Thursday, October 3, 2002

Boyz

Through all of this experience there's been one saving grace: no boys.

Okay, there's Jessa's older brother Russell, who is a senior and mostly keeps away from his bratty younger sis, which works for me. Beyond that, guys do not feature prominently into my life at all. That's great. I don't think I could handle it if Jessa had a boyfriend. I don't even know how well I'd take it if she had a male friend. Even Jessa's friends don't seem to have any guys in their orbit, which is crazy to me: Erika is really pretty, and Alicia is fun.

That said, I know for sure they're thinking about them. Erika desperately wants to be a teen queen, and part of that is probably getting a popular boyfriend. Alicia would probably date the first person who asked her, but seems to put guys off with her weird, artistic exterior (she pioneered wearing pajama pants to school with a jean jacket covered in anime buttons.) I figure there's gotta be someone out there for her, but maybe not yet.

I thought I was perfectly in the clear, but then at some point Alicia nudged me and said the name "Brian," in a hushed tone that made it seem like some big secret. I froze up, as I have a habit of doing. That name meant nothing to me, but I knew it was supposed to so I just said "Oh, I... don't want to talk about him" and made a note to find out what was the deal.

Jessa, like a lot of teenage girls, keeps a pen-and-paper diary under her bed, which is all well and good, but she was pretty sporadic in keeping it up, and obviously writing for herself because she wasn't explaining a lot of details. That's why I haven't exactly absorbed all of it (and because, no disrespect for her, she's no Hemingway. I'm not sure even he could make the trials and tribulations of an average teenage girl riveting enough to want to read.) But now I had a research topic. Brian.

Details were scant. Not even a last name, but it seems like he is a friend of Russell's. There's just a lot of "Brian's so cute," "I want to date him" "I love him" hears and stars and things drawn in the margins. The girl obviously had it bad for him.

I felt really crappy reading all of this. I mean, for starters, it's obviously very private, but Jessa and I... I think I can admit, I know her from a very particular angle at this point. Whoever Brian is, it doesn't seem like she has a chance with him, and is just infatuated. But it's not like he is oblivious to her. There's descriptions of conversations, in person and on MSN, all of which are terribly meaningful moments in Jessa's life, but probably insignificant to him. It made me pretty sad the more I read.

To my knowledge, I have not inherited any of Jessa's... shall we say, tastes, in that area (all teenage boys look like giant smelly, greasy dirtbags to me, sorry.) So that means that as far as I'm concerned Brian is a non-person. He has not sought me out and I have no idea who he even is. I wish him well.

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