My Dear Friend

I got a text message last night. It came from my brother at my church in Oklahoma. "Your dear friend is here." I laughed. And promptly decided that I needed to share this story with you all.

You see, my senior year we had Yearbook Signing Day a couple of weeks before the last day of school. A bunch of my friends and I gathered on a sidewalk outside the Two-Story Building (while that should probably be lowercase, there are words that end up with capital letters in my mind) and sat and just signed each others yearbooks. If someone wanted to come to us to have us sign theirs, we would deign to sign it, but there was no way that we were getting up and walking around. We were too cool for that.

Toward the end of the afternoon, a young man wandered into our group and started talking to Teresa. I'm really not good about making small talk with strangers, so I ignored him. Pretty soon, Teresa decided that she was going to go home. I stayed where I was, surrounded by people, so that this young man couldn't get to me. After a few minutes, I forgot about him, and moved across the circle to have one of my friends sign my yearbook. Big mistake. This exposed me to passing strangers and pretty soon he had come up and wanted to sign my yearbook. Please note that I had never met this young man before that day (I attended a large high school) and didn't really want him signing my yearbook. I couldn't say no (still can't!) though and so he signed it. Then he asked for my phone number. I still couldn't say no, so he ended up with my phone number while I made an excuse for leaving. Teresa, if you are reading my blog, I still blame you for all of this!

Before I tell you the rest of the story, I want to explain what I was like as an 18 year old. I was dramatic, flighty, and somewhat self-centered. I'm trying to do better. I've had 6 years to practice since then, so hopefully I'm not as bad.

At school the next week, I was walking to my 2nd hour, and discovered that this young man had a class right across the hall from mine. I quickly ducked into my classroom, but he still saw me and waved really big. Great. I stewed the entire period about how I was going to get away. There were two doors to the classroom, so I picked the one furthest away from his doorway and took off the opposite direction. Probably not the nicest thing to do, but I was trying to avoid awkwardness.

I don't recall seeing him again until the very last day of school. My friends and I were heading to the parking lot at the end of the day, and he found me. He told me that he had lost my phone number and wanted to know if he could have it again. I told him no (I grew a backbone in a very short amount of time) and thought that was the end of it. It wasn't.

I spent the summer in ignorance. He spent the summer calling my Grandma's phone (she was the first Chancellor in the phone book and happened to be out of town most of the summer). When my Grandma got home, he called again. She gave him my phone number. I received a phone call on a Wednesday night. Talk about awkward. I'm not good at talking to people on the phone. Really. I'm a talker if I know you and so you are all feeling skeptical at the moment. Just believe me, ok? I told him I had to get off of the phone to go to church, and he asked to come with me. He couldn't drive, so I had to go pick him up. He's a sweet kid, but I took siblings along to protect myself.

At church that night, he kept scooting down the bench, closer and closer. I kept inching away, and by the end of service, he was practically sitting on me, and I was close to sitting on the girl beside me. I had the irresistible urge to giggle all service, imagining what the backs of our heads looked like to the people sitting behind us. This young man got up and told the church why he was attending our service with his "dear friend". *Insert very red face here* From then on, he has been known to my family as my dear friend. That I only talked to a handful of times. But we are close. Definitely.

I finally got him home and breathed a sigh of relief. I ran into him a couple more times at Wal-Mart (where he worked) and finally he got up the nerve to ask if I had a boyfriend. I told him yes, and promptly stopped shopping at that store. I couldn't handle the awkward meetings.

Good story, huh? Hopefully one day I'll figure out how to handle awkward situations. Until then, you can find me running the other direction.