The Meeting

I am now about 5 feet from where she is standing and at this point, some of her female friends stop talking to look at me or in my direction. At this point, I have made a decision to just smile at her and say hi. I chickened out to do anything more than that. Jackie smiled back at me and said hi back as I walked on to my first class of the day.

Later on, during the day during lunch, I got my tray of food, went, and sat down with my friends from last year. I sat in my usual spot, the back corner of the cafeteria. It was, in my opinion, the best spot to watch for people coming into the room. As I was eating my turkey sandwich I happened to look up and Jackie was walking into the cafeteria. One thing I noticed was that Tim was not by her side like usual. In fact, when Tim did come into the room, he sat down at a different table than that of Jackie. At this point, I’m thinking that maybe they broke up and that put a smile on my face. I asked one of my friends at the table if Tim and Jackie were no longer with each other and Ben said that he had overheard someone in the hallway saying that they had broken up over the Summer. Again, another smile, but bigger just came across my face. I don’t believe I should be apologizing about this because Tim was, IS a complete jerk and I’m just glad that she is no longer with him. She probably saw that he was a complete jerk and decided that she didn’t want to be associated with that kind of person.

I don’t know what came over me, but at the moment I found out they weren’t together I got up from my seat and walked over to her table. She was talking with 4 other of her female friends and as I got closer to the table (zeroing in on where she was sitting), her friends stopped talking and just started staring right at me. With a crackle in my voice, I said hi to her and she looked puzzled. She said, with a hesitation, hi back, but then added “didn’t you already say this to me this morning in the hallway”? I said, “yes I guess I wanted to say it again”. A couple of her friends that were sitting at the table started laughing. I don’t know if they were laughing at me because I sounded like a dweeb or if they thought it was sweet. I’m going to take a guess and say it was the first option. I was really embarrassed at this point so I turned around to walk away, but Jackie then said “where are you going? You can sit down if you like.” The two girls that laughed at me were in shock that she even said that to me and had a confused look on their faces. I turned back around and obliged her request. Sat down at the table and the only thing I could think to say was “how is your device working?” She had a puzzled look on her face but answered saying “it’s fine.” Again, she looks puzzled. I let her know that I was the one that fixed it last year. Then the light bulbs went off and she said, “Wow that was you? You have really changed since last year.” From that point on we had a really good chat at lunch talking about the things that we did over the summer. I just basically talked about how my life changed from working out and she talked about how she went to visit her grandmother in Utah. It was a good conversation I would say. She was really easy to talk to.

I’m going to skip ahead a couple of months because between that time we generated a really tight friendship. We sat with each other during lunchtime and even passed notes in the hallways between classes. The notes started out being simple like “hi, going to my next boring class”. Then the notes started expanding to asking what I plan on doing after school and wanted to see if I wanted to hang out. This is turning out to be a dream from which I didn’t want to wake up from. I am seeing who Jackie really is as a person and I already knew that she was a good person.

You might be wondering what Tim was doing during this time. The short answer is not much. He never attempted to try and get back with her. Whatever he did, he must have upset her. I never asked about that because I didn’t want to be in hot water because I don’t know what went on with that situation plus, I didn’t feel like she would have opened up to me about it. I didn’t really care anyway. As long as she doesn’t go back to him, I was okay with where our friendship was headed.

Moving on, the homecoming dance was coming up and I wanted to really ask Jackie. I don’t think anyone else asked her or she probably would have told me. I was walking in the hallway to go to my next class when I saw her coming my way. She had a folded-up piece of paper and I knew what that meant. I was going to get a note from her. She handed me the note smiled and said she had to hurry to her next class. I said OK and proceeded on to my class. As I sat down, I opened the letter and my heart sunk into what she said………...