You are characterized by Peter Pan’s smile; cheeky, confident to a fault, weightless. No doubt we were too young then to begin feeling the weight of the world on our shoulders.
You would sidle up to me if you noticed me sitting alone, try to get me to talk to you, to laugh at your lewd jokes. Everyone in my class referred to you as an idiot in an affectionate, ruffling-your-hair kind of way. But I knew you were brilliant. You were better than me at math, that’s for sure. You could calculate the velocity of a train chugging through a tunnel as I sat at the desk behind you and chewed my pencil, wondering how I would ever need that information in the adult world. I would kick your chair out of annoyance, legs swinging wildly, and you’d turn with that smile of yours. Your warm hand on mine as you tugged the pencil from my frustrated grip and explained the problem sum to me patiently.
Then again, I think you did that for every girl.
You’ve always been that one guy who crashed so deeply the first time, he told himself never again and lifted off the ground to live among the clouds. If you had someone you liked, the whole class would know it. We had a very efficient rumor mill. The rumor mill told me that you had wooed the same girl for four years--FOUR years--before you started your rapid fire jumps from cloud to cloud. everyone said you were a player, but I knew different. You always chose the girls who showed absolutely no interest in you, who could not stomach your jokes, who pushed you away when they ought to be pulling you close. It was an exercise in futility for you, and you went about it anyway. I guess I’ve always felt like I could relate to you, like we were the same soul despite how different we were on the exterior. Because I watched you. I developed a radar that made me aware of where you were in my surroundings, the distance x from me to you, the v velocity of your movement, the t time of your arrival at my side.
Of course, all I knew of Peter Pan then were the Disney versions of the young boy. I had you to teach me what J.M. Barrie really meant to convey: in Neverland, the mermaids were terrifying, the fairies had orgies, and Peter Pan was really a cruel, bloodthirsty boy, emblematic of the latent cruelty inherent in all children brought to the forefront by his surroundings and his rivalry with Hook. Disney, as it always did, smudged away the less than appetizing parts of the book, leaving the clean edges of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil.
My greatest thrill was when you called my house phone (we were too young to have cell phones at the time) and asked me, “What do you call a bike with three wheels?”
“A tricycle,” I told you breathily.
“Oh. Damn!” You swore suddenly. “I’m playing a game. Now who’s your favorite teacher?”
We started talking on the phone, perhaps once a week, for a few months. You would go silent a lot, focused on playing your silly video game, while I waited with tightly clasped hands on the phone on the other side, listening to your breathing, the clacking of your keyboard, your muttered swears. I would debate for hours before I dialed your number. I would even write a list of topics I could jump into if there were ever any awkward silences. We talked about our families and how you really liked playing badminton, I even asked you if you hated your dad once (“Of course not.”). At the time, a phone call was the height of intimacy for me. Your voice in my ear, chuckling and teasing me and commenting on school.
Until I got another phone call from your best friend. A girl.
“Peter Pan likes you,” she announced formally. “He told me to tell you.”
Suddenly I understood how the rumor mill started. And I got a strange knot in my gut. If i knew you, announcing to the world that you liked me meant you didn’t really like me that much at all. The next day at school, you told me not to call you anymore. You proceeded to do all the stupid things boys do when they “like” a girl: pulling my hair, shoving me as you ran past, calling my name in class and then ignoring me. I became a game to you, and two weeks later your best friend called me to say you didn’t like me anymore. I had lost.
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