Page 12 of Who's that Girl?
I looked at my closed locker.
I didn’t really need anything inside.
It wasn’t an auspicious re-meeting. But it was a start. And she was here. Here at my school. And now I knew her name.
The only problem was … I already have a girlfriend.
~
Claire was so skittish, it took more than a year to really get her to notice me.
I’d broken up with Johannah immediately, that very first night after seeing Claire in the hall. I’d never been all that into Jo anyway. She just pursued me so aggressively, it was sort of impossible to put her off. I’d only been seeing her for a couple of months. She’d latched onto me at the end of Sophomore year, but then she’d been away at camp for most of the summer. It was easy enough to disengage. She barely flinched. When I called it off, she looked hurt for about five seconds, then had immediately moved on to dating some other random guy from the team.
I can’t believe I let her screw up my entire adult life. I don’t care about Johannah. The only reason I still remember her name is because of that idiot, Jake.
But Claire. Claire was something else.
I tried to smile at her in the hallways, to catch her eye, but she always looked away. As I watched her, I realized that my first impression of her as a teenager hadn’t been quite accurate. She was still the girl from the woods, but … something had changed in the intervening years. As a kid, she’d been unbelievably open, completely confident. Silly. Strange. She was still sort of those things, but she’d become more reserved, quieter, less open than she’d been. She was almost … shy.
And I was shy too. Every girl who’d ever been interested in me had made the first move. I didn’t know how to deal with a girl like Claire. I wasn’t sure how to get her attention. She seemed pathologically opposed to speaking to me. I could never catch her eye for more than a millisecond before she would look away, usually down. I figured she must have remembered me from the woods, but I wasn’t sure.
I watched and I waited. We got nowhere.
But she never had a boyfriend. That was heartening.
Still … I let way too much time pass. It was Senior year before I finally got up the courage to force an interaction. And … she hadn’t been wrong. I’d seen her talking to Jake, slipping off and away from the field trip to her father’s factory. My gut had clenched as Jake caught my eye.
He knew I liked her. He’d figured it out.
He was messing with me. And I wasn’t sure what he’d do to her. How far he’d go. I refused to let her get caught up in our family bullshit.
So I guess she was right. I did finally get up the courage to talk to her on the bus that day because of Jake. But not because I was jealous of him. Because I wanted to protect her from him.
And it worked. Jake backed off. But Claire … still wasn’t interested.
It was almost another full year before I finally thought, enough is enough as I watched her drift along in the tree lot, looking like an older and even more beautiful version of the kid I’d met so long ago. I’d messed up. I’d waited too long. I’d gone out of town to a college I hated, to study stuff I wasn’t interested in. I’d made so many mistakes. But there was Claire, again, among the trees, just as I remembered her. There was my second change.
I’d reached out and grabbed her forearm, said her name.
“Hi, Claire.”
She’d looked … shocked.
“What are you doing here?”
She still talked like she knew me. Like she remembered everything.
But she hadn’t. She had no idea.
She thought the first time we talked was on the bus after the field trip. That hadn’t been the first time! That hadn’t been anything.
She didn’t know. She had no idea.
I have to tell her.
~
Adam: I know you don’t want to talk to me, and I understand that. I’ve f—ed everything up to an unbelievable degree, but Claire, I love you.
