boys

I remember Johny in my AP Biology class with skin so pale it was pink. I'd press my fingers on the back of his hands to leave little white marks on his flesh before the blood would rush back. I called him pinky.

There was a different Johny that I dated for a week in middle school. And I'm using the term "dated" very loosely. We didn't talk much, we didn't hold hands. When we saw each other in the hallways, he would nod a hello in a very gentlemenly way. He sat at a table near mines in the cafeteria and one day got another boy to tell me that he liked me. I had a few days to decide before I sent a message back via boy messenger. There wasn't much going on in 8th grade at the time, so I said yes. Johny got into a fight with a boy in the cafeteria a few days after. Seeing him fight, seeing him lose the fight--I guess I didn't recognized the feeling, but I think I was turned off and disgusted. I broke up with him after that, and the next week he came to school with bleached blonde hair in place of his brown locks. When we saw each other in the hallway, he would pretend not to see me. "You drove him crazy," someone had accused.

"I've been in love with you for three years," someone once confessed to me right after I broke up with my boyfriend in college. That someone was a little high strung. He would call at 3 in the morning, inebriated, and only say things that people who don't have control over their brains say. Things like, "You're it," and "I don't want anyone else;" little passionate things that were unprovoked because nothing had happened between us. 

He saw my photographs and I guess they hooked him. He took me out to the city and we would go to the museum and look at Russian portraits of ladies with dark hair. On my birthday he drove in the rain to give me a dozen red roses and a gift all too generous. I still wonder to this day if there was meaning behind that... I think I know, but I could be wrong.

My ex asked me for a kiss. I stared back at him and as nicely as possible, said no. We broke up a few months ago and he was with someone, but that night he drove to my house and demanded we talk. There was nothing left to say really. Just silences exchanged. Finally, after not getting what he wanted, he sped away in anger, yelling, "Why do you always act like you're better than everyone else?"

And then there was Jeremy who asked me to the prom and I was so nervous I said no, but didn't mean it. Tall, adorable and light skinned. On graduation day, when we were all in our white robes, he found a four leaf clover and ran over to give it to me. "For good luck," he said. On one gloomy day three years later, I found it pressed inside an art book.