Retroactively Pissed Off

Stephanie Walker
Nov 8 · 6 min read
An artistic attempt of my own

To make a needlessly long story short, he was not what I thought he would be.

I met him in the “early” days of social media. For me, that means AOL circa 1997. At the time I was a freshman in high school. Communicating in ways other than person-to-person — not to mention truly communicating with another person — was so foreign to me, so it makes sense that I was intrigued by the quick and often random exchanges afforded by said platform. Whether it was normative shyness, true social anxiety, or just plain awkwardness, there was a liberating quality to using just your keyboard to convey your thoughts and feelings, shallow or deep. And, for reasons beyond my comprehension, it felt so easy to “fall in love” with someone based on a few hours in a private chat room.

Oddly enough, the “him” to which I am referring was not someone I spent endless nights chatting with in a private chat room. No, the “him” to which I am referring found me randomly through what I assumed was a local directory of sorts. He lived in a neighboring town and attended a Catholic high school of which I was vaguely familiar, but had no real relevance to me. Anyway, this guy. Let me tell you about this guy.

I can’t tell you exactly how often we talked and to what depth, but I found our conversations exciting. He was charming, pleasant. And though I had no idea what he looked like, I was able to form a picture in my mind’s eye based on what I knew about him: high school junior, soccer player, altar boy, ex-boyfriend to a girl who shared my first name. I think I liked him, or at least the idea of him, even though we had virtually nothing in common. I started to conjure up daydreams about finally meeting him in person, about what it would be like to look into his eyes, this half-stranger. And when he asked me to attend Easter mass with him, and my parents actually allowed me to go, it dawned on me that this odd fantasy of mine would soon perish and, perhaps, become the stuff of high school dreams. To be clear, it was a huge leap, but not at all uncommon considering my age at the time.

Not knowing what a mass entailed, as well as being relatively free of organized religion (and, come to find out, any well-formed religious beliefs), I had no idea what to expect or how to prepare. I assumed I had to dress nicely, so I chose the most “fancy” article of clothing I owned: a just-shy-of-knee-length black dress I had worn to my homecoming dance the previous fall. As I did my hair and makeup, my mind automatically went to He’s not going to like you. He’s not going to think you’re pretty, and pretty much every possible variation of You’re not good enough.

So much for attempting to quell my ever-growing nervousness. Which was soon exacerbated by a knocking at the door.

And on the other side of that door stood a boy whose face was just as beautiful as I imagined: boyishly handsome, with skin like pale honey and intense blue eyes. He smiled and all I could do is smile back because throwing up wasn’t an option for me at the time. I said goodbye to my family and off we went into the cold spring evening. I can’t remember a word we spoke to each other, but certain sensory details seem as fresh to me as if it all occurred yesterday: the soft leather smell of his car, the song we listened to as we drove to his church (Canon by Johann Pachelbel), the muted gray sky of leftover winter. Once we got to his church, he took me to where his parents were seated, introduced us to each other, and left me to sit with them while he went to prepare for his altar-boy duties. I sat demurely, all but folding myself into my short black dress, all while becoming acutely aware that I did not belong. Or perhaps it just felt that way. Even so, I was self-conscious and in an unfamiliar place with at least a hundred strangers. How else was I supposed to feel?

Hours later, when mass was over, he found me and his folks who, incidentally, weren’t the warmest people but who were nonetheless decent, and a plan was made to go to dinner. “We’ll meet you there,” his mother said. He said we would be there as soon as we took a friend of his home.

Meanwhile, my eyes couldn’t leave him. And I was amazed at just how nice he seemed. I was smitten. But I didn’t know how interested he was until he kissed me in his car, right after we dropped off his friend.

Then, within a span of minutes, even seconds, his hand was in my pants (or, rather, my tights). I had no idea what to do: I had never been touched like that before, and by a half-stranger, no less. So, I didn’t do anything except go along with it and think, This is just what dating must be like (imagine a slight question mark lifting the end of that sentence). Plus, I really wanted him to like me.

Now I can’t help but think how strange it all was. Especially when, just a day or two later, he told me he loved me.

Then came the weirder parts.

About a week, two weeks later, the night before he was going to take me to a “Festival of Praise” event for his church, he gave me a rosary of his mother’s and taught me how to properly recite the Hail Mary prayer. He seemed slightly annoyed whenever I’d get it wrong. I thought, Whatever.

That same evening, we had planned to go see a movie. But not before he lectured me on my clothing and music choices. I distinctly recall him saying, “If you dressed like me, you’d be gaining a soul.” I remember being offended by this, but not offended enough to keep the same outfit on.

And of course he wanted me to get him off in the crowded movie theatre. I did. When he came he said, “You can just wipe it on my jacket.” So I did.

The next day was a disaster. But not at first. I attended church with him and his parents, ate breakfast with them afterwards. That all seemed fine. No, the disaster came when we went to the church event.

Not only was he pissed because I didn’t say the Hail Marys (I couldn’t remember them), but he mostly ignored me all night. The details I recall are scant but involve his ex-girlfriend having some kind of weird exorcism-like seizure in church and standing around by myself in a random (to me) person’s house. He and his friend took me home afterwards. And the most salient memories of that ride home were his friend saying, “Chill out, she’s not Catholic!” (he was still harping on the whole Hail Mary thing) and me realizing that I would probably never see him again.

I was right.

Well, not entirely. I did see him again, roughly three years later, but merely in passing: in a restaurant, a drug store. We didn’t acknowledge each other. And we did speak, a day or so after the so-called worship event, but that was only so he could break up with me.

Some 22, 23 years later I still cannot make sense of any of it — the layer of warmth, charm, and sweetness over the harsh, critical nougat of contempt — but I have some ideas. Even so, such theories do not necessarily bring me peace.

Finally allowing myself to be pissed off, and to express that anger with cheap acrylic paints and gutted magazines, brought me that much-needed peace. There was something particularly freeing about being retroactively pissed off — and sitting with that feeling, uncomfortable as it was — that gave me the closure I inadvertently denied myself all those years ago. With each brush stroke, I reflected on how much he truly hurt me, and how I wish I could have gone back in time and told him that truth. How shitty of him it was to tell me he loved me and then proceed to act in totally contradicting ways. How hurtful it was to be shamed for being. . . myself.

He’s not as nice as he seems. I wish I could travel back to that Saturday evening and warn the 15-year-old girl in the black dress.

Professional secret-keeper, part-time storyteller.

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