#18. Dodgeball (Friday, June 25, 2004)

What was your best day…of getting a lot of positive attention that you neither expected nor understood?

If you had to pick the two most obvious deficiencies that came to define my elementary and middle school years, they would have to be:

That I almost never hung out with friends outside of school. A result of my chronic tendency to never be “in-the-know” of upcoming social events, among other things.
That I had gotten next to no interest from girls (#47). Which for a teenage boy at least, has to be one of the most disappointing (and embarrassing) things in the world.

So you’d presume that either of these two things actually happening would make for a pretty good day.

How about both?

School had just wrapped up and most of my classmates were still around town for at least a few weeks. So Nora Gaudreau organized a group trip to the Famous Players Coliseum (#20) to watch Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. I had first heard them talking about it on the last few days of school, but of course I assumed that, as usual, I was not invited.

Except a few days before this, I come back from hanging out with Tam (my nine-year old neighbor) and my dad asks to “see my yearbook”. I’m like: “What do you want to see my yearbook for?” He says: “I want to know who this Nora is. She called.”¹

Cool. So I run upstairs to call her back (while I overhear my dad telling my mom downstairs: “Maybe it’s about time he starts doing that kind of stuff anyways.”). And Nora invites me to join the group for Dodgeball on Friday. As can be totally expected, I am beyond pumped.

That Friday comes, it’s a pretty big group. Steven Fennessy, Derek Dunlop, Shangyu, Noah, Aiden, and a few other guys. The girls are all there too.

And for some reason that I never fully understood, some of the girls (specifically, Nora, Darcy², and Chloe) are acting really flirty with me today – which no girl had ever really done before – giggling, touching my shoulder/arm, putting their arms around me for brief moments.³ I play some air hockey with the guys, I win (which earns me a bit more flirty behavior), and we go in and watch the movie.

For that part, let me just say: Dodgeball is a hilariously awesome movie. Full stop.

Once that’s over, we head over to the nearby mall. And that feels really awesome, like I’m finally the cool kid hanging out at the mall and such. At the first store we go to, we get told to leave for being too loud – which adds to this overall cool feeling.

Then we go to the next store, and on the way there Chloe starts acting really flirty with me. She keeps calling me her buddy, then really gleefully puts her arm around mine as we start walking ahead (more her dragging me ahead) arm in arm. I see a lot of people in the mall staring; and in my head, I’m all like: “That’s right. I’m in a public place with what looks like a girlfriend. Look at how awesome I am.”

Here, it should be noted that Chloe was kind of a family friend⁴. And she had a boyfriend at a time, Yang-Yang⁵, who she was not shy about being extremely touchy-feely with in public on many occasions.

But that, and the full three hours of female attention that preceded it, was still one of the greatest feelings of undeserved adolescent pride I ever had.

A true confidence-boosting moment at a critical age in my life.

Note that all of this conversation, except for the word “yearbook”, is taking place in Chinese.
She had been my locker-mate the previous year – since I came to school two weeks late because of my China trip (#75, #39) and she happened to be the odd person out – which I found hard to believe, because by the end of the year about half the guys in the class had developed a crush on her. I only developed a crush on her the next year…which was one year too late.
Yes, for Jeff at that time, that was interpreted as seriously flirty behavior.
Her mom was friends with my mom from somewhere. And her mom was actually my Chinese school teacher in 6^th grade: where I did shit all the entire term, and she literally give me half the answers on the final exam so I could pass it.
A master violin player with a bit of an anger problem, who was one of my first-year residence mates at Waterloo (at which point Chloe had already gone through three more (known) boyfriends).