Page 48 of Wedding or Not

Despite the way it feels sometimes, like everyone in the world is watching us, the full attention of social media is still a very small segment of the population.

Wes chuckles as I ask the server about the meal choices I’ve been considering, finally settling on grilled salmon since the lobster is so ridiculously expensive.

Then Wes goes right ahead and orders the lobster.

The nerve of him when I responsibly avoided the priciest thing on the menu.

He appears to be laughing at me when the server walks away.

I roll my eyes at him. “I guess we’re not uptight anymore.”

“I guess not.”

“What do you find so funny over there?”

I expect him to admit he’s laughing at me, so he surprises me when he drawls, “You remember Mitch from high school?”

“Yes.” Mitch was a classmate. He was one of those obnoxious people who never stop talking because they always have to be the center of attention.

Wes nods toward the far corner of the room. “That’ll be him when he gets old.”

Curious, I turn around far enough to see who he’s gesturing toward.

It’s an elderly man who is talking so enthusiastically he’s almost coming up off his chair. And I can see him as Mitch so clearly I let out a burst of amused sound.

When I turn back toward Wes, he looks ridiculously pleased with his own comparison.

Something about the picture of that old man as Mitch and the look on Wes’s face sends me into a ripple of helpless laughter. And once I start, I can’t stop.

I sit there laughing and trying to control myself and then laughing again and then once again trying to stop.

Wes looks more pleased with himself than ever.

When I was in third grade, the teacher made me sit next to the bad boy in class.

I was always a good girl. Quiet and responsible and diligent in doing everything I was told to do.

The worst thing I could imagine was getting in trouble with the teacher, so I never did.

Because of that, and because teachers always thought good girls would somehow be capable of reining in boys’ badness, getting stuck sitting next to the bad boys wasn’t unusual.

Third grade was the first time I didn’t really mind that annoying feature of my elementary school years.

The bad boy in class also happened to be the cute boy.

So I got to sit next to the boy all the girls liked.

Including me. I never admitted it because I never admitted such things, but I liked him too. I thought he was cute. And I really wanted him to like me.

But not enough to get in trouble with the teacher.

So for the first weeks, I did my normal thing, paying attention and only talking to him in breaks. But one day he snuck in clay to play with, and he was molding figurines out of it in the shapes of other kids in class.

I recognized all of them, so I kept getting diverted from the teacher talking in front of the classroom.

The boy must have realized I was watching because he kept it up. Then, in a happy accident, the boy he had just shaped happened to raise his hand, so he adjusted the clay to have the boy with his hand up.

The boy was an annoying one, and he went off in a long, self-aggrandizing ramble about something that happened to him over the weekend that barely related to the topic in hand. And the cute boy beside me took his hand and completely flattened the clay figure of the boy with his hand up.