There are times in life when you just have to psych yourself up and find the courage to tell a girl that you like her. Then there are other times, if you're like me, that you're willing to just throw your pride under a bus in order to avoid having your heart crushed. Why my parents ever let me out of my cage I will never know.
Back in elementary school I attended an overnight birthday party, at which the girls were sleeping in both the birthday girl's bedroom and the guest bedroom, and the boys were sleeping in the den. Since kids are stupid, it was decided that it would be a really fun idea to play truth-or-dare, which, I think, is really just an exercise in embarrassing your friends and learning their weaknesses.
Because young kids are horrible with thinking up things to actually be dares, almost every time that someone chose 'dare,' they were dared to reveal an intricate truth about themselves. So, really, the game should have been called "tell us a secret, or be asked a secret."
I spent a good deal of time worrying about what I would say when it came around to me, but I didn't dare to choose 'dare' in the off-chance that my peers would think up something hilariously demeaning for me to do and make my third-grade self want to lay down and die. Of course, since I was going to end up choosing the truth option anyway, I had no way of knowing what kind of question I was going to be asked, so there was really no point in me trying to prepare myself.
When it came around to me, I hemmed and hawed over what to choose, kind of hoping that I could waste enough time pretending to think about it that the parents would wander in and tell us it was time to go to bed. Since I couldn't waste three hours of the party based on one simple option, I made my choice, and I was asked who, in our class, I had a crush on.
Clearly, the answer was Isabelle, but, since she was sitting across the room from me, I wasn't convinced that I wanted to reveal that fact. I worried that it would somehow make her hate me if she knew how I thought about her, or that it would embarrass her so badly that she would have to transfer schools rather than face every day being mocked as the "nerd's girlfriend." On top of that I had to worry about how the other boys in my class would react, from then-on making fun of my feelings for one of the girls in my class, which would somehow be more hurtful since I did like her, as though they were saying that she was less-than and I was scum to consider her worth loving.
The answer came to me as soon as I scanned the room: "I like Caroline." This was a simple solution for two reasons: the first was that most of the other boys in the class had already chosen her as some golden goddess, so I assumed I would just be one more to add onto her tally. The second was that, if they made fun of her because I liked her, it really wouldn't matter to me, because I didn't, so I wasn't all that invested in her feelings anyway.
I assumed that I had avoided the situation of people saying to me "ohmyGOD, you like CAROLINE?!" because most of them did, too, but when the immediate reaction to my revelation was "EEYUU!" I realized that I had made a mistake.
Apparently it didn't matter who I pretended to like, because, whoever it was, was apparently far too good to be interested in me. This was the kind of psychological warfare that we were all really good at when we were children and then most of us grew out of (except for teenage girls, they just refined their abilities).
So for the next few months I was barraged with teasing about 'Caroline Lundy,' and how I was out of my mind dreaming if I thought I could ever catch her. This was irritating, but, as I said, since I wasn't actually interested in her, it wasn't the end of the world. Since Caroline was kind of a monstrous idiot, I was glad to see that she, too, was being teased with 'Lundy likes you!' which gave me some twisted satisfaction that I was able to bring her down with me.
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