Guess who?

Here's my entry for the Cleveland Free Times "Worst Valentine's Day Ever" Essay Contest:

He wasn’t classically attractive. Not in that heavy-lidded James Dean in a worn leather jacket sense. He was chubby and his wardrobe consisted of a seven-sweater rotation that he teamed with the same baggy jeans and suede flat-soled tennis shoes every day of the week. As far as I knew he’d never had a girlfriend. He wasn’t a Prom king or a quarterback or the honor society president—he was accessible. I’ll call him Dominic Fabrizzi to protect his name and to ensure that there are no questions regarding his heritage.
Dominic stood a few people to my left on the second riser up in our high school’s highest-level choir. I was an alto and he was a tenor with a rock star’s timbre—think of a portly Steve Perry with better hair and, again, only slightly looser fitting jeans. That’s what he sounded like. If you closed your eyes and listened closely during our choir’s take on Handel’s Messiah, every one of Dominic’s lines sounded like they could be alternate verses to “Open Arms.”
The other girls would giggle in appreciation when Dom belted out melody with those magic pipes but the thing that really made me swoon was his sense of humor. I loved him for his self-deprecation and his impeccable comic timing that breathed life into every theatrical production our school ever put on. He was just good. I imagined my sense of humor blending with his and how we would jive together if I could ever get the courage to speak to him. I foresaw both of our mental pop culture reference libraries blinking back and forth like little green lights on a network hub—and believe me, I wanted to interface. We’d be like Belushi and Radner: a perfect mix of husky frat-boy foolery and dweeby schoolgirl giddiness.
The trouble with this whole situation was a complete lack of communication. Mostly I stared pathetically out of the corner of my eye while we did our solfege exercises so I could see the fleeting but marvelous pout that his lips took on when they made a smooth transition from singing “mi” to “fa.” On days when I was feeling a little bolder, I would smirk innocently at him as we reached for our music folders before the bell rang. Some might say I was being coy. These people were wrong. I was being a total wuss.
I’ve always been a wuss when it comes to men. I still am. Maybe it has something to do with the way I’ve always seen myself as the smart, funny girl. I’ve never thought of myself as being pretty or attractive—I still don’t, even now that I’ve escaped the cruel conformist clutches of public high school. It was my senior year in that high school when I first realized my feelings for Dominic. If I was going to get him to notice the quirky girl to his right on the second riser up in choir, I was going to have to get brazen.
I asked around and friends of Dominic said that he always appreciates personality and creativity in a girl. I had both of those things so all I needed was a modus operandi to get him to realize that I was everything he wanted in a woman and maybe even more. (After all, this was the same year that I learned how to make homemade pie crust!) So one evening as I was putting my clothes away and noticed a blank t-shirt at the bottom of a drawer, it occurred to me that I should just go for it and wear my heart on my sleeve…in the most literal sense.
I immediately took a thick black sharpie to the clean untouched fiber of the straggler of a white t-shirt that I had earlier spotted in my drawer and feverishly scrawled the first thing that I thought of on the front of it: “Gee, I really wish Dominic Fabrizzi would ask me for a date.” I grabbed a red sharpie and drew a comic-inspired thought bubble around the text with an arrow pointing up towards my face. Then I added a few little red hearts, just in case the message itself was too subtle. I stared at the shirt from an arm’s length away and it looked creepily professional for how fast I had created it. I didn’t consider the possibility of Dominic thinking that it might be creepy; I was so determined that I was being creative and showing my true personality that I stuffed the thing in my backpack with all of my other homework and zipped the thing shut. I slept with a smile on my face and with little specs of sharpie littering my fingernails like tobacco stains.
The next morning at school I wore the shirt under a sweater that I pulled off as I entered the choir room. I sat down on the riser and waited for his eyes to meet mine. And they did. And then they met with the text on my shirt. I pulled the loose tendrils of hair behind my ears and felt my face get hot. I smiled a little bit and I think I started to squint as I tried to read him. He laughed nervously and climbed up the riser, fiddling with his choir folder. We spoke about it the next day. Then we never spoke again. I was completely heartbroken. I’ve since decided that actual conversation is a better foundation for a relationship than a homemade t-shirt. I kept watching him out of the corner of my eye in choir for the rest of my senior year and I came back to high school a year later to watch him sing “Open Arms” at the senior choir show. I think Dominic got over the whole t-shirt thing. I hope he has anyway—we go to the same college now and I've been thinking about joining choir again.

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