The Good Old Days: Part 1

I was in 8th grade when I met Sam for the first time. A friend had invited me to attend a party Sam was throwing, which ended up just being him and his girlfriend cooking spam and watching Nine Inch Nails videos. I thought that was pretty cool.

I didn’t meet Sam again until I was in 10^th grade when I returned from sleep-away camp (read the post Triumph of The Will for more info on that experience) and found him to be dating my best friend, Lana.

Sam was the kind of guy that everyone wanted to be friends with. He had a great sense of humor, his own band, no inhibitions, and his parents were never home. And despite what you might be thinking, we didn’t do drugs or drink at his house. We just played video games, yelled obscenities, drank Mountain Dew and ate pretzels. Sometimes someone would steal beef jerky from the local A&P and that’s when the party really got going.

I thought Sam was great but he didn’t like me at all at first. I was loud and anxious and Lana and I had a way of talking to each other that made other people feel like they didn’t exist. This was not easy for Sam to handle and he was not particularly welcoming to me. Luckily for me, one of his friends had a crush on me, so between him and Lana, I was always welcome at Sam’s house. I started hanging out there everyday. And I began to grow on Sam.

I knew that Lana wasn’t as in to Sam as he was to her. I also knew that she was cheating on him, which I was totally appalled by. Slowly, my friendship with Lana began to fade and my friendship with Sam began to flourish. It didn’t take long for Lana to break up with Sam, and for him to start pursuing me.

Sam made everything fun, and it was an entirely new type of friendship for me. My friendship with Lana had taken up so much of my emotional energy and Sam was easy, I didn’t need to worry about him, he was strong and I could relax with him. He pursued me consistently for a full year. Sam was the second man to look at me in that way, and with him, I felt like I had earned it. He was my best friend and he really understood me. He listened to all my stories of heartache and promised me that if we were together he would never break my heart (don’t they all).

When Sam and I finally started dating, it was like everything fell into place. I had never been so happy. It was my junior year of high school and things were finally working out for me. And that’s when I started breaking all the Rules.

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