Some Kind of Popsicle

The first time I saw her, my popsicle melted. And no, that’s not a euphemism – it was a very hot day.

I was eleven years old when I first met Amy. Her father had recently accepted a teaching position of the local university and so the whole family had moved state, setting up home in the house next door to mine. I gazed at her on that first afternoon, my popsicle melting in my sweaty, chubby hand while perspiration ran down my face, my neck, even the lenses of my glasses, feeling utterly and hopelessly in love. Back then, her hair was light brown, not the bleached blonde it is today; but it still tumbled riotously to her shoulders (okay, I’d been peeking at some of my mom’s romance novels) and when she smiled, it was like a store full of candy or a day filled with sunshine.

“Hi,” she said, a little uncertainly. “I’m Amy.

I grinned back at her, a million questions buzzing around my brain. How old was she? What school would she be going to? What was her favourite color? But shyness tied my tongue in knots so that all I could do was stutter, “Do you want a popsicle?”

Her eyes flickered to the sticky state of my hands and she shook her head politely. “No thanks. I’m an ice cream girl.”

And throughout our time in school together, that metaphor defined our relationship: I was the substandard popsicle – ordinary and unexciting – whereas she was the exotic ice cream: one of those really fancy ones that commercials tell you only rich, successful people can afford. She was out of my league, and I knew it; nevertheless, she deigned to hang around with me for the first few weeks of Middle School – until one of the popular girls took her aside and politely explained the rules. Girls with Amy’s potential weren’t supposed to be seen with losers like me. From that point on, we stopped eating lunch together or even acknowledging each other’s presence in class or at recess; but at the end of the day, we always rode home together in her mom’s car. What her friends didn’t see didn’t count.

Gradually, though, even that ritual disappeared as Amy started staying after school for dance practice and gym practice and drama club. She was effortlessly lithe and flexible and seemed to be on every team that mattered. By way of contrast, I played the tuba in the school band: it was hardly a romantic instrument and I knew that I would never be able to serenade Amy with it from underneath her bedroom window.

We were still friends, though, despite the complications at school. When you live next door to someone and all the other kids around go to some snotty private school, you need someone else who can sympathise with you when you want to moan about teachers or homework.

It must have been about five or six weeks into Sixth Grade when she started asking me to help her with her math assignments. Amy was pretty but she had no head for figures.

“C’mon, Artie,” she said, smiling up at me. “We can be Study Buddies: you help me with math and I’ll help you with English.”

I didn’t like to point out that I had won prizes for Composition at Elementary School.

Still, a study session with the girl I had a crush on was something I wasn’t going to turn down – especially when we would study for an hour and then hang out afterwards. At first, we played video games and ate the pizza slices her mom heated for us; but once Amy hit thirteen, she decided she was too old for video games and suggested watching a movie together instead. That was fine by me – I guess a part of me still harboured a secret hope of snuggling up on her couch together to watch something scary enough to make her want to bury her head in my chest. Then I could enfold her in my strong, manly arms (there go my mom’s romance novels again) and gently kiss the top of her head – even though I was actually a few inches shorter than she was and my physique was anything but manly.

However, Amy wasn’t into horror or even anything that hinted at suspense. Instead, we found ourselves working our way through all the classic films from the eighties that her parents must have watched when they were our age. Together, we watched Back to the Future, parts 1, 2 and 3, Dirty Dancing, Labyrinth and The Princess Bride. She rejected both Ghostbusters and Gremlins as being “too scary” – and then we discovered John Hughes.

Looking back, I realise now that Amy was trying to grow up too fast. She was way too young to have a boyfriend (her father had specified no dating until she was sixteen), but it didn’t stop her experimenting with makeup – mainly lipstick – and asking her mom if she could have her hair coloured. The John Hughes films we saw fed into that obsession: The Breakfast Club made her think bad boys were cool, and Pretty in Pink reiterated that the most important event in a girl’s life was Senior Prom and that the perfect date was the must-have accessory. In vain, I tried to point out that Pretty in Pink wasn’t romantic – in my opinion, Andie should have ended up with Duckie, the best friend who was in love with her but afraid to tell her how he really felt. I almost wept with frustration when she went after Blane who’d treated her so badly, and kissed him instead of Duckie as the film finished.

The next time we studied together, Amy confessed she’d spent hours practicing kissing with her pillow, just to make sure that she’d be able to do it right when the time came. For a moment, I felt irrationally jealous of all the soft furnishings in her bedroom. If I’d been a little less in love with her, I might have suggested that she practice on me instead; as it was, just sitting next to her to watch a movie made me sweat horribly under my armpits, and I knew that were she to kiss me, I’d find myself melting faster than the popsicle that first time I saw her.

It was then that she told me her secret. Despite her father’s no dating rule, she’d agreed to meet up with a boy from school who liked her at the mall the next day. I gazed at her in horror. What was she thinking?

“It’s okay,” she said hurriedly. “There’s a group of us going to Burger King together.” She listed names, but I didn’t recognise any of them: they were cool kids; fellow luxury ice creams. “But I thought I should be prepared,” she continued, “just in case... Well, you know.”

I didn’t know. Being short and fat with glasses, I was unlikely to find myself in her position.

“What does Josh look like?” I asked next, interested in spite of myself. After all, he was a more dangerous rival than the pillow she’d been practicing on.

A dreamy expression crossed her face. “He’s blond... and blue eyed... and he’s on the school swim team.”

I knew it was an unwritten rule that girls like Amy should date jocks like Josh and not nerds like me, but wasn’t it time someone rewrote those rules? And then I thought about The Breakfast Club and realised I should be grateful that she wasn’t seeing a bad boy like John Bender – not that you get many of those in Middle School.

Once we’d finished studying – well, it was more a case of me tutoring her in math than the two of us sitting down to do our homework – she looked at me. “I’ve got another John Hughes movie.”

I knew I shouldn’t be encouraging all these ridiculous romantic notions she’d had since we started watching Molly Ringwald et al smooching each other, but if I said no, then Amy might stop asking me to watch movies with her after our Friday night math sessions and those 90 minutes were the highlight of my week. So, I muttered that we “might as well” and we settled down to Some Kind of Wonderful – and that was when I discovered that John Hughes had finally got it right. It was like Pretty in Pink, only a million times better, with the main character, Keith, thinking he wanted to date the spoilt rich girl but then finding out at the end that he likes his tomboyish best friend, Watts, better. At one point in the film, Watts says Keith needs to practice kissing – just in case he has to kiss Amanda, the rich girl – and then she shows him how it’s done. At that point, I nearly fell off my chair. Why, oh why, hadn’t I made the same suggestion to Amy?

“That’s what a film should be like,” I said as it ended.

Amy gave me a narrow look. “I thought you hated this sort of stuff.”

“Not when they get it right,” I insisted. “He ends up with his best friend and not some flashy person who doesn’t really care about him.”

I was hoping she’d take the hint and cancel her date with Josh, but she didn’t.

Amy never told me how her date went, and I didn’t ask. Middle School was almost over and I couldn’t see things getting any better when we started High School. No doubt there would be plenty of older guys – Juniors and Seniors – who would catch her attention with their perfect teeth and their letterman jackets and their cars, and I would continue to be the boy-next-door who tutored her in math and perspired heavily whenever I talked to her.

*

That summer, she gave herself a makeover. When we started High School, she didn’t look like Amy anymore: she was another Barbie clone with bleached and straightened hair and a wardrobe that screamed expensive. She looked good – you could tell by all the heads that turned in the hall every time she passed by; but I found myself longing for the riotous curls and faded jeans of the girl who’d sat next to me on a couch, watching teen movies and eating pepperoni pizza.

Our study sessions tailed off now that Amy had to spend so much time being popular. She’d taken it to a whole new level since Middle School: joining the cheerleading squad and shaking her pompoms at every available moment; running for class president (she won by a landslide – every single boy voted for her); and taking a role on the Yearbook Committee (the cynical side of me wondered whether this was so she made sure she got enough coverage). The girls she went around with were the same haughty clique from previous years only now they accepted her as Queen Bee and hung on her every word.

I might have been heartbroken over Amy’s loss – if I’d had the time. As it was, with Chess Club and Math League and the Science Bowl, not to mention all the advanced classes I was taking in calculus and computer science and physics, I was far too busy to sit and mope – although from time to time when I spotted her in the dining hall tossing her straightened hair or smiling at one of the jocks on the football team, I was transported back to a hot July afternoon and a popsicle melting in my hand.

*

I hadn’t seen Amy for months – not out of school anyway – so it was a surprise when she called round one night and asked to speak to me. By now, we were both in our sophomore year and she was as popular as ever while I was still the fat, brainy kid that people recognised by sight but didn’t talk to.

“What do you want?” I asked a little ungraciously. She was still my Some Kind of Wonderful, but the glitter was wearing off a little.

She fixed her large, mascara-ed eyes on me, looking slightly embarrassed. “I need a favor. Do you know Todd Jenkins?”

And that’s when the story came tumbling out. Todd was a star quarterback and the most popular Senior in our school. He was two years older than Amy and me, but that hadn’t stopped him asking her to Senior Prom as his date. Here, Amy stopped. “You know my dad has this silly no dating rule,” she said.

I nodded, wondering what any of this had to do with me.

Amy took a big breath. “Well, Todd needs tutoring in math. He’s failed all his classes this year and he’s worried about the ACT. He’s got a football scholarship for college, but if he messes up on the math questions, they might not let him in.”

“And he wants me to tutor him?” Why wasn’t Todd asking me himself?

She averted her gaze, staring at the floor. “I told him,” she said in a small voice, “that you’d tutor him if he got you a ticket for Prom. You can go as a Sophomore if a Senior invites you.”

“Why would I want to go to Senior Prom?” I asked, mystified.

Amy stomped her foot. “For someone so clever, you can be really stupid at times! You need to go to Prom so I can tell my parents I’m going with you – as a friend. You know my dad won’t let me out of the house if he thinks it’s a real date.”

“So, in other words, I’m just a cover story?” At that moment, I felt angry with her. She was treating me just like Andie had treated Duckie in Pretty in Pink, going to Prom with him and then abandoning him for someone ‘better’. And unlike Duckie, I would have no cute girl smiling at me when Amy waltzed off with her footballer.

“Please, Artie.”

I tried to imagine my heart as a frozen popsicle, icy cool and refusing to melt; but when she looked up at me with tears in her eyes, I couldn’t refuse. And so I agreed to tutor Todd.

*

“What do you see in him?” I asked her the next time I saw her. (We’d agreed I should start popping by her house again every so often so that our ‘Prom Date’ seemed more authentic.) “He’s unbelievably stupid.”

Todd knew nothing about algebra or pre-algebra; he couldn’t solve even the simplest geometry problems; and as for trigonometry...

“But he’s so pretty!” was her response.

I compromised. “Okay, he’s pretty stupid.”

I didn’t tell her that Todd had been more interested in asking questions about Amy than applying himself to the math questions I’d set him. Even now, his enquiry about whether or not I thought she’d ‘put out on the first date’ rankled.

*

As the weeks went by in the build up to Prom, I tried to let my heart freeze over. It wasn’t easy. Amy had stopped straightening her hair (Todd had told her he liked the natural look) and the riotous curls tumbled once more about her face with a sun-kissed colour that was totally unnatural (but what Todd didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him). My mom was ecstatic that I was taking Amy to Prom (Amy’s mom had mentioned it in passing) and hadn’t wondered why we were both attending something two years before our time. She even took me shopping for a tuxedo which was quite a feat considering my body shape. I subjected myself to the embarrassment of trying on pants that were a good six inches too long in the leg and an equal amount too short in the waist, thinking that I would make a fortune if I set up a tuxedo company called Short and Fat Formal Wear.

It was as Prom Night approached that I began to realise why Amy was doing this. Sure, Todd was good looking, but I think secretly, she found him as boring as I did. She wasn’t in love with him or even in lust with him: she wanted to be his date because that cemented her position as Queen Bee with the other luxury ice creams. Amy would never know the agony I suffered on a daily basis of being overlooked and ignored because I wasn’t good-looking enough to attract attention; but then I would never know the pressure she was under to be perfect all the time with never a hair out of place; never a chipped nail nor an unflattering outfit. John Hughes had taught her that arm candy was a girl’s most important accessory, and she was making sure that the whole school knew she had bagged herself a trophy boyfriend.

*

There were tears in my mother’s eyes as she looked at us both that evening, taking snapshots to commemorate the occasion. (I wondered how many of them would find their way onto her Facebook page.) The limo arrived and we climbed in, none of our parents aware that once we arrived at school, Amy would be met by Todd, and I would spend the rest of the Prom skulking furtively by the punchbowl.

If this was a story, or a John Hughes teen movie, then Amy would have realised I was the one for her and not Todd after all. And for a moment, it almost happened: the limo pulled to a halt and she turned towards me. “Thanks, Artie,” she said, kissing me briefly on the lips.

But real life is painful and so my first kiss wasn’t the start of something but the end of everything. That night, I watched Amy dancing in Todd’s arms, their mouths interlocked, knowing that unlike her I would never graduate from a pillow to a human being. And that was when my heart finally froze inside me – like some kind of popsicle.