Another

I'm posting another one of these. Much more recent, so making fun of me for this one isn't allowed. Enjoy if you want to. :) (It's pretty silly, fyi. I enjoy writing fun things. They seem to be the only ones I finish anyway.)

It was practically the single most embarrassing moment of my life. I cursed my weak constitution and hopelessly romantic mind with everything I had after it happened. What happened, you ask?

Well, let's begin with when I was a little boy. I watched a little movie called When Harry Met Sally and decided I was going to fall in love with my best friend. I blame this movie as much as anything for what happened. I was always kind of feminine in my actions, though not in my looks, so I guess my family figured it out pretty quickly that I was crushing on my best friend. Everyone in my family teased me about it all the time. Everyone in my family also teased me about my body type, later on. What body type is that? The type called “high metabolism.” My body was in shape for a good game of soccer at all moments. Why was this? I felt the obsessive compulsion to run at least a mile per day. Not because I worried about being in shape or anything, no. Because if I didn't run at least a mile every single stupid day I wasn't able to sleep, even though whenever I wasn’t running I always seemed awkwardly short of breath. It was absolutely ridiculous. I tried to break the habit once and spent a solid week only falling asleep when I was so tired I literally couldn't hold my eyes open. I always woke up within a couple hours though, so I eventually had to relent and return to my regular jogging schedules. So I was tall and toned on the outside and dressed to suit it, but my mind still showed me to be a flaming 'mo.

My first crush was on the most lovely human I had laid eyes on up to that point. See, by the time I turned 12, my mother had figured out that I was a raging homo and decided that I could probably watch Titanic straight through with the naughty bits uncensored with no real preteen sexual consequences. After watching Titanic, it became the single most important thing in my young life. I watched it every day for months on end, eventually deciding to fast-forward through the naked lady bits because they were of no interest to me. In fact, besides the obviously epic love story, the thing that interested me the most of all was the star of the movie. No, not Kate Winslet, who do you think I am? I speak of course of Leonardo DiCaprio. God's gift to preteen gay kids.

So it was only natural that when I saw Leonardo DiCaprio walking down the street, I sprinted on over to him. My friend who was with me at the time says I “ran like Forrest Gump” over to him. If I would have been thinking a little harder maybe I would have realized the young man I was looking at was thirteen, much like I was at the time, and not quite as identical to Leo as I thought he was.

In any case, I decided to just go for it and asked, “Can I have your autograph?”

“Sure,” he replied. No confusion in his voice whatsoever. In fact, I didn't even realize that he wasn't Leonardo DiCaprio until he wrote his name and number on a piece of paper and walked away. My best girl friend, Emory, joined me then and laughed at me as if my embarrassment was funny. It was not funny, and I realized the person who I'd just talked to probably didn't want anything to do with me in the future. Despite this realization, I made sure to remember his name and number. Charles “Chaz” Weiss.

It wasn't until my first allowed co-ed slumber party later that year that I actually called the number. I kept it under my pillow and fantasized that this “Chaz” was somehow related to Leonardo DiCaprio and if I called him I would meet and consecutively woo the celebrity. Emory, or Em as I called her, discovered the number under my pillow while we were playing a game of truth or dare.

As everyone knows only sissies choose truth so I went with dare. Em dared me to call the number and ask this Chaz fellow where he lived, then go to where he was and propose marriage. Since it was a dare I had to. I had no other option, so I picked up my phone and dialed his number.

The first conversation I ever had with his mother followed this. “Hello, Weiss residence,” Mrs. Weiss answered.

“Hello, may I speak to Chaz?” I asked, hoping she wouldn't ask me who I was.

“Who, may I ask, is calling?” she asked, and I cursed my psychic premonition creating powers.

“Kyler,” I replied immediately. Maybe she wouldn't call my BS at pretending to know Chaz if I sounded confident, right? Wrong.

“Charles doesn't have any friends by that name that I know of,” she stated. “How do you know my son?”

I knew I couldn't tell her the truth so I gave my best lie, “We go to school together.”

“And what school would that be?” she asked. Knowing I had been outsmarted, I went to hang up the phone. Before I hit that button labeled “talk” to chicken out of my dare a young male voice came on the other end.

“Let me talk Mom,” the voice said, “if it's for me then I get to talk.”

“OK, but if you invite another creep over we're not helping you out this time,” his mother warned him. I was intrigued by this exchange. See later I learned that Chaz was one of those people who liked to take home strays; you know dogs, cats, rabbits, homeless people, lost children, child molesters...Thankfully his mother learned to intercept it after a homeless woman slept in their basement for a week without her noticing.

Chaz took the phone from his mother and said, “Hey what's up? Let's hang out you and me and that girl.” Chaz always did have an excellent memory, except when it came to names.

“How did you know who I was?” I replied, but I should have realized then and there we were destined to be together. Both of us being “psychic” and all.

“Oh, I'm psychic,” he replied confidently. I believed him because that's kind of what I do. He had me believing he was actually psychic for a few weeks after that.

“Wowww! So can we come over there?” I asked.

“Yeah! Totally, where do I live?” he replied. I was confused. Extremely confused.

“Huh?” I replied. I later realized Chaz was a dweeb.
“Yeah, where do I live?” he asked again. I sat there in silence for a while, trying to understand what was happening, so Em grabbed the phone away from me and somehow figured out where Chaz lived. Fortunately it was about four blocks away. If it was any farther I most certainly would not have been able to go, but I didn't really think about that because I was 13 and thinking things through wasn't my strong point. Em and I sneaked out of my house and she, with her insanely impressive sense of direction, led me to Chaz's house.

Chaz's sister (fraternal twin, may I add) met us at the door. She was like a female Leonardo DiCaprio and I fangasmed. Fangasm is a word Em taught me. It means “to have a fan orgasm.” The more you know, right? So then Christie, as she is called, let us into the house because I flattered her so much. Looking at it now, she probably looks more like (young) Leo than Chaz does. I'm OK with that. So Christie led us to Chaz's room where he was waiting for us. I guess it was some sort of trust thing that I lost a year or two later, but we made immediate friends. After a short while of discussing our favorite cereals and why they were our favorites (because he was having cereal for a nighttime snack) Em reminded me I still needed to propose. So I proceeded to get down on one knee and ask Chaz if he would be my lawfully wedded wife.

“Why of course. You've made me the happiest woman in the world,” he replied, and I think I almost got my first kiss at that very moment, because he leaned forward a little bit when he said it. At least, that's what I told everyone else later when I recounted my daring tale where I traveled four whole blocks from my home with no parental supervision. To my two other friends...I didn't have a lot of friends. We left soon after, but not before discovering that we were all going to go to the same high school. For the rest of that summer we didn't hang out a lot, but Chaz tracked Em and I down on our first day of high school.

“Kyla and...girl!” he declared loudly as he approached us. After reminding him of our names, which he insisted he didn't forget but simply made some “artistic changes” to, we settled in on being the three best friends that anyone can have. We sang that song together pretty frequently, and I guess we were probably pretty annoying as freshmen. Chaz and I bonded as we got a bit older, and joined the soccer team together in the spring. I ran cross country in the fall, but Chaz whined at me about it when I did and complained that “running is dumb.” Before this time, the three of us were all best friends together, but Chaz and I began to develop a separate best friendship as well.

It was during the summer that followed when I began spending time with Chaz separate from Em pretty frequently. I mean, I still hung out with Em by herself too, and the three of us hung out together, but Em and Chaz never hung out just the two of them. I was confusingly relieved.

That year when school started Chaz and I were officially best friends separate from Em. This meant I was supposed to avoid falling in love with him yet and save it for at least a year or two. Unfortunately he offered to join me in cross country and took up daily running with me. This caused two things: even more time for us to spend together and an even more attractive body in his part. By the time soccer started and the year ended Chaz became irresistible with his slowly maturing personality. Deep down he was still a dweeb, but he came off as older and therefore was somehow more attractive to me. Not that I don't love the dweeb in him, because I do.

During the summer before Junior year, I went back to hanging out with Em more than I hung out with Chaz until Chaz noticed and I had to hang out with him too. Our relationship was a tad more awkward, because of my new found and ever on my mind crush. Still, there was no one in the world who I enjoyed spending time doing absolutely random things with more than Chaz. We spent a surprising amount of time playing video games, but I guess for two teenage boys that was pretty normal, even if one was a flaming 'mo.

For the most part we played harmless games like Mario Kart and Mario Party and Halo. Believe it or not, I was pretty good at those games, and we had a real rivalry going. Sometimes this rivalry went over into other things, like making sandwiches. We usually raced when we did anything that you could possibly compete at. A standard contest in the friendship of Chaz and Kyler went as such:

In the late morning to early afternoon, Chaz would call. “Hey, what's up? You busy Ky?” he would ask.

“No, not really Chaz,” I would reply with a happy little grin on my face.

“Would you like to come over here to my house to spend some quality times together?” he would ask.

“Oh yes I most certainly would,” I would reply. In not too much time I would be over at his house, hanging out with him and his family and making sandwiches.

“OK, go!” his little brother would say, and then judge which one of us would win the sandwich making contest. I would take out a slice of bread, slather on some mayo, toss on some meat or fake meat (Chaz's sister was a vegetarian and eventually convinced the two of us to give it a shot) some lettuce and whatever else we wanted to add. Chaz's two siblings and I got along really well, so sometimes we even competed to see who made the best food for their dinner. One example of one of these competitions was on an evening where we agreed to make pasta for Bennet (Ben) and Christie.

“OK, I get this burner you get that one,” I instructed, and Chaz nodded. We both pulled pans out of the cupboard and tossed pasta onto the burners. Ben was betting on me and Christie was betting on Chaz, so they were cheering each of us on and booing the other one. We finished with almost perfect timing together, and then Ben and Christie tested the food. Naturally they claimed whichever team they were on had the better food. This resulted in the four of us settling the contest by playing team Super Smash Brothers Brawl. This time Ben and I won, but there were plenty of times when the opposite was true. Eventually even Chaz's siblings picked up on the fact that I was crushing on him, but they teased me a bit less than my own. Where my two older brothers and one younger sister joked about how I was hopeless, Ben and Christie gave me status updates on how clueless their brother remained. In truth, I think they were all gunning for us to end up together; my siblings, his siblings, Em, and my parents. His parents were sometimes a different story, but he didn't really mind anything they did. See, Chaz's dad worked a lot, and they were kind of involved between the two of them more than anything else. It wasn't a huge surprise then that they got divorced by the end of the summer before Junior year.

The biggest change this brought about was the way Chaz and his siblings gravitated to my house after that. Ben was a year younger than my little sister, Sammy, and Christie was our age. Though these were, admittedly on their part, excuses. Ben and Christie both enjoyed the time they spent with me more than the time they spent with my siblings. This isn't just me being egotistical, these are their words. Sometimes the four of us actually hung out together, but sometimes Chaz and I managed to find our alone time. Though we didn't really talk about a lot of the more serious aspects that were going on, our relationship grew in strength over that time.

By the middle of Junior year, I was thoroughly enamored with him. Em took over the main job of teasing me about it, but she also gave me a lot of hope. Thankfully, Chaz never dated, so my heart never had to break while I watched anything so awful. Our friendship was still going strong by the middle of senior year, which is when the event I discussed at the beginning of this story happened. Let's get to that part, then, shall we?

Since Em and I were secretly preteen girls on the inside, we played a lot of the old sleepover games. One day while we waited for Chaz to show up so we could go play some Xbox in my basement, we played the old “Bam, a divorce!” game. I will explain this game to you now. So first you take a deck of cards and pull out the four kings. You then shuffle up the deck, and the person playing picks out a card and sets it off to the side without looking at it. Then you lay out the four kings and name off four guys (or girls, I'm not closed minded) who you want to play the game with. At the end of the game you end up with one of these people, so pick wisely. In this particular game, I got to pick one, Em got to pick one, and we had to agree on the other two, but that's simply our variation. So we listed off the options. I chose young Leonardo DiCaprio as the king of diamonds (because even I had to admit as he got older he got a bit less attractive), Em chose her ex-boyfriend who she insisted was gay as the king of clubs, and in the middle we agreed on Chaz as the king of hearts and Em herself as the king of spades. Em then got to dealing out the cards, one in front of each card until all the cards ran out, and then she organized them and showed them all to me. In this game, the number of heart cards you get signifies the amount of love you'll get in the relationship, the number of clubs you get is the number of kids you'll have, the number of diamonds you get is the amount of money you'll have, the number of spades is the number of big fights, and the number of aces, no matter the suit, is the amount of divorces.

Things looked pretty good as she went through them, Leo would give me a decent amount of love but more money than anything but would end in a divorce, Em's ex would give me a lot of children and a good relationship for the most part but would end in a divorce, Em would give me tons of love and a well-balanced relationship, and Chaz would give me no love at all, lots of children, a tiny amount of money, tons of big fights and two divorces. Em flipped over my card from the beginning and giggled as she handed it to me. The suit of the card was, of course, hearts. According to this game, then, Chaz and I were going to have the worst relationship ever, get divorced, and then get remarried and divorced again. Em was teasing me about this when Chaz walked in.

“Just face it, you and Chaz are going to end up together and have the worst marriage ever. He doesn't love you even a little bit haaaa,” Em stated right as Chaz walked into the room.

“Hey!” he protested, glaring at Em. “When we get married it's going to be beautiful and awesome and you're going to be jealous. Of course I love him.”

For the first time, I wasn't really sure if Chaz was joking or not. In the past I knew Chaz joked around about our relationship a lot, about the fact that we were “engaged” and whatnot, but I was usually pretty sure that he was joking. After a silent moment where Em and I glanced between each other, Em spoke, “Do you...think you guys are actually engaged?”

Chaz just stared at her for a while, and then eventually mumbled, “Oh.” He walked farther into my room and stared down into my eyes. “I really...was insane as a child,” he stated, as he sat in front of me and I tried to speak. My mind was already reeling, actually, and I was feeling a bit light-headed at the prospect of the words he'd already spoken (“I love him”). He explained himself quickly, but I was hardly listening, “When I was younger I had the firm belief that a marriage proposal, if accepted, was something that couldn't be backed out of. So even if it was a joke, I believed you had to get married to that person. I learned I was wrong a long time ago, but I guess it just never clicked...” Em laughed, but my heart was going too crazy to think anything. Despite my shaky legs, I stood up and walked toward my window in an attempt to get some fresh air, where I remained while Em and Chaz had a whispered conversation. If I were trying to listen, I probably would have heard it, but I was actually trying to stabilize my heartbeat.

This did not work out well when Chaz walked over to me and looked at me with those chocolate colored eyes and spoke in a low voice, “Ky, I wasn't joking when I just said I love you.” My eyes probably did this crazy freakout thing as he leaned close to me, pressing his lips against mine. Everything was perfect for a few seconds, until the mortifying thing I told you about in the beginning of this tale happened. I passed out. Turns out when you're extremely light-headed because your dreams are coming true sometimes you pass out.

Em recounted the story to me later. She apparently thought it was very funny when Chaz leaned down and kissed me, then my knees buckled and Chaz caught me. The look on his face was also “hilarious” but I disagree that this could be possible. He caught me in a way so that his arms were around my waist, so he shuffled me over to my bed and lay me there, where I woke up a few moments later. During the time that I lay there unconscious, Chaz and Em discussed how long I must have been waiting for that moment.

Chaz's face greeted me when I woke up and he had an amused little smirk on his face. “You don't need to go to the doctor, do you?”

“No I'm just a moron,” I spat out. I was so embarrassed I could hardly squeak out, “I'm sorry.”

Chaz smiled at me and grabbed my hand and pressed his lips against it, crawling onto my bed, where I had apparently been relocated to after I fainted. “Did you really think I was joking every time I told you I loved you? I kind of thought you didn't feel the same way...Every other time I've tried to kiss you you kind of dodged away...”

“I proposed to you on a dare,” I sighed, “and I thought you just thought it was funny to pretend to want to kiss me, but I didn't want to make you do that. You never even told me you're gay...” Everything made perfect sense then when I thought about it, but I hadn't realized Chaz had believed we were already in a romantic relationship. I sighed again and pressed my head against Chaz's shoulder.

“I kind of thought I didn't have to,” he replied. “Most of the guys I've met don't frequently try to kiss their best friends.” At that moment, Chaz and I were probably on about the same levels of denseness combined with idiocy, so I scowled at him.

“Yeah, but there are a few,” I insisted, knowing it wasn't really true. “No one else got it either. We've all been talking about it for a long time.”

Chaz shrugged at me and leaned close to me, “Well none of that matters now. Be my boyfriend?” I nodded, so he kissed me again, and I successfully avoided passing out this time.

Chaz was the best boyfriend a guy could hope for, which was still a bit of an issue for me and my weak constitution. The second time I passed out was when he asked me to Prom in front of all our friends, which was at least twice as mortifying. Luckily enough I love him and every part of his being, so much that even a couple fainting spells and a lot of times where I have to sit down to catch my breath can't keep us apart.