"Same for me. I feel the same way"

In ninth grade, "Wes" and I sat near each other in study hall, and when he wanted to confer, he'd tap me on the arm with a pencil. Wes was bright, easy to talk to, slightly spacey, several inches shorter than I was, and extraordinarily cute; he had piercing blue eyes and a wide smile. However, for most of freshman year, my attention lay elsewhere. We attended a boarding school in Massachusetts, and I was at this time in my life so adept at developing crushes that I'd found a boy to like before my official arrival on campus -- I'd picked him out when making the prospective-student visit the spring before. It was not until well into freshman year that Wes' huge and undeniable adorableness, and the fact that it far eclipsed this other's boy's, finally occurred to me.

Of course, there are plenty of cute boys at your typical New England prep school, so it wasn't only Wes' cuteness that had me smitten; it was also that we talked completely easily, that no matter the subject (teachers, television shows, whether or not everyone in the world has a secret identical twin) our conversations always felt -- even if we were disagreeing -- like inside jokes. Wes seemed to enjoy talking to me as much as I enjoyed talking to him, he seemed to get me, and even back then, before I realized how rare this type of connection is, I recognized it as a good thing.

And so when I knew I didn't just like Wes, I actually liked him, the only thing to do was become increasingly self-conscious and tense in his presence. The next fall, when we returned to school, he'd shot up in height, our study hall seats were far apart, and we had no classes together. As if these last two twists of fate weren't bad enough, I took the situation into my own hands and quit talking to him. Completely. For almost two years. I think that I even, pretty much, stopped making eye contact with him. What can I say? It made life less confusing.

But then we began talking again -- the truth is that, in spite of how large this all loomed then, I can't remember the exact circumstances -- and during senior year we were friendly. He once made a reference to the long silence that had passed between us, and he seemed to be good-naturedly mocking both himself and me, our mutual silliness.

The week after we graduated, there were parties at a bunch of our classmates' houses in different states. At a party early in the week, bolstered by what was probably about half a beer, I confessed my enormous, years-long crush on him. Then I made a joke about the awkwardness of this confession -- I was, at the age of 17, nothing if not self-defeatingly meta -- and he said, "What if I said, 'Same for me? I feel the same way'?" Clearly, what I should have done then was plant a huge kiss on his lips. I didn't -- again, weirdly, I can't recall what either of us did -- but later in the week, I was at a movie in Harvard Square with a few friends and in the middle I got up to use the bathroom and I remember walking through the empty theater lobby and being in the empty bathroom and feeling that by-yourself glee, his words echoing in my head like a promise or an incantation: Same for me, I feel the same way. They were a good luck charm to hold onto until I next saw him.

This didn't happen until the very last party of the week, when we ended up, at 3 a.m., standing outside by a fence on Long Island. He told me I had nice eyes, and I proceeded to set my arms down on the fence, and set my forehead facedown on top of my arms. I'd never have kissed him, and in case he was planning to kiss me -- well, just let him try! And yet, of course, I managed to feel disappointed when he and I returned to separate quarters of the house where we were staying and in the bathroom I ran into two girls in my class who were brushing their teeth after their own late-night rendezvous with boys. Their hair was ratted in the back, there were grass stains on their jeans. In other words: They'd gone through with it, in all its complicated, enjoyable messiness.

I suppose now that I put my head down partly because I was tired and partly because I was afraid of getting what I wanted. That might have been overwhelming, whereas failing after giving it your best shot -- or at least making a confession you could pretend was your best shot -- was something I could handle. In the 12-plus years since our boarding school graduation, Wes and I have been in sporadic touch. The last time we saw each other was in the spring of 2003, when I'd flown to the city where he lives for the wedding of a grad school classmate. He was still nice, and easy to talk to, and attractive in the more hardened way of an adult. He wasn't his high school self, or perhaps I should say he didn't exert the force on me he had back then. He was pleasantly ordinary. And what this made me think was, Phew -- I'm not supposed to marry him! Granted, this realization came as a relief partly because he had a girlfriend, but it also came as a relief because it meant there was nothing to correct. I didn't have to fix the mistakes of high school. It was over and past.

For the last year, I've been going out with a guy who is so good to me that I often accuse him of having studied some sort of sensitive boyfriend handbook. I can honestly say I don't wish I were Grown-up Me dating Grown-Up Wes. And yet, to think of how devastatingly and consumingly I adored him, how part of the reason I couldn't allow anything to happen was that it seemed like it would be such a big deal if it did (surely, it would change my life in ways I might not be prepared for!), I have to admit I sort of miss that. Feeling unhinged by a crush is mostly draining, but, as everyone knows, during those interludes when you're hopeful, it's also really, really fun. And, in the end, Wes isn't the one that got away; it's a moment in time that did.

-- Curtis Sittenfeld

Recent Stories