Well, as I'm off work sick again today, I may as well share some more
This one's a bit awkward, as the guy in question is now one of mine and my now husband's best mates, and was one of the best men at my wedding back in May. Now, to anyone who knows me it's immediately going to be obvious who I'm referring to, but I'm still going to go down the "refer to by initial only" route, so let's call him L.

He lived opposite my best friend at the time, who we shall call J. They both lived right by our school, whereas I lived over the other side of town. We got talking over the summer between year 9 and 10 (age 14, then). J had been telling me all about L over the previous few months - it was a big school and as he was in the other half of the year group to us, we'd previously had no contact whatsoever. They had only happened to bump into each other walking home and got chatting. As we were going into our GCSE years, our classes were now all mixed up and - RESULT! - he was going to be in my music class. Even better, he was into the same sort of music that I was (yes, we were the much maligned "met'lers!!"), played guitar and was a good few inches taller than me (at that age, most of the blokes at school had yet to experience any sort of growth spurt and were all stuck at about 5ft 4/5, whereas I was already a good 5ft 9). My friend J had shown him a couple of pictures of me and had told her that he thought I was really hot and wanted to get to know me. So, we started meeting up as a group in the town centre, as a nice halfway point, over the summer holidays. All going well, methinks, and he certainly appreciated my tendency at the time to go braless in strappy tops. We're pretty firm friends by the time school comes around.

Now I should take a break to explain a couple of things. I was going through my first bout of clinical depression at the time, which I now suspect was brought on by my dad's cancer diagnosis about a year previously (he's in remission now, thankfully) and my self esteem was at zero, so the thought of someone actually liking me was a big thing. I've always had some pretty bad body image issues as well, due to not being tiny and anorexically thin like all the popular girls (the women of my family have frequently been described as having an "amazonian build". I also hit puberty during middle school - having boobs at that age immediately marked you out as "fat", and having to wear a skirt when my legs were already developing some serious fuzz wasn't really helpful).

L, meantime, was at this point drinking and pumping about every illicit substance he could get his hands on into his body (a fact that it seems everyone who knew him was oblivious to at the time, including me) and had dated pretty much every girl he could in his end of the school year. Which, I guess, is why he moved on to my half of the year, as his reputation was in tatters with his own half.

His birthday was right near the beginning of the school year and I got an invite to his party. He asked me to bring my drum kit along so we could all have a bit of a jam, and a jolly good night was had by all, aided by a couple of crates of those stubby bottles of "Biere des Moulins" French lager from Sainsbury's (our underage drinking beer of choice). Highlights included the girls getting topless (not completely, you understand, bras remained on, but that was quite a thrill at that age. There are some great pics of me drumming away in this state which I must ask him to dig out sometime) and my mate J being dared to streak down the road - which she duly did, then realised looking across the road at her own house that her parents were stood outside having a fag and had just seen the whole thing. What larks.

I think it may well have been the next day that he asked her out. Arse. Obviously she seemed more "up for it" than I did. She told me this over MSN Messenger that evening, I threw my mouse across my room and smashed it against the wardrobe, and didn't speak to either of them for weeks. I also cut myself for the first time - fun fact for you all. I'd already started staying home from school quite a bit by then, starting with the days my dad's checkups were, in order to be around to support him, but as I grew more depressed it became more frequent. I'd started piling on weight and was having lots of blood tests, as no-one could figure out what was wrong with me. Everyone figured it was some sort of thyroid problem or a form of diabetes, but the tests always came back negative. After this I practically stopped going altogether as I couldn't face seeing them. Lo and behold, he dumped her after about a month, can't recall why, and I started going into school a bit more and patched things up with them. I think I probably could have got over that one, but the story doesn't end there, I'm afraid.

We grew very close again over the Christmas holidays that year, culminating in my friend J texting me a few days before term restarted saying that L wouldn't stop talking about me and was definitely going to ask me out. I was chuffed to bits and got a text from L about an hour later asking if I fancied going to the cinema the following weekend. I was very excited and of course said yes. My first proper boyfriend! Term restarted, and I was a bit nervous about overdoing it and scaring him off, so I didn't really treat him any differently - a few more hugs than usual, maybe. That evening, there I was at home, and I got a text from him. Saying that he was really sorry and he thought I was lovely, but he thought I'd got the wrong end of the stick about the cinema, and it wasn't a date, but just as friends. I was mortified. I forget what I replied, but I stayed in bed crying my eyes out for the next couple of days.

No, that's still not the end. You'd think I'd learn eventually. After that I stopped going to school altogether, but tried to keep in touch with a few friends. Including him. I got it into my head that if I persisted, he'd eventually see sense and give in. I practically stalked him over the internet, learnt his favourite song (The Offspring's Dirty Magic - if you know the song you'll know it was a particularly poor choice for me to be listening to over and over in my fragile mental state) and kept asking him out. He started ignoring me after a while. The crunch point came when he signed into MSN with the screen name "Will She Say Yes? :S". I was crushed, he was asking another girl out, and I stupidly decided to push it in a moment of bitterness, opening with something like "Well it depends who you're asking". He responds with "oh yes useful_idiot, it is you". My heart leaps for a second. Then he gets all abusive, I sign off and go looking for my penknife (I really don't remember most of this as I've successfully purged the memory from my brain - don't much fancy going and finding my old diary and checking it right now!). Now, if you're going to do sarcasm in text form, don't use a font that doesn't differentiate between caps and lowercase - what he'd actually written was "oh YES, useful_idiot, it IS you". Just to seal the deal, he sent me an email afterwards in giant, bold, red letters that simply said "I HOPE YOU DIE". Bearing in mind that by now I was convinced I was seriously ill, as I had yet to receive any sort of diagnosis from my doctor (other than "pull your socks up" from a particularly unhelpful GP), it really wasn't the nicest thing to say. He doesn't remember any of this now and is apologetic about it, so I suspect he wasn't quite lucid at the time.

I finally learnt after that one, and didn't speak to him again until a few months after we'd all left school, by which time I'd met the man who is now my husband - who oddly enough had been best mates with him at middle school until some random bust up at the beginning of secondary school, and hadn't spoken to him since then. I need to perk myself back up a bit after dredging that lot back up, so I think I'll be posting that as my one success story shortly! Apoligies for length and teen angst, but it's been quite cathartic getting that lot off my chest.
( useful_idiot, Wed 16 Dec 2009, 14:42, 2 replies)

Any chance of a condensed version?
I'm sure it's all very interesting but it's a bit epic.
( SpikeyPickle wishes he was mabazaritchie, Wed 16 Dec 2009, 17:27, closed)

A quick skim through suggests
"I really fancied this boy at school but he didn't fancy me. Boo hoo."
(ubergeekian, Thu 17 Dec 2009, 6:49, closed)