Forgotten
(Trigger warning)
He smelled funny and his hat was dirty. Super dirty. His hair was pretty greasy too. Those were the reasons I did not want to go out with Chuck*.
This morning, while doing my morning perusing of Twitter, I saw a tweet from Lynn (she needs no last name, you should know her) that caught my interest.
“This is fucking scary to read http://l.ynn.me/1Kn3vZL (trigger warning)”
I clicked the link. I wanted to read the scary thing and understand what was triggering about it. My browser did its browser thing and took me to the AskWomen Subreddit, where someone had asked the following: “Ladies, has a man ever gotten angry/hostile toward you after you’ve (politely) turned him down?”
I’ve been crying some lately, more than usual, so I wasn’t surprised when tears came to my eyes. I thought they were the empathy tears I often feel when faced with the pain of others. Others. Those other people who had experienced hostility in response to their desire not to become involved with a potential suitor. Not me. I always counted myself in the group of women who had avoided such things throughout my life, with careful selection of who I chose to be around and wise exiting of situations when the person I was with seemed to have anger issues. (PSA: if you want me to leave your presence, just throw your phone at a hard surface while I’m around.)
About two seconds after the tears, the memory came. Memory is tricky. It doesn’t behave in ways that we expect, which is why I didn’t expect this one: I didn’t remember that I had it. This memory came first with a picture. The angry face in front of me. The dirty hat. The greasy hair peeking out around the edges of the hat. Then the feelings. The hands on my shoulders. The feeling of the wall, suddenly against my back when it had not been there seconds before. The fear. The searching around, looking for someone, anyone to end this. Then the words. “Why don’t you want to go out with me?!”
I went to a small high school in Alaska. My graduating class had about 70 people in it. Our school was a mish mash of hallways that seemed like they’d been added on as the population grew. The Junior High That Used To Be The High School connected to the New and Improved™ High School via a hallway: The Great Hall. Where lunches happened in the middle of the day and cheerleading practices and sign painting happened at the end of the day. The New and Improved™ High School was itself four long hallways, in the shape of a square, each hallway lined with lockers and classroom doors. The freshman hallway, where all the freshman lockers were, was where Chuck asked me to go out with him, because we were freshmen.
I wasn’t into Chuck. He smelled funny and his hat was dirty. Super dirty. His hair was pretty greasy too. These are good reasons to not go out with someone to a 14 year old. Besides I was madly in love with Lamont…or was it Danny? Chuck was not either of those boys. I turned him down. “No, sorry.” Off to class I went. I did not tell anyone about this. It wasn’t a big deal and it probably would have been embarrassing for both of us.
Because our school was small, but growing, because the population around it was growing, at the other end of the Junior High That Used To Be The High School there was a set of portables. That’s what we called them. In reality, they were classrooms made of doublewide trailers, tacked onto a hastily built hallway. The hallway was poorly heated, if at all, so if you had a class in the portables in the winter, you always made sure to grab your jacket beforehand or risk 15–20 seconds of freezing cold. That freezing cold was no match for the vanity of a 14 year old, so I never wore a jacket to my classes in the portables. That’s probably why the wall was so cold.
There were no teachers in the hallways when classes changed. Our schedule ran counter to the Junior High schedule so there wouldn’t be crowds in the Junior High hallway as we walked through on our way to the portables. Save a few kids getting stuff from their lockers, the Junior High hallway was always pretty empty as the Senior High kids were making their way to class.
I don’t remember Chuck being in the Junior High hallway as I walked down it that day. I feel like I would remember if I noticed him near me. Maybe not. I don’t think I’d learned by then to think of people as potential threats. Violence was a thing that happened in New York and Iraq. I don’t remember Chuck being in the cold hallway as I walked to my class in the portables, late for some reason or another. I’m pretty sure it was English, with Mrs. G, who always thought I’d grow up to be a CEO or a politician or something. Mrs. G, who was cool with my being a little late to class every so often, like I was that day. I was almost to class when it happened. The surprise of it. Walking to class, then suddenly pushed up against a wall in less than 2 seconds. “Why don’t you want to go out with me?!”
If my life were a movie, the writer might have turned that scene into something romantic, as writers are wont to do with creepy and violent behavior towards women in movies. He just really wants to be with her, look how in love he is, it’s so sweet that he won’t take no for an answer, it’s adorable that he’s following her to her classes, awwwwwww.
It wasn’t romantic. It was fucking scary. I was terrified. I had no idea what was going to happen next. There were no saviours around. Nobody to come to my rescue in the empty cold hallway. He was strong and I was scared and so I just uttered a meek “I don’t know. I just don’t.” I knew why. It was because he smelled funny and his hat was dirty. 14 year old me knew that probably was not a smart thing to say at that time, so I didn’t. I remember telling him to let go of me and I remember him thinking about it for a second. I wonder what he was weighing in his head at that point. What he had to consider before coming to the decision to let go of me. He did let go though, and I went to class and never told anybody about it. I’m pretty sure that after that day, I never thought about it again. I avoided Chuck when and where I could. Our social circles didn’t overlap and he skipped school a lot. I put those events into a little box, and tucked that box far away in the back of my head, where I never had reason to bring it out again until today.
Chuck is not on Facebook, I’ve looked, so I will never have to deal with him commenting on our classmates posts. I will never have to confront him. I will never have to interact with him. He is still alive. He is still living in Alaska. I am still afraid of him. I have not forgotten.
*His name is not Chuck.
