gems shone in my direction. He ended with a smile that was just for me, because none of the others knew what he was referring to.
Keep it together, I tried to coach myself, but my skin had suddenly become heavy with a tingling awareness, and I thought I was melting into the couch.
“No you were not,” I managed to reply with eyebrows raised. I let out a laugh so everyone knew I was cool and not in fact burning away through my cheeks.
“I was. That was so funny,” he confessed.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I said. “That is not what you want to remember when you look back on your accomplishments.”
I meant it. I believed that Robby should not tarnish 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 reunion, I have little faith that Robby remembers me. Meanwhile, I think of him time and again (clearly).
“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 a cherished, ridiculous, magical link. Teenage Me didn’t appreciate what that could have been. I was too “by the book,” “anti-sappy,” and couldn’t fathom that a catch like Robby would want to savor a memory with a girl like me.
“You should change it,” Robby suggested, knowing that I had the power to edit the spread before it was submitted to print.
“I wouldn’t do it,” I said. So, that was that.
