Rumor Has It

Long before I was pulled out of school for two months because I had mono, and before I rejected her advances when she threw herself at me, Liz and I were the talk of the school. Well, we were the talk of the graduating class for our first year of high school, but, unfortunately, neither of us knew until it was too late.

Our high school had a lot of study rooms, and a couple of favoured nooks wherein we hid, but we weren't always free to be as loud as we pleased. As our school year was winding up, Liz and I thought that we had found the perfect solution to our problem: the courtyard outside of the art class.

There were two courtyards that were built into my high school, the first was accessible from the gym and used as an outdoor auditorium, while the second had picnic tables and was blocked on the sides by the art room, the language classes, the senior study area, and the administrative offices. The courtyard would normally be jam-packed with chatty students, but as autumn was slowly turning into winter, Liz and I found ourselves the sole survivors of an abandoned space.

I'm sure that we had started the hour with doing some form of schoolwork, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was or how long we had managed to stay focused. I do remember that, eventually, Liz had started to pace around our table and ended up sitting on top of it for a while.

She had the tendency to sing little songs about whatever she was doing, which, for some reason, managed to get itself wormed into my subconscious and I find myself doing the same thing to this day. At some point she made a move to tickle me, which shot me off of my seat -- in part because I don't like being touched, but mostly because I'm excruciatingly ticklish. In the end I found myself sitting on the table, my arms out in front of me ready to fend off her attacks, while she had taken my seat.

As the hour wore on our discussion became progressively louder, which we didn't think would bother anyone since we were the only two people in the courtyard at the time. We didn't seem to notice that the windows to both the administrative offices and the senior study area were open, but they didn't seem to bothered since we weren't yet to the point of disturbance.

As I continued trying to block my sensitive areas from Liz's attempts to jab at them, she worked herself up onto her feet and started dancing around me trying to pin me down. She grabbed ahold of both of my arms, and before I really knew what was happening she was straddling me on top of the table while we both howled with laughter. It would soon come to our attention, in the form of one of our teachers, that this was an unacceptable form of study.

Unbeknown to the both of us, while we had worked our way up onto the table together, we had gained the attention of the entire senior study area, which was abuzz with talk about the two freshmen dry-humping outside the window, and the teacher coming outside to tell us to pack up our things and get to class only seemed to confirm their suspicions.

I think that, if I had known just how scandalized I had managed to make the senior class, I could have somehow used that to my advantage in my efforts to become more popular. But I didn't have this information yet.

Over the next week I slowly started to feel more and more ill, and I'm almost positive that it had been this incident with Liz that had given me mono. It was the next week that Liz threw herself at me, and the next week would be the start of my illness-induced exodus.

When I would finally get back to school Liz and I would have a happy reunion, but that's not an important part to this story. This story continues in the last weeks of school, when the sun had come back out, and Liz and I had started returning to the scene of the crime during our study periods. While our antics were now much more subdued than they had been at the beginning of the year, people would still come to recognise us as the horny freshmen.

I came home from school one afternoon to see a new message flashing on the machine, and when I pressed play all I heard was laughter, followed by Liz's voice telling me "...I heard an awful rumor about you today..." followed by a hang up.

Curious, I phoned Liz, and she launches into a story that was told to her in her last class of the day. As I had been walking to the exits to get to the bus, Liz's friend nudged her in the side and pointed to me saying "hey! You know who that is?" Liz looked up, saw me, and, indignantly replied "...yeah...do YOU?" I wasn't very well known in high school, and I certainly wasn't popular, so for anyone to recognize me at all was strange.

"That guy was expelled last year for having sex with someone in the school, the grads have been talking about it all year!" This view of my school year was far more interesting than what actually surpassed, but, instead of being some bad-ass player, I was a virgin on his deathbed.

In the two months that I was out of contact with everyone in school, mostly because I was unconscious for a good portion of the time, but also because a lot of my new friends still weren't to the point where we were talking on the phone every night, I had become a legend. The things I could have accomplished during my year if I had only known that I was so impressive.

To put it bluntly, I was shocked when I heard this. It was so far beyond absurd that I just didn't really understand how anyone could mistake me for someone that would have that happen to them. I'm sure it would really have impressed my mother, who, at the time, was the head of the school board, but it certainly wouldn't have helped her re-election campaign.