Such Good Friends

A large part of dating someone is getting to know your partner's circle of friends. Trying to gain the approval of the friends is sometimes the hardest part of the chase, made all the more difficult when the object of your interest has no idea you want to date her. This isn't a story about the girl whose attention I was trying to win, it's a story about one of her friends.

I was interested in a lot of girls that were a part of my group of friends in high school, and some of those relationships got more mileage than others. Had I played things correctly with Diana, I think that ours could have had some potential -- at least for a time -- but I definitely missed the boat with her. During my time trying to get Diana's attention, where it was plainly obvious to everyone but her that I was interested, she had become close friends with Chelsea.

Chelsea was...severely irritating. I tried to be as nice as I could to her, but she just rubbed me the wrong way, and I couldn't stand to be around her for too long. We had no common interests, and the only reasons we were ever in the same room together was because of mutual friends.

During one of our social studies classes, I was sitting next to Diana, who was sitting next to Chelsea, and we were sort of having two separate conversations at once. While Diana and I were speaking verbally about one thing, she and Chelsea were passing notes back and forth about something completely different. In the moment, I had assumed that Chelsea was writing to Diana about how I clearly liked her, and either telling her to run away from me as fast as possible or just teasing her about it.

It's really difficult to get your flirt-on when you feel like someone's making fun of you two feet away.

Our trio would quickly become a staple of the social studies class, always repeating the same awkward dual-conversation around Diana while Chelsea and I essentially ignore one another. To be honest, Chelsea's voice always kind of grated on me, in part because she screeched my name in the same way that a donkey brays so aggressively.

Over the next few weeks Chelsea started talking to me more and more, while I replied to her monosyllabically. Every time I heard her donkey-like exclamation of my name, a shiver would shoot down my spine and I would pucker a little. She was the kind of person that wanted everyone to know about her business, which made her speak far more loudly than was socially acceptable. She would always start to retreat from a conversation before she was actually finished speaking so that she could yell, from across the room, for whoever she was speaking to to "call [her]" or to let them know that she "[would] call [them]."

One day, as I had just taken my seat on the school bus at the end of the day, there was a sharp tapping on my window, and I turned to see Chelsea drumming her nails against it. I opened the window slowly and asked her what she wanted, and she quickly asked me if I had seen Diana. She gave me a message to relay to Diana, which she gave from a rapidly increasing distance, and then yelled for me to call her, which seemed strange to me, since she and I had never spoken on the phone before and I had no intention of asking around for her number.

When Diana finally got onto the bus, I gave her Chelsea's message, and made a joke about how she had told me to call her. Diana agreed with me that that was strange, since she never really saw Chelsea and I speaking outside of social studies -- nor did she ever really see us speaking to one another during social studies -- but she thanked me for the message.

The next time the three of us were in class together, there was a noticeable difference in mood. Chelsea and Diana were passing far fewer notes back and forth, and, while Diana made a few attempts to include Chelsea in the conversation that she and I were having, Chelsea seemed to be excluding herself from the situation almost aggressively. I wondered, briefly, if the girls had had a fight that I wasn't privy to, or if I had said something that had really offended Chelsea, but at the same time I didn't really care, because either way would mean having less of Chelsea in my life.

Chelsea finally passed one final note to Diana, stood from our table, and left the room as quickly as she could. Diana read the note to herself, chuckled a little, and went back to her reading. I asked her if everything was alright between the two of them, because I wanted to seem like I cared, since that seemed likely to help win Diana over, but she shook her head.

"No, she wants me to tell you that she likes you." The words hung in the air for a few minutes as I just stared at Diana as though she were speaking greek. I'm pretty sure my only slack-jawed reaction was "...uh...what?"

"She likes you," Diana repeated, and I tried to think of any single time where Chelsea would have been led to believe that I was in any way interested in her. Diana went on to tell me that Chelsea had been talking about me non-stop all weekend, and had been working up the courage to tell me how she felt, and Diana was hoping that she could relay some form of good news back to her.

After what was probably an uncomfortably long silence, I finally told Diana that I didn't really know Chelsea well enough to be interested in her that way, because that seemed like the most diplomatic way to say that I hated Diana's friend. Diana seemed appeased with this answer, and we went back to whatever reading we were doing.

I spent the bulk of the day wondering how I could reject Chelsea in a nice enough way that Diana wouldn't hate me for hurting her friend's feelings. Since I usually wasn't very good in dealing with problem's of the heart, I went to Natalie and asked her for her opinion on the subject. I told her the entire story, watching her brow furrow as she listened to the idiocy of my problems, and as soon as I was done she nodded slowly and said something along the lines of "she has been talking about you lately..."

Natalie promised to go to Chelsea and find out what the gossip was, which, it turned out, wasn't hard, because you could just sit down beside Chelsea, ask "what's the gossip?" and she would then spill a lifetime of secrets to you in one breath.

By the time I had gotten home that night, my phone was already ringing, and I spent the next few hours talking to Natalie about how strange it was that Chelsea was interested in me even though we never spoke to one another and I clearly disliked her as a human being. Well, we spoke about that for a little while, and then other things for the rest of the conversation, because our conversations were nothing if not tangently-driven.

Natalie's efforts to help me find an appropriate way to tell a girl that I hated her would become unnecessary by the next morning, not because I had figured out on my own how to say it, but because she would, apparently, change her mind about me.

When I next saw Diana I'd like to think that I came up with something incredibly clever to say to her about the entire Chelsea situation, but I'm pretty sure it consisted of a lot of awkward small-talk followed by "...so...Chelsea." Diana immediately told me not to worry about it, because "[she] had it confused before, when Chelsea said she liked [me], what she meant was...as a friend."

To this day I still find this baffling, because if that is what she had meant, then there was clearly no reason for her to say it. The only thing I can think of is that she found out that I clearly hated her and changed her story to avoid embarrassment.

I'm not sure that I ever really spoke with Chelsea after that, and we most certainly never became friends. But I still pucker every time I hear a donkey.