high school sweethearts

it could never work

norman rockwell, before the date

he was the only child of two atheist lawyers. she was the eldest daughter of a large catholic family. they competed academically; his standardized test scores edged hers out; she had the advantage when it came to gpa. he was a “why?” autist & she was a rules autist. he badgered the principal about petty inconsistencies & injustices at schoolwide assemblies, annoying his fellow students as much as the administration. she had the rare distinction in their upper-middle-class suburban high school¹ of never having been dress-coded; the administration & the boys, when they happened to think of her, vaguely felt alike that they wouldn’t miss much by ignoring her. but high schoolers do a lot of things that could never work.

her parents, although very strict, were mollified into letting him come around because of his general stats. the test scores mentioned above, his student council involvement, his debate rankings (later they realized that should have been a red flag), his parents’ very nice house (bigger than theirs, with less than half the number of occupants) in that very nice neighborhood. they noticed, and made allowances for, his clear infatuation with her, contrasting it with the erratic manipulative teenage-boy lust they greatly feared. this was also a strategic mistake.

for him she was a princess in a tower. he loved hating her parents’ rules and arguing with them. why not let her out on a school night when her grades were so good—why not let her buy jeans tighter than levi 501s—why be mad at her for watching that movie, it’s art—why not let her come to the beach with him if she slept in “seaglass cottage” w his grandmother & he stayed next door in “shore enuff” w his parents? it was so arbitrary it kept him up at night. & arguing with them was a great way not to notice how much he liked what their unjust rules had created. a pretty girl whom everyone else ignored. all his, & less frightening than a girl who got attention.

not noticing that he liked their rules, blinding himself to his inner patriarch, was worth so much to him that it was even worth trading for her parents’ good opinion. and once she’d passed the threshold of doing that first forbidden thing—once she’d agreed to stay with him, in a secret relationship—he found her delightfully persuadable. he had no bad intentions. he wanted to compare their college lists. when he was done with law school, she would be done with medical school, and then—

but he had misunderstood. he had thought that she loved him enough to break her parents’ rules. but, having noticed her parents’ rules were strange, & that most people around her followed different rules just as strict, she had wanted to break their rules and had found in him a tool for doing so. they stayed together through their freshman year—she was so practiced in doing what people wanted her to. but that summer, she told him they were both still so young. he took it so badly he dyed his hair pink.

1. which means that both the students & the administration had the slack to have a cold war over girls’ outfits