Friday the 13th reminds me of Bill. When the school year ended for a lot of students this past month, and when I spied a group of kids on their way to their senior proms, I was reminded of Bill. Just the other day, when I posted comment number 91 on Dooce’s announcement and comment number 13 on Jimbo’s poem, I was yet again reminded of Bill.

Seems like this is the perfect time to write about him.

Bill was in my high school class of 1991, but I didn’t know he existed until the very last days of my senior year. He was in my calculus class, quietly sitting at the far left side in front of the room. At six feet three inches tall, he towered lankily over everyone, yet I never noticed him. I was too busy trying not to laugh at some football player’s antics and trying not to worry about falling behind in my calculus homework due to cheer practice.

Yeah… I know about all those stereotypes that pop up in your head at the mention of smart lanky kids, football players and cheerleaders. It totally wasn’t like that. It usually never is.

High school can be a painful place for people, as it was for me at times. Being involved allowed me to have a lot of acquaintances, but I didn’t have any true friends. My self-esteem was nonexsitent, and I truly did feel ugly and ignored. How could I not? For the homecoming dance, because no one asked me, I went with another girl from my squad; I wore a little black dress, she wore a dashing white tux, and I’m sure people had strange, suggestive things to say about that. For the Valentine’s ball, because no one asked me soon enough, my friends had me go with a boy whose girlfriend was somehow forbidden to go to the dance with him, and to add to my humiliation, I spent much of that night feeling ill with heartburn and gas pains. How romantic.

And for prom?

No one asked me to the prom, and the one or two guys I asked either already had a date or was too broke to go; even when I offered to pay for everything, the one who was broke turned me down. It all wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t have my heart set on going and if I didn’t already buy my shoes and get my dress made (what a hopeless case!). But there it was. I had no date.

On the last full school day before the prom, the one chance that I had to get a date, I ended up crying my eyes out over it, and it felt like the whole school was a witness to my despair. Suddenly, everyone was offering to help me find a date, even as the day was swiftly slipping by. Even my teachers assured me of their help. Pathetic, isn’t it?

Then, during one of my afternoon periods, I was pulled out of class by a girl I’d seen but never knew personally and brought to a counselor’s office. Apparently, the counselor had been asking around among the students if they knew anyone tall, dark, and handsome who would want to go to the prom with me. The ultimate humiliation, I kid you not. The girl and her friend had evidently suggested Bill, and I could not for the life of me figure out who this Bill character was. Not that it mattered, the counselor determined that Bill should be my date. He set us up somehow, and later, before I knew it, I was on the phone with Bill making arrangements and trying to get to know him a little better.

It was Bill who told me that we were in the same calculus class. He also told me that he knew who I was, noticed me early on, in fact. And later, when he felt a little more comfortable speaking with me (I was trying my damnedest to put him at ease), he even confided to having had a little crush on me.

That settled it. I set out to make our prom date the best date he’d ever had.

Bill was shy, and so was I, but because he was the one in A.P. Physics and I was the one in Varsity Cheerleading, I figured it was up to me to help him relax and have fun. I turned on the charm that I didn’t even know I had, and I soon had him joking and laughing with me on the phone.

For prom night, our plan was a group date—dinner with my friends at a fancy seafood restaurant where we all had reservations, then off to the prom. My friends, unfortunately, were space cadets, and on the way to the restaurant, they went in the other direction, got totally lost, and never made it to the original destination. Bill and I, on the other hand, made a good team. He drove, I navigated, and with plenty of time to spare, we made it to the restaurant on my friends’ half-assed directions. We found ourselves waiting for them in vain, but we chatted during that time, and Bill came out of his shell more and more.

We ended up not having dinner and went straight to the prom, where I seemed to take the lead in most things—getting our picture taken, finding some seats, continuing our conversation, and making Bill dance. He told me that he wasn’t a dancer, that he couldn’t dance, that he looked like a dorky white man trying to dance, and I told him with my brightest smile, “Dance anyway. No one really cares. All you’re meant to do is move your body and have fun.” And somehow, I got him dancing.

I really think he had a lot of fun, too. When I thought he’d had enough, I made a move towards our seats, but he actually stopped me and asked me for another dance. I was happily surprised. After that, the date only got better and better. I was so set on putting him at ease, I completely forgot about my own uneasiness, and when he was completely at ease, he revealed the truly beautiful side of him—his perverted sense of weird and wacky humor. I don’t remember if we stayed until the end of the prom; I think we did. All I remember is going to a late-night restaurant afterwards to eat, we were so starved for food, and we laughed uproariously in our booth (at what, I don’t remember). Then we went to his house so we could change into casual clothes and so that he could play me some of his favorite music (Somebody by Depeche Mode), and we went driving along the empty streets at breakneck speeds, chatting away into the wee hours of the morning about everything and nothing.

It was sometime about seven in the morning when our date officially ended, and from then on we were great friends. Or at least I thought so.

We lived at opposite ends of town (he’d been bussed to my neighborhood school for its magnet programs and its aviation/aeronautics class), but we often talked on the phone for hours on end. He asked me out every time we talked, but I would shyly decline because as effervescent as I was during our first date, I really was a complete social case around guys if there was even a hint of romance involved. Bless Bill; he wasn’t fazed by it at all. He happily told me that he would ask me out 13 times… because 13 (his birthdate) was his lucky number.

But we never did go out on that second date. I went out for a submarine sandwich with him once, and I was totally ill at ease. I knew he wanted to develop our relationship into something more than friendship, and that knowledge gave me cold feet. For reasons I won’t get into, issues I’ve had to deal with since childhood, I couldn’t allow myself to think of him that way. I liked him too much, and he was the best friend I’d had in a long, long while.

So… he went off to college in the northern part of California, while I stayed at home to go to college in the southern part of California. We kept in touch by e-mail and by post mail—long and wacky, funny letters that were free and uninhibited, rife with inside jokes, doodles, and craziness. He told me about all the house DJing and dancing he was getting into, this man who once professed that he was too dorky and white to dance, and he sent me tapes filled with his favorite songs.

He was growing, evolving, and I wasn’t. He was learning to relax and have fun, and while I might have been the first person to tell him to relax and have fun, I wasn’t relaxing and having fun myself. Instead, I was dealing with my demons and finding myself in the grip of angry hormones and emotional anxieties, dealing with monsters that I didn’t even know were there.

And a few years later, when Bill and I made plans to go to Disneyland with his college friends and to meet up with my online friends, I went from being the easygoing charming cheerleader who accompanied him to the prom… to being a cold, hard, angry bitch who treated him and his friends abominably for no reason other than it was a trip met with hardships in finding a room and disappointment for me in not spending enough time with my online friends. For the entire trip home, the tension in my car was thick enough to choke someone; no one wanted to upset me any more than I already was.

This was all before Bill left the country to teach English in China, and I never heard from him again. Not even after I sent him a card with an apology. Then again, when I consider how I behaved, I don’t blame him. It’s my fault and my loss, and my biggest regret in all of this is that I lost him as a friend.

So Bill… if you’re out there, this one’s for you.

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