You never really know what people think of you
The high school hottie who didn't know it
There was this guy at my high school who we'll call Chad Michael, a senior when I was a freshman, who was universally adored by every girl in the school, myself obviously included. He was drop-dead gorgeous and completely aloof to the world around him. Looking back, I can't even remember who he hung out with; in all of my memories of seeing him around school, it's just, like, this image of the crowds parting while he glides down the hallway, books grasped lazily by his side in that apathetic dude sort of way, an aura of golden light emanating from behind him as he floats past his gaping admirers, staring straight ahead, completely unaware of, or maybe just unconcerned with, the admiring eyes following him.
Okay, that’s maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but this was the kind of guy that inspired wild pubescent female fantasies so widely shared that girls wouldn't even fight over him or get jealous, they'd just be happy for you if he managed to so much as look at you, even by accident, like he was JTT or something.
Anyway, I had long forgotten about this dude when I was sitting at a bar downtown about fifteen years later, visiting a friend who worked there because I always got free drinks when he was working and I knew everyone there, and a random guy I hadn’t met sat next to me. We started chatting and, as we kept talking, realized that we had graduated from the same high school, three years apart. I asked him his name.
“Chad! Chad Michael!”
My mouth dropped open. There was simply no way this was true. I told him I did not believe him. He laughed and swore it was really him.
…You may be wondering how on earth I couldn’t have recognized this guy if he had been such an amazing hottie not that long ago. Well, he shaved his head. He had these wild, dark, spirally curls back then and absolutely no hair to speak of now. A very stark difference. That’s pretty much the long and short (heh) of it.
Anyway, I actually managed to have a class with this guy even though we were 3 grades apart: a music class. It was an “intermediate” music class, meant to bring students like me up to speed — that is, the ones who played an instrument throughout elementary school or had taken some lessons awhile back, but who were out of practice and couldn’t keep up with the marching band yet. It was also a class for learning instruments that were out of the ordinary for the regular marching band, like piano and bass guitar.
Chad Michael played the piano, naturally. It fit perfectly with his mysterious allure to be the quiet guy in the corner who didn’t talk to anyone but played the piano beautifully (I have no idea if he was actually any good; I’m sure he could have discordantly banged on the keys with his elbows and we still would’ve swooned about it). There were only nine students in this class, total, and we were in all grades playing a variety of instruments. It was an interesting and fun class, especially since I got to stare at Chad Michael playing the piano every day I had it.
I wasn’t even going to try with this guy. There was no way. Way out of my league and I was not about to even risk it.
One morning between classes, I was standing outside of a classroom with a couple girlfriends and Chad Michael walked by. I ignored him and kept babbling at my friends because I sure as hell didn’t have the nerve to say anything to him and I knew he wasn’t going to have anything to say to me. But after he walked past, my friends elbowed me in shock.
“Chad Michael said hi to you!!! Why didn’t you say anything?!” I was utterly dumbfounded. I did not hear him say hi to me. He was so far off my radar because I thought I was so far off his that I had completely discarded the idea that I could even be recognized out loud by someone I literally shared a very tiny class with.
So anyway, fast forward back to that bar downtown, where I did not believe I was really talking to Chad Michael. First of all, he didn’t look anything like the Chad Michael I remembered. Second, he was talking. The Chad Michael I barely knew at all in any capacity did not speak! Chad Michael was a mute mystery who only spoke in piano!
“I live around the corner,” he told me. “Come over and I’ll show you my yearbook and prove it to you.”
“Okay!” I said, because I’m very smart. We paid up and I followed him around the corner to his building, located exactly where he said it would be, and he led me upstairs to his apartment and promptly located the hardcover, textured red book I also had at home. He turned to the senior page with all the full-color professional photos and pointed to himself. Sure enough, that was absolutely the same Chad Michael that we all went crazy for.
“You know every girl at Henry was completely in love with you, right?”
He looked at me like I had grown three new heads.
“Haha, yeah right. I didn’t have any friends in high school.”
My turn to be dumbfounded. No friends? But he was literally the most sought-after guy in our entire school, at least during my first year there, which was his last.
He went on to explain that he was raised in a very religious family, described it as an actual cult, and said that he was forbidden from dating and as a result, never really thought of himself that way or looked at other girls that way back then. He also didn’t remember saying hi to me that day in the hallway, because yes, I definitely asked.
I went on to tell him about the way that the girls would talk about him and how everyone thought that he was just too cool for them and wouldn’t even try, thinking there was no way he’d be interested. He was stunned. He had literally no idea.
I think about this story a lot. How did this guy who had achieved mythical status among the young women in our high school have literally no idea that so many girls were into him? Man, religious indoctrination can have a lot of unpleasant side effects.
But also, you never really know how you are perceived by others until someone just straight up tells you, sometimes. And it’s kind of illuminating to know! Especially when it’s actually more positive than you expected. Even when it’s not, it’s something concrete and honest to learn from.
Once, when I was in my early twenties, I posted one of those anonymous surveys on my LiveJournal so that my friends could tell me what they really thought of me by answering questions I had chosen from the website about my personality and behaviors. Turns out everyone thought I was self-centered and immature. I got mad at them and wrote an angry LiveJournal post about how wrong they all were.
Sometimes it takes a while to learn how to accept criticism, even the kind you literally blatantly ask for.
Anyway!
I definitely kissed Chad Michael that night.1 Duh, I just had to. It may have been fifteen years later, but my inner high school freshman dweeb absolutely needed that story to later tell her best friend after he makes fun of her “type” another decade or so later.
yes, that’s it, get your heads out of the gutter!
This gave me hope that maybe girls were secretly pining for me in high school, but then I remembered what I was like in high school
A few years after I graduated from high school, where I was miserably unhappy, and believed myself to be a total outcast, who had to move 1000 miles away to even talk to a girl, which I did when I got out there. I went back to be with my family on some holiday or another, and some of my friends were having a party, and they had a band, and they were playing in the basement of my friend’s house, and it was a blast. People who I wasn’t particularly friendly with in high school or who I hadn’t even met because they were people my friends knew from community college were there and just being cool and friendly, and we were drinking beer in a not particularly rowdy way, but everyone was all loosened up. And we were sweaty from dancing because this was the punk rock era and these guys were a pop punk band, as we would call them now. So I walk upstairs to the kitchen to get a beer out of the refrigerator and there’s this really pretty girl there. And she’s looking at me and I say hi. And she tells me she was in 10th grade when I was a senior, and then I kind of remembered her. And I remembered that she was cute then, and she was even cuter a few years later in the kitchen at the party. She told me she had a terrible crush on me back then. I said not only did I not have any idea, it would not have even entered my head that that was possible. She was surprised by that. Her mental image of me and my own interior picture of myself had absolutely nothing to do with each other. Completely different planets. I said if you had given me the tiniest hint, well, the magic might have happened! And we both laughed. But, in reality, it wouldn’t have mattered, it would’ve taken more than a hint to get through a thick layer of self loathing. I would’ve simply discounted even overt signals. The mental construct would’ve been more compelling than even facts on the ground. Adolescent life can be tough. There were some cool things about it but I don’t miss it!