It all started one day sophomore year. We were playing basketball in gym and doing lay-ups. I turned to the person next to me and asked if I was in the right line. He got a panicked look on his face, turned around and didn’t say a word to me. He had a bowl haircut, his name was Terry and he used the word “Jr.” after his last name. He was quiet, shy and on the nerdy side.
Turns out he was a friend of a guy named Jay in my art class. He must have said something to Jay about liking me and next thing you know Jay was asking me all these questions. One day I got a phone call from Jay, even though I had never given him my number. He asked me what I thought about Terry, did I like the way he dressed, etc. I really never thought about it so I said I guess he dresses alright, blah, blah, blah. I found out later that Terry got my name, address and phone number while he was working as an aide in the records office at school. What I didn’t know was that Jay had three-way calling and Terry was listening in on the conversation.
Over the course of the next few weeks I saw Terry in the halls quite frequently. He had found out my schedule and made sure to be in the same hallways at the same time I was. One day he finally got up the nerve to speak to me. Unfortunately this happened to coincide with my having a horribly bad day. I was standing at my locker when out of the corner of my eye I saw him coming towards me. He started saying hi, how are you?, and I replied with one long sentence dripping with negativity, “I’mreallysorrybutI’mhavingaREALLYbaddayanditisNOTagoodtimetotalktome.” He said okay and skulked off.
End of the school year. I was looking forward to spending 6 weeks with extended family in Britain. I had saved up all my paychecks from a horrific job at a school uniform store the summer before and the trip was just around the corner. Right before I left I got a letter from Terry. It was typed on a word processor and printed on a dot-matrix printer. These were the days before everyone had computers. It was 5 pages long. He started out by telling me his life story. Literally. What hospital he was born in (I think what he weighed at birth too), where he lived, what his dad did for a living (he even told me his dad had just bought a new air-conditioner), where his family was building a house, how he came from the typical American family with 2.5 kids and a white-picket fence, what his favorite color was…I could go on and on. He wrote sci-fi novels and since he’d seen my performance in the school play (which he gave me rave reviews for) he was changing the female lead’s name to mine. He imagined that one day his novels would be made into a screenplay and I could star in the movie. He asked me to please write back even if I didn’t know what to write, just write anyway. This was all very flattering (not to mention weird) but I was a shy 16-year-old about to take my first solo trip to Europe and I just wasn’t interested. I never wrote back. Since we weren’t friends I had no reason to tell him that I was going away for the summer. I soon got on the plane and forgot all about Terry and the letter.
When I returned home at the end of the summer I found two more letters, both just as long. The second was an extension of the first and asked why I hadn’t written. The third one, however, was ugly. He was no longer nice and tolerant, and was instead very angry that I hadn’t replied. He wrote that his friends suggested he send me a raw liver in the mail, and even if I wasn’t interested I could’ve at least written back. How he (and I quote) “must just be a dork. Definition dork: whale’s penis.” After pages and pages of nastiness, he ended with a venomous P.S. saying that he had changed the female lead in his novels back to what it was previously.
Well, I was the one that was pissed now. Who the hell was he to write me a letter like that! The nerve. He just assumed I never bothered writing when little did he know I was away all summer. I returned to school at the beginning of junior year with a new, darker wardrobe, Doc Marten-esque shoes (influenced by my British cousins), and a strong dislike for Terry _______, Jr. My chance to express my dislike arrived one day after school. We were all trying to pile on a bus home and I spotted Terry. I HAD to get my own back. I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Hey Mr. Whale’s Penis!” Nobody but my friends and he knew what this referred to but that was okay with me. The crowd to get on the bus was so thick I couldn’t see him or his reaction but I know he heard me. In my own little way I had gotten back at him. Two weeks later his family’s new house in another town was completed and he moved away. I never saw or heard from him again.
