Girl Thing

As I ran upstairs to share the news with someone, anyone, who could give me any support on what had just happened – my mind wondered all places. I have never kissed a boy in my life, would we be kissing? How would that feel? For the longest time ever, I thought that my first kiss will be the love of my life in a super romantic setting and never had it crossed my mind that it would be with a teenage boy in the high school halls by water fountain. I wondered if I was the only one out there feeling both excited and puzzled, or was it a normal and common reaction to being asked out for the first time in your life?

The first person that was there for me, was this very tall, blond beautiful and skinny Russian girl, who had embarked on this boarding school adventure same year as me. She was very confident in herself, her looks and she radiated the vibe that screamed “I am the best”. A completely opposite type of girl to my personality, who is scared to speak because her teeth are not perfectly aligned. You get the picture. We were now six months into the school year, and she was completely single – and you could feel that this was bothering her more than one could imagine. Not only was she still single, no boy had taken any interest in her yet.

I ran into the room, and needed to share my experience with her to find some answers, something – anything. We close the door in our dorm room, and I am starting to speak up:

“Hey, so listen, this boy has asked me out. I don’t…”
“What??” – she did not even let me finish the sentence – “You, no I mean, YOU, were asked out? By who? What is this, I am the most beautiful girl in this school, and YOU get asked out? Why is it that we are almost halfway through the school year, and I am not dating yet.”

Silence. In my head, I am thinking wow, this is not support, this is borderline reinforcement of my fears of not being worthy to be asked out, and this girl is so confident of herself with the allure of arrogance and shifting the focus of conversation onto herself. Is this how friendships work?

Before I even had a chance to respond, she opens the door and screams “Karina was asked out on a date”. Great, now the whole boarding wing knows that there is a boy interested in me. Not one of these girls came to me with questions on how I felt about this situation, asking if I liked the boy at all – no. All they were worried and concerned about was comparing their lives with mine, and dropping words like “nerd” and “asked out” in the same sentence. You did not have to be a literature major to know who is the protagonist of that story.

Burn. Strike. Pain.

The only comfort that day was in the music and in the conversations with my family, while I was hiding the tears that ran down my cheeks. Solitude in a crowded place, loneliness in a shared dorm room and the only outlet for the feeling was a secret diary under my pillow.