EngineerBoy has been a constant fixture on my previous posts
here and
here but I have yet to tell his story. So, I suppose, it’s fine time that I do.
EngineerBoy and I were classmates from highschool. He was a quiet guy who was accelerated by one year during his grade school days which made him at least a year younger than most of us in the class. Because he was short and sported a “Keempee-Keempee” hairdo (named after a popular That’s Entertainment teen idol in the 80’s), he was frequently picked on by the rest of the boys.
- Keempee de Leon, the trendsetter -
In highschool, where cliques are the usual trend, he was a member of the Homebodies, a group of quiet, male non-achievers who were forced into a clique of their own, seeing that everybody else had already fallen into their own groupings. I, on the other hand, ran with a different crowd, the Glittergirls, a group of popular girls in class who excelled either in the academics or athletic fields.
It would have been an understatement to say that our worlds did not collide.
It wasn’t until a few weeks before graduation when the impending end of our angst-driven years threatened the exclusivity brought about by cliques. As my own friends started hanging out with those from the other groups, a web of interactions resulted to EngineerBoy and I engaged in conversations between the two groups and before long, we found ourselves, talking and hanging out with each other without the rest of our friends, simply enjoying each other’s company. We would have lunch together, sat together during games, annoy an ex-suitor by making him feel jealous, spend our after-school hours by the white picket fences where class couples frequently hanged out, talking about school and music and everything under the sun.
Our first “date” comprised of EngineerBoy and I going with two of the couples in our class to a movie entitled “Daylight” starring Sylvester Stallone. We were nervous and awkward as we sat together, painfully aware of just how close our heads had to be for us to be able to make little side comments to each other’s ears during the movie. The group outing was construed by the rest of the class as a date and it elevated my relationship with EngineerBoy from friends to a soon-to-be couple status.
All this time though, EngineerBoy never professed his love for me. I wasn’t even aware that he had a crush on me. I was waiting for him to say something that at least implied that he liked me so that I can finally say that I like him too, but it never came. I suppose what we had was more of an unspoken mutual interest. A guessing game of sorts, of whether who liked who the most.
Until one day, I had ripped a sheet of paper from my notebook and he offered to throw it out for me. I gave him the crumpled paper and left him to take a quick sip from the water fountain. A friend of mine rushed to my side and handed me the same crumpled sheet of paper. EngineerBoy had apparently written something in there which he wanted me to see. As I uncrumpled the paper and tried to discern his handwriting from my own algebraic graphs and equations, I realized that he had only written one word:
PWEDE?
One word and it spoke of volumes. Of the fact that he liked me, that he wanted to be in a relationship with me, that he wanted me and was asking me to be in a relationship with him.
Finally, in one word, he had found the courage to tell me that he wanted us to be more than friends.
“So, ahmmm… what do you think?” he asked, looking at me sheepishly.
“What does this mean, EngineerBoy?
“Well, I… Ahmmm… I like you… Do you think it’s possible that you’d like to… ahmmm… go steady with me?
Like every naïve highschool girl, I was an idealist. I had a vision of how my first boyfriend should be, how our first date should come out, how my first kiss should feel. I was slightly being a snob but I wasn’t quite sure that EngineerBoy was the right person for the job. Hell, I wasn’t even quite sure I was ready for a boyfriend then. I was 15 and afraid of my parents. I wasn’t prepared enough to be willing to take that road yet, much less disappoint them by coming home with a boyfriend they’ll probably think isn’t half worthy enough for their daughter.
It didn’t help that I had been accepted to a prestigious school at the big city. EngineerBoy, on the other hand, was planning to enroll at a school somewhere down South. I didn’t seem right that my first boyfriend-girlfriend experience would be in the form of a long distance relationship. That wasn’t how I envisioned my first ever relationship should turn out and I’m sure, neither did he.
So I chickened out. And gave him this elaborate excuse in the form of a stupid analogy, “The thing is, EngineerBoy, if we start a relationship now when we’re about a few weeks short of graduation, it will be like a half-empty glass of water. You only have so little left before the glass becomes empty. We’ll be going off to different colleges soon. If we do start a relationship, we’ll be spending only a few weeks together. I don’t want us to become boyfriend-girlfriend only with what little time we have left. We’ll just be forcing ourselves to something that doesn’t fit right in the first place. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone of us.”
Of course, a simple “No” would have conveyed the same message easier but I figured, this would sound less painful.
We lost touch soon after graduation and accidentally found each other again a year later at a mall in the big city. He had his arm around some girl and I couldn’t deny the pangs of jealousy that overcame me when I realized that it was him. It turns out EngineerBoy had ended up taking up college at some university just some walking distance from my own school, instead of the school down South.
Can I get any more pathetic?
And it didn’t help that he had grown at least a foot, lost the baby fat and looked so much better. Like John Lloyd Cruz post-loveteam days with Kaye Abad.
- Isn’t he just gorgeous? -
I banged my head repeatedly on the wall. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Why me, Lord, why me?
A few years later, we met again, during one fateful highschool reunion. We were both single and thus, hoping to rekindle what we forego years ago, we found ourselves flirting with each other again. But the flirtation fazed off just as soon as it started. It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other, it was just that a stronger bond of friendship was developing between us. We found ourselves dragging the other to new places and experiences: making me miss my dormitory curfew just so we can have a few smokes at some nearby park, raiding 7-11s near his boarding house at midnight, hanging out at music bars and getting drunk on cheap beer, frequenting cheap carinderias with VideoSingko machines where we’d sing our lungs off, not particularly caring that he couldn’t carry a tune to save his life.
We became bestfriends. I was delegated godmother to his future kids, he, my back-up husband by age 30.
I introduced him to one of my classmates from medical school, who became his girlfriend. A year or so after, he left our town to look for work at the big city, found himself a new girlfriend, got one of his ex-es pregnant. It took four years before he returned for a vacation and I finally saw him again. He still looked younger, more reserved, less childish, more profound. Yet he was still the same EngineerBoy I adored.
Some days, I think about my what ifs, like what if I said yes to EngineerBoy during highschool? What if he had become my first boyfriend? Would we have lasted long? Would I have met the others? Would we have become the best-est of friends like we are now?
This time I don’t need an analogy. The answer is definitely NO.
