My husband, Eddie, and I were high school sweethearts. This is our story. It’s not as interesting as my title makes it sound, although it does involve a real-life serial killer.
Today is the 12 year anniversary of the day that Eddie and I started dating. The real-time. We also “dated” for two weeks at the beginning of our freshman year of high school, which basically just consisted of talking on the phone occasionally. He broke up with me after the first week, then we got back together, then I broke up with him the next week. It was lame. So is the rest of this story, but I’ll share it anyway.
I avoided him as well as I could after that because, honestly, I thought he was kind of annoying. (Sorry, honey.) Besides he was popular and had a lot of other options and I did ok for myself. We each dated other people, but we were forced to spend a lot of time together because it was a small school and we had almost all of our classes together and were involved in many of the same extracurricular activities.
Towards the end of our sophomore year in March of 2000, serial killer Joe Palczynski went on a killing spree in the suburbs of Baltimore, which happened to be just a few minutes from where we went to school. It was kind of scary and while he was on the loose we all had to be on lockdown after classes until our parents came to pick us up. While on lockdown we just sat around the cafeteria doing homework and talking to our friends. I was talking to Lauren (the same Lauren with who we just went to the tea party) and the conversation went something like this…
“I think Eddie likes me again, but he kind of gets on my nerves.”
“You are so full of yourself, he does NOT like you like that.” (best friends keep it real)
“I really think he does.”
“No, he doesn’t. Seriously. Get over it. Wait. He IS looking at you. Is he throwing candy?”
And then I got pelted with a bunch of Shocktarts. (I wonder why I thought he was annoying?)
“Oh my gawd. He totally does like you.” (When you are 15 and a boy throws candy at you it is a pretty obvious declaration of love.)
“See. I told you.”
(If you expected a well-written Romeo & Juliet full-blown love story with intriguing dialogue just stop reading now, ‘cuz this ain’t it.)
Also, Mr. Naunton had moved our seats in world history class so Eddie, Lauren, our friend Phil, and I sat at a table by ourselves because there weren’t enough desks for everyone. In reality, I’m sure he did this because we were pretty good kids and he figured we wouldn’t be too disruptive, but at the time I thought that he & Eddie were conspiring against me because he was Eddie’s baseball coach and probably knew he liked me and wanted to put us in a situation where I couldn’t avoid him. Besides, I had a huge crush on Phil, and Lauren kind of liked Eddie and it was pretty awkward.
So every day Eddie would try to flirt with me, Lauren would try to flirt with him, and I would try to flirt with Phil, Phil was either completely oblivious this was happening, didn’t like me, or maybe knew Eddie did like me and didn’t want to block his friend. It was a teenage love square. Then Phil got a new girlfriend. We also learned about Ancient Egypt and stuff.
Plus, while we were on a field trip for our french class my friend Nicki told me Eddie had admitted to her he liked me. It wasn’t exactly a secret.
In May of every year, our school did something called Olympic Day, which is basically field day. You signed up for a team, played games and sports, and they turned it into a kind of competition. I had signed up to be on a team with my girlfriends, most of us being the nerdy, non-sports-loving variety, and much to my dismay Eddie had signed up to be on our team too. He was popular and athletic, so this was the last team he normally would have been on.
I had to spend all day embarrassing myself playing sports I wasn’t any good at in front of a boy I had no interest in who wouldn’t leave me alone. Meanwhile, several of the girls on our team did have an interest in him and were busy flirting with him the whole time.
During the awards ceremony, he sat next to me and my friend Nancy sat on the other side of him. They spent the whole time talking about me as if I couldn’t hear them.
“Do you think she’d go out with me?”
“Oh she’ll totally go out with you. Here’s her number.” (Nancy, I’m going to KILL you. )
After school, I was really mad at Nancy.
“How could you do that to me? Are you serious? I don’t want to date him. I already did and it was dumb.”
“Why not? It’s Eddie. Everybody loves him. Besides, I already told him you’d say yes. He’s calling you tonight. Just date him for a week. It’ll make you really popular. You can always break up later. Don’t hurt his feelings.”
Apparently, not all peer pressure is bad. I didn’t really care if it would make me popular (and it didn’t) but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I wasn’t worried about hurting my friends’ feelings either because, honestly, since just about every one of us had a crush on him at some point, we had a running deal to let him make up his own mind, and whichever one of us he decided he liked could date him.
He did call me that night. He rambled for about an hour before he finally asked me. I told him yes as long as it was different than the last time. (Writing this is making me realize I was a total brat.)
That was May 11, 2000. Twelve years ago today.
It didn’t take me long to fall head over heels in love with him. I knew at 15 that his strong faith, determined work ethic, patience, and great communication skills would make a wonderful husband and father, and I was right.
I’m sure I practiced writing Stephanie Giese in my boy book (a separate book I used for writing about boys because they were taking up too much valuable space in my real diary) and now I get to sign my name that way for real. 🙂
This was such a cute story. Have you ever considered writing for young adults?