Chapter 10

Geometry class, first day of spring semester in eleventh grade. The room was filling up and there was one desk left open. The one right in front of me. The seconds were ticking down before the bell would ring. Somebody was going to walk in and take this seat, and I would spend the rest of the semester staring at the back of the head belonging to this particular somebody.

Please, God, let it be a hot girl.

The reason I cared so much about who sat in this seat was that I had just recently turned sixteen. Sixteen, meaning I was finally allowed to date. I had a pretty sweet ride (a Toyota Camry, one year older than I was) and a girlfriend-shaped hole in my heart. That’s why, sitting there at my desk, I was praying that whoever would fill that seat might also happen to be, you know, girlfriend-shaped.

Then, in walked Francesca Marcelo. Let me say that again in case you missed it:

Francesca. Marcelo. Walked. Into. The. Room.

Yes, people, there is a God.

Francesca was hot. Really hot. But she wasn’t queen-bee, alpha-female-cheerleader hot; she was art-class, vegetarian, hemp-jewelry hot. Unlike most girls her age, she had this aura that suggested she’d already found herself and was content with what she’d found. She was cool enough to hang out with the popular kids but chose to merely float in and out of their circles, sometimes gracing their lunch table or weekend parties with her presence, sometimes not. As far as I knew, she’d never had a boyfriend. She just made guys nervous—even the popular guys, the ones with cool cars manufactured in the current decade.

As I said, Francesca was hot. But I was attracted to her because she was more than that. She was a mystery, an enigma, a challenge. I might not have understood pretty girls, but I did understand challenges.

But I couldn’t carry on a conversation longer than Hey, did you do that fun homework assignment yet? To which she’d just say, Ummm, fun?

Winter turned into late spring. Then it was almost summer. I knew I had to make a move. But if it was so difficult to talk to her about normal things that I knew a lot about (read: math homework), how could I ever will myself to articulate a series of words that would ask her out and therefore risk rejection?

The same people who tell you The worst thing she can do is say no will also tell you Even if she does say no, she is rejecting you only based on surface reasons. She doesn’t know the real you. Surface reasons like what, exactly? My personality? That I’m not funny enough, or confident enough, or interesting enough, or intelligent enough? Or do these surface reasons concern the way I look? That I am not handsome enough, or thin enough, or muscular enough, or that I have an abnormally shaped body, or that my haircut isn’t expensive enough or my clothes stylish enough?

Are these the “surface reasons” we are talking about here? Surface or not, take away my personality and appearance and I’m not sure what is left. I’m not sure what the “real me” would be apart from them. But I know one thing: There aren’t a lot of girls who would date a guy with no personality. Or body. Surface or not, I’m of the opinion that these things do matter, at least to some degree, and therefore a rejection of them can’t be trivialized.

So I reject your attempts to downplay the pain of rejection, well-meaning advice givers. You can’t rationalize this one away. I mean, you can try. You can try to say that it’s a numbers game, that you need to get X number of rejections before you finally get a yes. Or that every person has a preset chemical affinity for people with other predetermined chemical characteristics, an explanation that would in theory at least suggest you can make a formula for it, that fate has already been determined by the inevitability of the numbers. You can try to approach it this way. I know because believe me, I have.

But this is where you run smack into the outer limits of numbers and theory and enter the domain of emotions, an irrational wasteland of dangerously unpredictable weather patterns. You can throw all the numbers at it that you want, you can shout theories all day long, you can draw graphs and make flowcharts until you run out of paper, but in the end, rejection is just pure pain, and fighting emotion with logic is like bringing a calculator to a knife fight. You’re going to get stabbed in the heart, and there’s nothing your precious numbers can do to protect you.