Eight Is Enough

Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like [crap]

Um, I don't know if I really have an answer for this one. There really wasn't anyone who habitually treated me poorly. Sure, there have been some crappy things done to me over my life, but they were really isolated incidents.

Okay, I have one. I have told this story a number of times, so if you've already heard it, my apologies. I was in high school (in Tennessee). I had a crush on this girl named Nadalie (which is almost an anagram for Daniel, thus leading me to believe fate may be on my side). It was a pretty big crush. The problem though, was that this wasn't a girl I admired from afar. We actually became somewhat close friends...at least in the school setting. We never hung out any outside of school, but we had a number of classes together and were very friendly with each other.

One day, after school, I brought her into the art classroom to show her something I had made earlier in the day. On our way out of the room, she left first, then one of the students in the room said "Hey, Daniel...is that your girlfriend?". Playing it cool, I flippantly responded "I wish!". I didn't really mean much by it. I mean, I did wish that, but I would have never acted on it.


Well, either she heard me say it, or word got around to her that I had said it*. A few weeks later, close to the end of the school year. I walked into a classroom halfway through a story she was telling. In this story, a crazy ex-boyfriend had showed up at the school because he heard she was dating someone new. He wanted to know who this person was, and that this person would have hell to pay. He was not afraid of getting in trouble - or even arrested - for what he did, because his dad was a cop and could get him out of any trouble he may find himself in. Did I mention he was crazy?


Well, like all the other people crowded around the table, I listened to Nadalie's sad story. I listened to her talk about how she sometimes fears for not only her safety, but the safety of the people she hangs out with. Nothing changed in our relationship much after that through the end of the school year. She signed my yearbook with the classic "K.I.T." with her phone number.


I fretted over that number many times over the course of that summer. Should I call her? What would I say? We had never hung out before, so it would be weird to ask her if she wanted to, and I wasn't really in a place (of confidence) to actually ask her out on a date. One day, I was at a friend's house and we were discussing all the potential possibilities of calling (or choosing not to cal) her. For some reason, my friend was obviously on the side of encouraging me not to call her. I really couldn't figure out why. Finally, he relented. "Daniel, do you remember hearing Nadalie tell a story about a crazy, jealous ex-boyfriend?" "Yeah", I replied. "Well, she made that story up, because she heard you liked her, and she wanted to scare you away".

Despite going to that school for another full year before moving to Georgia, I never talked to Nadalie again. Part of me was embarrassed, but the other part of me was kind of pissed off. I had asked girls out before. Some had said yes, and others had said no. It was no big deal. Granted, had she said no, it likely would have ended our friendship anyway (as was the case with other girls that had turned me down in the past...it would have just been weird to continue being friends with them...at least when I was 15). It's a funny story to tell now, but at the time, I just thought it was a really cruel thing to do. Actually, I still think it was a cruel thing to do, but I got over it.


*She may have heard that I said that, OR it could have been that I think she saw one of my doodles that had her initials in the middle of a heart. I understand that this is likely the biggest part of the story, yet I chose to leave it out of the actual telling of the story. I could understand her being a little weirded out at the sight of her initials in a heart on a friend's piece of scrap notebook paper, but seriously, I was harmless. I was a quiet, shy 15-year-old who was still scared to death of girls, despite having mustered up the courage to ask a few of them out at that point. The reason I left it out of the story is simple...it never occurred to me that the doodle could have been what threw her off until just recently. For some reason, I never put those clues together at the time. What could I say, I overlooked the basic facts because I was smitten.