When Being Beautiful Isn't So Fun

My first boyfriend, David, broke up with me using the line, “I just don’t want to date anyone right now.”

He was lying, but don’t worry, I didn’t believe him. I had a gaggle of girl cousins who did not like me for reasons I was very able to sympathize with. My sister had enchanted one of their boyfriends and earned the spite of the entire group. His loss was to be lamented as he was a complete buck. Even though no one expected it, I did lament with my spurned cousin, if only from a distance. If I'd gotten closer I could have lost a limb simply for being the younger sister of the girl who stole him. As a result, my cousins, who could not get revenge on my older sister, were more than willing to share the details of David’s defection with me. They described the situation sparing no detail: the girl he was with, the songs played at the dance I missed, everything.

As a matter of fact, their description was so tight that months later (after David had broken up with her too), I was standing at a dance and a girl came up to one of the guys I was talking with and I looked at her and thought she must be the girl David had dumped me for.

I took a chance and asked her directly, “Are you Mindy Martin?”

She was a little surprised and answered that yes she was and asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m Stephanie Quist.”

Mindy took two steps backward as she knew David had broken up with me to date her. But I laughed, told her to relax, and not to worry. I did not blame her for what happened and I really didn’t. I just wanted to ask her a question.

Her eyes were huge as she replied that yes she would answer my question.

Then I explained that my cousins had given me a thorough description of that first night she and David got together and if she didn’t mind, I would like to hear her side of the story to see if my cousins had exaggerated the story to hurt my feelings. Mindy was more than willing to oblige and told me the story in great detail.

My cousins had not lied to me. Actually, it was creepy how well the stories aligned. They had embellished nothing. I was sort of proud of them for not adding extra stuff just to pour salt in my wounds. Nice.

Oh, and Mindy was still in love with him.

Every word she said seeped of her deep affection for David, how much she missed him, and how he had hurt her when he had broken up with her. I understood. I had been hurt too. She wanted to get back together with him and was searching for every opportunity to do so.

I hadn’t done that. I had avoided him like poop on the sidewalk. I didn’t speak to him or look in his face, until on a different night, at a different dance, I had my hand grabbed by a different boy. It was Jared, David’s beautiful blond older brother. He grabbed my hand in one of his and David’s hand in the other and drew us together. “You two have to be friends,” he said.

My first instinct was to tear my hand away and storm off like the black witch I was, but I was curious, so before I did that I allowed myself to glance over my shoulder at the boy who had taken me on a figurative roller coaster ride I was still throwing up over. I shouldn’t have looked over my shoulder. I have always regretted looking over my shoulder, as when I did, David’s face was pained like he did want to be friends with me, like everything that had happened had hurt him too, and like somehow his heart was hanging on that moment.

And I wondered if I agreed to be his friend, would my pain stop? What I had been doing to heal myself had not been working and it had been months. If I had broken my arm, I would already have had my cast off and been proclaimed healed, but I still wasn’t over our breakup. I thought I had better give the ‘friendship thing’ a try as nothing I had done had cured me yet.

But I still kept my distance.

One night, I was at a dance in Cardston and I saw him there. I said ‘hi’ friendly-as-you-please and took a hike. He followed me and it wasn’t until he almost beat the crap out of Jeremy for trying to dance with me that I thought that maybe, he might want to get back together with me too. That week, after the dance, he called me three times, and I thought something romantic might happen if I saw him at the dance on Saturday. Maybe...

I had my fingers crossed.

So, I walked into the dance all bubbly with anticipation, and Mindy came up to me. She told me in a happy-clappy dolphin way that David, who had been calling me all week, had asked her to be his girlfriend the Saturday before, the day after I had seen him. I was a bit speechless. If he and I were only friends he could have told me that he had gotten back together with Mindy. He’d had plenty of opportunities since he had called me three times.

And standing there, on that basketball court floor, I felt like I was dumped for Mindy Martin all over again. It was nightmarish.

I was not angry at Mindy. She was small and fragile, and she deserved to have what she wanted just as much as I did.

I congratulated her and felt it in my heart.

But now I was trash. Now I was something David just used for entertainment, and I did not like that feeling. I was a person, and even though I did have a multitude of skills intended for entertaining and enchanting young men, that didn’t mean that I deserved to be lied to or misled because he felt like it... unless, I was trash, which was what I felt like.

So, I was feeling a bit crushed at the dance.

As was my custom, I scanned the room and located the hottest guy there. It was a guy I knew named Caleb. He had a girlfriend, but the point was not to steal him from his girlfriend, the point was to have a little fun and he was my first target.

I went up to him and cupped my hand over his ear. Then I whispered, “Hey, wanna kiss?”

Girlfriend or no, he glanced around to make sure no chaperon was watching and leaned in... only to have a Hershey Kiss put in between his mouth and mine, just in the nick of time. That was my trick.

Caleb laughed, enjoying the joke ever so much. He leaned in and said, “Do you have any more of those? I gotta try that.”

I gave him a small handful and sent him on his way. Might as well share the fun. Especially because I really couldn't have any fun. I felt scammed and cross and cross and scammed and grouchy. I didn’t have the energy to try my trick with any other guys. Doing that with Caleb, a weak replacement for my ex-boyfriend, David, had exhausted all my strength. I sat by myself until the boy who had made me feel ill-used showed up at the dance. I didn't speak to him. I went and found his new girlfriend, Mindy, and told her he had arrived. Then I went to pout by myself on a steel chair that had been spray-painted gray and it felt like I sat in amongst the tombstones. All the chairs had half-circle backs and they were all empty, which is much less friendly than sitting among graves, I just wanna say. At least graves have dead people in them who aren’t having the best day.

Caleb found me and told me how unhappy a friend of his was that he couldn't make it to the dance that night because he wanted to see me. To be straight, I had no idea who that guy was. It took a bit of remembering to recall the event where we had met. Then it came to me. I had been to a dance where I had been wearing high heels. My sister had once shown me a cute trick to do with heels was to stand really close to a guy, so your eyes met, and then kick off just one of your heels so he could see the dramatic difference in your height when you put your foot flat on the floor. I actually had a line of guys waiting to see me do this with each and every one of them. Who needs a kissing booth? All I had to do was take off one shoe.

In truth, I wasn't very interested in the guy Caleb was trying to set me up with. I was more interested in Caleb himself. Not that I wanted very much from him. He had a girlfriend, but even if he did, we were teenagers and I was not planning on doing anything with him. I just wanted him to look at me with his extraordinarily complimentary eyes, and dance with me so I wouldn't feel that I was garbage. Unrequited love was such a burn. I remember Caleb comforting me marvelous much that night. He swung me around and put his hand on the far side of my waist when we danced. I put my head on his shoulder because I was so hurt and tired. On that night, Caleb was extra nice because he was very handsome and he couldn't ask me for anything.

David and Mindy broke up after a week because he hadn’t really wanted to date her the second time around. He told me later, he asked her out to cheer her up at her birthday party, because that was the only thing that would work. I didn’t know what to make of that. I would never have done that. I would never have agreed to date a guy because he wanted me and was sad because he couldn’t have me. I had long since accepted leaving a trail of unsatisfied young men in my wake. Instead of being sappy like that, I would have flipped my hair and told that boy to forget he ever saw me because he was never going to get me. But if I did decide to date someone out of pity, I certainly would have had better longevity for it than one week. She was perfectly lovable. I wonder why he couldn’t stand to date her longer.

On a different night, I was out with Caleb and a bunch of his friends and he turned to me with his very handsome face and said something like, “Stephanie, you're alone with us tonight. What if we gang-raped you?”

I acted like there was no way he had meant that and said something stupid to try to lighten the situation. The problem was that what he said was quite true. I was in a place I should not have been and I was not near anyone I knew who could help me.

Another problem was that it was a huge leap from, 'Hey, wanna kiss?' It didn't matter whether he was joking or not. All jokes, all words spoken come from the heart. He could not have said something like that if he hadn't thought it. He sealed his fate in my books since he never apologized for his incredibly off-color remark.

That was why I had to go through boys like Kleenex. They were like tissues with built-in noses. They snotted on themselves and had to be thrown away.