Booby Trap

 Sunday, April 28, 2013

One of the things I learned from my best friend, Dave, growing up, is that when someone is plotting against you, pretend like you don’t know.

This is as true with her (you know who I mean) as it was back then.

Dave always had a crush on the girl next door, and she hated him – more than a little curious why he would bother, since she made it very clear she didn’t go for losers like us, but preferred a brand of loser that had a leather jacket or a high school football jersey.

She hated him so much she sometimes pretended like she didn’t, just to hurt him more, I guess.

She thought he was stupid, and that after all the hate she expressed for him in School #11, and later in Junior High, he was suddenly going to believe it when she started acting nice.
This didn’t happen often, but when it did, Dave would go along with it.

He liked her, but he wasn’t as stupid as she made him out to be in front of her in-crowd, and he said his uncle had just come back from Vietnam where they were always getting booby traps set.

“You either let them be or set them off,” Dave told me.

I didn’t quite get the idea until one day when she started dropping hints that she might say yes if Dave asked her to a dance.

I knew she didn’t mean it, that she had some plan to embarrass him, perhaps thinking she might go as far as to let him take her out on the dance floor where she might get her crowd to mock him in public – as if mocking ever bothered him after all the years of abuse heaped on people like him from people like the people she liked to hang out with.

I asked him if he really believed she was sincere, and he laughed and said, of course not.

“Then what are you going to do?” I asked.

“Let her keep dropping hints,” he said.

“What does that get you?”

But he only winked and never did answer the question.

She got bolder and more desperate, trying to get him to commit to her little scheme, and he would smile and nod, and meander off, acting as dim-witted as she thought he was.

It got the point where she got so desperate for him to fall for the trap, she asked him outright in the middle of the hall with dozens of her cool friends looking on, all of them gigging, waiting for him to take the bait.

At which point, he said “No.”

I remember her screeching at him as we walked away, saying she never meant it in the first place, that she would never go to a dance with a jerk like him.

He never turned back the way I did, he didn’t need to see her red face growing redder with rage, the bobby trap exploding inside of her instead of inside of him.

If he felt hurt, he never told me. I could read no emotion from his face. But I know he never stopped loving her, even when he never saw her again.

But he did later tell me on the bus to our jobs at the theater where we worked as ushers.

“Some things are just too good to be true,” he mumbled, then went back to reading his comic book.

email to Al Sullivan