Day 0502

The first guy who legitimately asked me out on a date was my close friend’s brother. We were in grade 12: he was in third year uni. He was studying to be an engineer and I remember asking him to explain what made engineering interesting. He talked to me about the angle of the ramp bits of sidewalks at crossings. Hmmmm …
He started by offering to drive me and my friend everywhere we wanted to go. And then he joined us: at movies, playing Risk (the world’s most boring game – does it ever end?), going to Dairy Queen for a banana split.
Eventually he got on the phone one evening when I rang my friend and asked me out.
Ugh. It had never ever ever occurred to me that he might like me. And he was my friend’s brother: it felt like incest somehow.
Never mind the sidewalk ramp obsession, the dad who was a coroner and spoke of corpses at dinner, the xmas tree that literally did not get taken down from the living room until it had lost every needle and turned a very dry reddish brown. Never mind he wasn’t tall and blond and athletic and everything I’d ever dreamed for myself.
I ended up feeling anxious for 24 hours and then told him ‘thank you’ but that it made me uncomfortable because of my friendship with his sister.
Turned out she had encouraged him to ask me.
Urgh.
I eventually lost her friendship over a boy – not her brother.
I’ve often wondered what became of her and her other, younger brother, who had a room in the attic under the sloping roof where he kept turtles in a kids’ wading pool.