Why are all the weirdos called Nick?
Yonks ago when I was the tender age of 14, I was a member of a karate club. Now there were several rather striking older members of this club that myself and my friend Freya rather admired.

One member we did not admire was Nick.

He was our age, went to the local boys school, and while I loathe to dismiss people due to social categories, the guy was an utter, utter loser. Aside from being catastrophically ugly (imagine a chubby, pale face, horrible slicked down hair and a blubbery nose and mouth with pinprick eyes), he walked with a limp and had the physcial prowess of a crippled hippo.

Suffice to say, he didn't even register in our 13 year old minds - we were too busy staring at the pretty older boys with their six packs and tall-ness and the like.

Unfortunately, Nick took quite a liking to me.

Now, having been bullied myself when I was a child, I would never be outrightly cruel to someones face or laugh at them for trying to be nice, but Nick pushed the boundaries of creepy. It started off with him following me round the room during lessons, then doing his best each week to get me as a sparring partner. I put up with this because I felt sorry for him, but I in no way encouraged his advances.

Then, when my Dad came to get me at the end of each session, he would take to waiting for me outside the changing rooms and walking with us to the car park. I was starting to get quite irritated by this attention and each week silently hoped my Dad would suddenly come over all protective and tell young Nick to fuck off. Sadly not.

Then came the time for a disco between the boys and girls schools, of which or course he attended in a desperate hope of seeing me. He turned up wearing an uber cool Man United shirt - which someone from his school immediately stuck chewing gum on the back of. I felt sorry for him and told him it was there, even though my friends begged me not to through their tears of laughter. I even made the GRAVE mistake of dancing with him because it was plainly obvious that people just made fun of him all the time and I really thought it was tragic.

Worst mistake ever.

He began pestering Freya about me, asking her what I liked and talking about me whenever they had to spar together (poor girl). Eventually, when indulging in his favourite passtime of walking to the car park with me, he piped up "So...have you seen Titanic yet?" to which I replied "Um...no, but it looks good".

Luckily we had reached the car and I escaped, but the next week he appeared again and said "So when shall we go and see Titanic?" I almost screamed in fear.

"Um..I wasn't aware I was seeing a film with you..."

"Yeah, remember you said last week?"

"No, you asked me if I'd seen it and I said no. That wasn't an invitation and my reply wasn't a yes!"

He limped off.

By this point my younger brother had joined the karate club, and Nick decided the best plan of action was to befriend him to get to me. He would invite him round his house with the lure of seeing all his cool computer games (substitues for friends, I imagine). Then things got really, really scary one week when my brother whispered to me during a lesson "Nick says if you don't freespar with him he's going to call you a sexy bitch"

My brother was fucking 10. He had no idea what that even meant and there were so many things wrong with this! I vomited in my mouth and inched away, warning my brother he was under no uncertain circumstances to ever speak to Nick again.

More was to come. One of Nick's chosen "chat-up" lines was the relevation that he had only one kidney. This was supposed to be interesting or attractive in some way? Anyway, it was a fact he frequently reminded me of. On one occasion the whole club travelled to Birmingham to take part in a competition (he spent a vast majority of the time trying to take pictures of me), and Freya thought it would be hilarious to tell Nick that I wanted him to come to our hotel room after dinner, so at bang on nine o clock there's an eager knock at the door. I get up to answer it and it's Nick, grinning broadly at this invite into my world. I freak out and slam the door in his face with Freya pissing herself from her bed.

The worst was yet to come.

Eventually he seemed to have calmed in his rabid pursuit of me, which I was entirely grateful for. We even found out that he was going out with a girl from the year below (the female equivalent of him, physically and socially) - thank god for me right? Wrong.

One day this girl approaches one of my friends on the way to school (she vaguely knows her from a drama thing they did). They get into an awkward conversation, with my friend wondering what she did to deserve this attention. Finally, the girl starts talking about me. "Odd" thinks my friend "why is this strange girl talking about Posage?"

It turns out Nick had told his new hunch-backed girlfriend that I had been pestering him for years to go out with me, and when he finally relented he had to dump me because I was, to directly quote, "too frigid".

My friend bursts into school, pissing herself with laughter and relates the story, which I realise he must have told the whole of his school, including the pretty boys I so admired. I was branded. And fucking furious that after suffering so much creepiness at the mutated hands of this bloated sea creature, I came out of it looking like the stalker.

I relayed a message through the hunchback girlfriend.

"If Nick ever even thinks of mentioning my name in conversation again I will find him and rip his remaining kidney out with my bare hands, and force him mum to eat it"

I never saw or heard from him again.

Sorry for the length but he probably didn't have one.
(posage As I turned the corner I felt muscular and compact, Thu 7 Feb 2008, 13:37, Reply)