Alright, I'll start by just admitting straight out, that ever since the first trimester of freshman year, I have had this tremendous crush on Sydney Levine. Yes, yes, I'm Harry Altman and all that, but, well, despite all evidence to the contrary, I'm human too. And yes, I know I'm hardly the only one. But, so it goes. Anyway, as I was saying, back in freshman year, I could barely get within 5 feet of her without blushing. Naturally I didn't want anyone to know, but I couldn't hide it in the slightest, so I simply avoided her. My locker was on the northwest side, hers on the northeast side; hardly far apart, but to me, there may as well have been a wall right there.
By sophomore year, I had myself more under control. Now I could at least somewhat reasonably pretend she was just an ordinary person so far as I was concerned. How well I hid it, I don't know; I was always worried that there was the possibility that she knew. Towards the end of sophomore year, Sydney started going out with JT, which didn't really matter to me, as I knew full well I was way too shy to ever ask her out, and it was pretty unlikely she was at all attracted to me anyway. And so matters simply continued. At the beginning of senior year I decided there was really no longer any point in hiding it; I didn't like having secrets, and, honestly, what did it matter if she knew? At least then I would be *certain* that she knew. Not that I would tell her, or anybody, or anything like that, of course. Just that I wouldn't try to hide it so much. Of course, by then I had learned to do so pretty much reflexively anyway. For instance, on Sunday, she had an away message up, "Who wants to be my valentine? :)" and, of course, before, I wouldn't have replied at all, whereas now, I said "Oooh! I do! I want to be a purple cow, too!" (The point of saying that I also want to be a purple cow was not to turn it into a sarcastic remark, although it could easily be read that way (as we all know nobody wants to be a purple cow), but rather merely so that I would not be going "Oooh! I do!" and saying nothing else, to temper it, I suppose... of course, knowing me, such a declaration could easily be assumed not to mean anything anyway, but... well, I don't know how she took it, but this is all kind of besides the point.)
And so it continued, in pretty much the same form, from sophomore year until yesterday. When in her AIM profile, in her "Things that make me happy" list, appeared "secret admirers".
Now, while I've become pretty disinhibited over my years in high school, it always seemed to me that there are, naturally enough, some things I simply will not do, such as, for instance, talking directly about this at all. But I suppose it may rather simply be a matter of finding the proper catalyst...
And so, I asked Jess Chong, who has about 50 gmail invites, for a gmail invite. I made a gmail account, adhoc17@gmail.com, and used the name "Ad Hoc" (as that's precisely what the account was). And so I wrote an email to her, with subject line "[Unidentifiable subject line]", declaring my secret admiration of her.
Of course, I had to make sure she couldn't identify me from it - because while it might be nice if my secret simply got out and I had one less secret to worry about (if she didn't know already), I then wouldn't be a very good secret admirer. "Secret" is kind of a key word there, after all. And so I went back over it and tried to change the style. But I can't really write not in my style, and so I figured I would go a step further, and make it inconsistent. I alternated between my ordinary writing, attempts to simply not write in my style, pirate talk, vwl-drppng, mikang radnom speling erorrs, speaking like one of those hyperactive teenage girls on AIM who use way too many exclamation marks!!!!, and, of course, 13375|>34|<.
Now it's hardly surprising that I should have gotten a bit nervous while writing this, made worse by the fact that she already has a boyfriend, not to mention probably at least one secret admirer already. But I wrote it anyway. How? Sheer obliviosity, I suppose. One of the very last things before I failed to sign my name was the following comment: "Every now and then I'm inspired to do something utterly stupid... and this may very well be one of those times - but if it be so, then so be it."
And, despite the fact that I thought that I really hadn't done a good enough job of covering up my identity, it was sent. Then I jumped around my room a lot.
I woke up today thinking "What have I done?! Well, I'm about to find out..." I prepared my best poker face (not very good) and got on the schoolbus.
I somehow managed to keep a straight face when speaking to her today. I kept waiting for the bomb to go off, but it never did. As the day wore on, I grew simultaneously more and more nervous and more and more relieved. Finally, at the end of the day, I was speaking to Anna and she just happened to ask me my email address. I immediately suspected Sydney suspected me and had told her, or had told her and she suspected it was me, or some permutation of similar.
"sniffnoy@optonline.net, of course," I said.
"Do you have any others?" she asked. (Yup. She definitely suspects me.)
"Well, there's haralt@bergen.org, there's my gmail account, which I don't use, sniffnoy@gmail.com-"
"What did you say your gmail account was?" (I don't really need to point out that this confirms it further, but I will anyway.)
"sniffnoy@gmail.com."
"You don't have any others?" (Wow.)
"Nope, that's the only one. Oh, also, during PROMYS, I can also, in theory, be reached at harmeta@bu.edu, though that never receives any mail and for good reason...and, yeah, that's it."
A bit later I came back to her.
"Oh, there's also my old hotmail account, mosquito_ls5@hotmail.com."
"You use that for MSN, don't you?"
"Yes, but not for email. [Why not. Let's be annoying.] Oh, and if you want to get really old, back when we were on Erol's, we just had one email address for the entire family, namely, faydave@erols.com, and before that we were on CompuServe, and I don't remember what it was back then."
As school is ending and I'm leaving, she shouts to me about how she's just trying to identify a certain email address. I should, of course, have offered to help her, but I didn't think of it at the time, so I just ignored her.
Unfortunately, I didn't manage to keep a straight face during any of that at all. Probably because I hadn't expected Anna was going to ask me about it.
Well, we'll see what happens tomorrow. Well, no, tomorrow's Wednesday, so more likely we'll see what happens Thursday. Regardless... back to waiting.
-Sniffnoy
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