Up until high school, Valentine’s Day was a chore and a bore to me. With equality measures in place, everyone received little valentines from classmates – it was a completely socialist holiday. We were required by the grand masters of the school to give everyone the same cheap little card, even if you didn’t like them. Once capitalism was introduced in high school, I found that giving or receiving valentines on February 14 was actually something special. Let me take you back to a time of innocence – the 80s, which are like the 50s compared to high school today.

Intimidating beauty. That’s what I remember most about Rachel Young (name changed to protect the guilty), my sophomore-year crush at Scottsdale High. She was the school’s homecoming queen and gracious winner of nearly every social award the school had to offer. She was the president of all of the clicky clubs, the captain of the cheer squad and undisputed champion of motivating the slack-jawed masses at the school’s pep rallys. She had a smile that made the boys uneasy – worrying that they might “telegraph” their inner thoughts below the waist. Her lips were like luscious satin pillows, which she kept constantly shiny and enticing by slathering them in Strawberries & Cream lip balm. She was probably the most popular nymph in the school’s history. She was also an exceptionally stupid girl.

It was my second year of high school and Rachel’s fourth – but probably not last – when we met in Retard Algebra, a class she was taking for the second time. On the first day of class I grabbed the desk right next to hers. My thinking was that if I was going to sit there for nine months not paying attention, I might as well have something pretty to look at. She glanced at me and smiled when I sat down and I discreetly slid my notebook off my desk and into my lap.

“Lame class, huh?” she said, looking in my direction.

Was she talking to me? After an awkward pause, I responded with yeah.
Then she didn’t say much at all to me for a month, but she still smiled in my direction every morning. In the meantime, I was joining the Chess Club and Dungeons and Dragons Club, thinking that I might meet more chicks if I was active in the school’s social scene. What this really did was label me further as a dork – as if wearing O.P. shorts, top-siders and pastel-colored Izod dress shirts together didn’t broadcast sufficiently.

At lunchtime, I would usually get shaken down for quarters by the jocks, who drank their lunch out of the soda machine. Depending on the mood of the Neanderthals, I would either get a wedgie or a charlie horse after handing over my money. I was a little over four feet tall and weighed about a hundred pounds – there wasn’t much I could do.

That was until Rachel happened by one day while I was being mugged. She gave the guys a load of lip and they scampered away like hyenas shooed from the open carcass of a felled gazelle. Then she said a bunch of things to me that I couldn’t make out, due to the angels singing. She said something again, this time looking impatient, so I blocked out the chorus and realized she was asking if I was okay.
In my squeaky voice I said something like (and crank this up about eight octaves from your internal reading voice), “I’m fine. Those guys are always messing with me.”

And that was it – she took me in like a whimpering puppy left out in the rain. We became friends – although I’m sure in her mind we were just acquaintances. I found out that she didn’t date and really didn’t have any friends. Turns out the guys were too afraid to ask her out and the girls resented her. She was an outcast – just like me – the runt of the litter, the diseased baby bird pushed out of the nest, banished to an island of self-doubt and loathing.

Rachel was getting straight Ds throughout most of high school. I’m sure her counselor and parents thought she just wasn’t applying herself, which might be partially true. But really, while she had hit the genetic jackpot, a portion of the winnings were withheld – like the brain part. She was sincerely sweet and incredibly friendly to me, so I paid no attention when she copied my answers in math – nearly assuring that she would be taking the class yet one more time.

After thinking about Rachel through all of the winter break, I committed to getting her something special for Valentine’s Day. But I waited too long to buy anything, so the night before I put together a homemade card – an artless specimen crafted from poster-board and red construction paper. I wrote a short paragraph about how much I appreciated our friendship and signed my name at the bottom.

Arriving early to class, I slipped the card on her desk. When she walked in as the bell rang, I got up to sharpen my pencil on the other side of the room, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the potential embarrassment of her opening the card and laughing.

She didn’t laugh. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I’ve always aced English, so it must’ve been decent. After sharpening my pencil, I turned to see her reading the card. She was smiling, so I started back to my desk. That’s when she got up from her seat and met me halfway. And there, in front of the entire Decelerated Math class, she bent over and kissed me (strawberries and cream – yum), hugged me, and said “thank you.” A chorus of “ooohs” came from the class – the homecoming queen just made out with some nerd! It was all very similar to a John Hughes movie plot.

Even though she knew everyone would talk about this for weeks – and she would probably never live it down, she threw the dice and kissed the dork. For a while, it was rumored that I had slipped $20 in her valentine, just to get her to kiss me. I am absolutely not above that type of behavior – this is, after all, a capitalistic system.