Tales from the Trenches Tuesday

This one is from the vault...and while it doesn't exactly fall into the bucket of a bad date, I think the story fits well in this category.

I didn't really "date" in high school. I managed to bring dates or get taken as a date to prom and such. You know, events where you were required to have a date. But actual dates? Yeah, not so much. I had painful unrequited crushes on people, crushes that sometimes only my journal new about. But my interaction with boys was pretty minimal. And while I was no raving beauty, I didn't think I was a complete disaster. Just shy and quiet maybe. And completely and utterly uncomfortable being around boys outside of the classroom for the most part.

But I will always remember the day I realized that dating, boys and all of that was never going to get easy for me. I was walking from the soccer fields up to my high school after practice one day, I guess this must have been my junior year. I happened to be doing so at the same time that a whole bunch of football players were leaving practice to head up to the locker rooms.

Now being shy, quiet, and uncomfortable, I tried to just hurry by them (hopefully) unnoticed. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. One of the football players, DFI, saw me walking alone and attacked like a lion would on a gazelle that strayed from their group.

"Hey, dog!" DFI shouted at me. "Where's your Alpo?"

I froze for a second, horrified. I should have kept moving, because clearly he saw that he had rattled me and went further with the taunting.

"That's right, I think you're a DOG!"

And that is when DFI started barking at me.

Now, I have enough perspective in my older age and wisdom to be thankful that it was not as bad as it could have been. I mean, it wasn't like the other football players joined in with him. But at the time, OUCH that hurt. I mean, someone just told me I was a dog and barked at me. It wasn't a real "high point" in my high school career.

But at the same time, I also felt really bad for DFI. I don't know if he didn't know me very well, or just didn't care. But I knew who he was. Well, knew enough that he hoped to play on my Dad's Varsity baseball team come that Spring. Clearly only a Dumb F*cking Idiot would call the coach's daughter a dog and then bark at her, right?

Pretty sure DFI rode the bench that spring, poor guy.