my first love was nick

PUBLISHED 11 March 2009 20:40

When I look back, I wonder what I was thinking. I should be really embarrassed about some of this crap. It’s all just so high school. Nick* and I met during my all-girl’s school’s high school musical, when Nick and some other boys came in to do the show.

I didn’t know if he liked me at first, but we talked online all the time. One day, I told him how much I liked him and he responded positively. But he apparently didn’t want it to seem like a rebound from this other girl who had turned him down, so we kept it secret for a week.

So then the next day he had his birthday party, which was a murder mystery that he had written himself with all these Shakespearean characters. There were little subplots going on, so everyone was given certain goals for the party and facts about themselves. So, he was King Henry VIII and I was Jane Seymour and all the different girls at the party who were the other wives were supposed to get him to remarry them.

At the end of the party, Nick stood up and gave prizes for those who had succeeded at their goals and for those who correctly guessed the murderer. And then he looked at the girls and said “So all the wives were trying to get with me, but I choose Jane Seymour, in more than one way.” And he pulled out this dollar ring he had made and gave it to me.

Neither of us had ever kissed anyone before, and we wanted to take it slow and wait for the right time. I told him I didn’t want it to be planned, that I wanted it to be spontaneous. But after rehearsal one day, I couldn’t find him anywhere, and a friend told me he was waiting for me and I had to go find him. And I thought “OH NO,” because I knew what was coming.

He brought me to this little grassy knoll where he had his iPod and some speakers and some sheet music set up. And he sat down and turned on some instrumental music and started singing words he had written about when we first kiss and how it will be perfect.

I was horrified and really upset because it wasn’t supposed to be like this, but I really didn’t have the will to turn him down after all that work. I sat there avoiding eye contact for what seemed like forever. When he FINALLY stopped singing, I leaned over and pecked him and then stood up quickly and said, “Let’s go home.”

On our two-week anniversary, he wrote me a really long love letter. Because he said he had written to all the other girls he’d ever liked, and now he liked me best, so I had to have a letter, too. That was the first of many, including a whole journal dedicated to us for our first anniversary.

It all sounds so silly, except I was in love. I thought I was in love. I told him I was in love. He was the first boy I ever said I love you to. And then after a while I stopped meaning it.

* Names have been changed