Susie & the Geek

The other day Susie crossed my mind, someone I hadn’t thought about in a long, long time.

When I was a freshman in high school, I was a total geek.  I recently discovered the show Freaks and Geeks on cable reruns and yeah– I was right there with the geeks (though later on in high school I’d also mingle with the “freaks” very much like Lindsay’s character).  Smart, socially awkward, and painfully shy around the opposite sex.

Sam and Cindy

Susie sat in front of me in study hall.  She was older, 17, even though she was a sophomore.  She was pretty, tall, with long sandy brown hair and hazel eyes.  As she walked by I’d smell a faint combination of perfume and cigarettes that smelled so grown-up and sexy to my geeky young 15 year old self.  She’d sit down, put her books under her desk, turn around and flash a smile at me.  My heart would start pounding in my chest.

“Whatcha reading?”

Back then I always carried a fiction book around with me to each class.  As a geek, I’d often finish in-class assignments early and needed something to keep my mind occupied.  I’d turn to fantasy or horror novels for supplemental brainfood, and Susie would always pick up my book, read the back of it, and then grill me about what had happened so far.

“What’s happening now?”  She’d ask me the next day, and I’d give her the update.  “How did it end?” she’d ask when I was done, to my initial dismay—I mean, you never spoil the ending of books to people!  But Susie said she’d probably never get around to reading it and she had to know the ending.

After getting the story lowdown, Susie would move on to grilling me about… well, me.  She’d ask me about my classes, my family, what I did after school.  If there were any girls I liked (gulp!), and how I should ask them out (double gulp!).  It was intoxicating, the level of interest this girl-woman paid to me despite my painful shyness.  It used to drive another friend of mine nuts, he sat next to us in class, and he was the natural charmer that had girls swooning over him left and right, even as a high school freshman.  Yet Susie barely paid any attention to him at all.

“You need to ask her out, man.  She’s totally into you,” he’d tell me weekly after we left study hall.  The idea was thrilling and terrifying at the same time.  How could I possibly?  The gulf between 15 and 17 is gigantic in high school, especially when the boy is on the low end.  Add to the mix that I was a geek and she was a “freak” (though we didn’t really use those terms back then).  It was obvious that learning, reading, paying attention in class wasn’t a priority in her life, because she was surrounded by friends and family who just didn’t care all that much.  I was a bookworm nerd and she was too cool for school.

And yet it was also obvious to me that Susie was smart, and that some part of her longed to exercise that brain.  It was like she had an inner geek that was dying to get out, and during study hall her inner geek would reach out to me as a momentary glimpse of an alternate universe.

Of course, another big obstacle to the potential Freak/Geek, June/September romance was the big class ring she wore on her index finger.  Of course Susie had a boyfriend!  Worse, he was 18, out of high school and working full-time as a carpenter.  One time when she was sharing some photos from birthday party she’d gone to I saw the dude, my nemesis.  Tall, dark, handsome.  Full mustache.  Lean build.  Basically my nightmare scenario.  Still, she used to constantly complain about him being a jerk and an asshole, sprinkled occasionally with gifts of I’m Sorry Flowers.  She said he sometimes talked about joining the army and seeing the world.

One day near the end of the year she came into study hall without the class ring on her finger, which of course I noticed almost immediately.  My momentary happiness was quickly squashed however by what I saw on her other hand.  On the ring finger.  A tiny diamond ring.  I was stunned.

Susie sat down, put her books under the desk, turned around to look at me.  She didn’t smile.  She didn’t say anything.  She just looked into my eyes.  I stared back.  Minutes seemed to crawl by.  What should I say?  The southern gentleman in me knew the proper thing to do was to congratulate her, but my mouth refused to open.

Her eyes… they looked so… sad.  Eventually she sighed and turned around.  We didn’t say anything to each other that day.

The next day she sat down, put her books under the desk, turned around to look at me.

“Whatcha reading?”  I had started a new book, so I let her read the back, then gave her a rundown of what had happened so far.  She still had the engagement ring on her finger, but neither of us said anything about it.  We tried to carry on as we always had, but things had definitely changed between us.  It was like whatever thin, nearly impossible thread of what if? between us had been severed with a sad finality.

When the class bell rang at the end of study hall on the last day of school, Susie stood up and grabbed the book I was almost done with.  “You know, I bet you could write one of these,” she said with a big grin on her face.

I was a little stunned, because… “I actually have been working out the plot for a horror story idea of my own,” I confessed.  The look on her face, it was like she already knew it somehow.  She knew me.

“One day I’ll pass by a book store and see your name on one of them, I bet.”  I felt hot and tingly basking in her smile.  Suddenly she stepped forward and wrapped me in a big hug.  I could feel her breasts pressed against my chest, her hands curled up to my shoulders.  I could feel the womanly curve of her lower back under my hands.  I never wanted to let go.  “You’re gonna make someone a really happy girl one day,” she said softly in my ear.  And then she was gone, but her perfume and cigarette scent lingered as I watched her walk away.

It was the last time I saw her.

I thought about Susie all summer as I sketched out the ideas for my book.  By the time school resumed I had several chapters done and was dying to show them to her.  Whenever I could find the time I lurked around the junior homerooms and classes, but I was never able to find her.

She was gone.  Maybe to another school, but I didn’t think so.  I was pretty sure Mr. Asshole had married Susie over the summer, had probably enlisted in the army, and she’d dropped out of school and moved to some military base somewhere.  I prayed that, wherever she was, that she was happy and found release for her inner geek.  Me… I kept on writing, hoping that one day Susie might see my name in a bookstore… and imagined the big smile it would bring to that pretty face.