I couldn’t be friends with Tee at first because every time I tried to see him, my heart began a race against no one. It raced so much that in the process, it had a collision with the butterflies in my tummy and they would do me no favour as I would sweat like a chicken about to be slaughtered. Is this what it feels like to like someone? I would ask myself many times.
See, I didn’t just fall for his physique, Tee was very intelligent and super-brilliant. His love for mathematics made me fall in love with him more because I was lacking a bit in that subject, so, I tried to get close so I could tap from his love for numbers. They say you develop likeness for some of the things your love likes, yeah? Oh well, I did like a lot of things, and avoided many things because of Tee. I didn’t want him to see me with the things he didn’t like so that he wouldn’t decide to stay away from me.
Now, do you know the amazing part of the relationship? We were the class toppers. Every term was a competition. Our classmates would always look forward to whoever would win the first position at the end of each term between me and Tee.
I liked Tee, but I didn’t want to appear desperate and foolish, so he should do the pursuing, isn’t that right? I am the woman. The man should make the move first.
Our teachers, ignorant of how I burnt inside whenever I was close to Tee would always link us together for assignments. We would always be in the same group even if it was just a team of two, it was always me and Tee. I wanted to tell them to stop, but I didn’t know if I was enjoying it or not. I wanted us to get closer and make Tee my boyfriend, but I didn’t want to be the one to make the first move. However, having us work together all the time didn’t give me the opportunity to run far enough. In fact, I couldn’t run at all.
I think the closeness had a toll on him too because at some point, he started falling for me. He wouldn’t go on break without telling me to go with him. He would want me to walk him to the park. We would gist about Mr A, our wicked English teacher with the accent, and mimic him together. We would do assignments together, and a lot more. But why is he not popping the question? Did you just ask that? Well, I wondered too. If he was getting fond of me that much, why would he not let me know his feelings about me and let’s just kickstart our relationship journey?
Since he wasn’t bold enough to do the asking, let me just go ahead and do it as I was getting impatient, so one day during one of our long holidays, we exchanged numbers because it was going to be a month long. We would talk over the phone daily like we were dating, but it was undefined, so I decided to ‘define’ whatever it was we had going on.
I recharged my line, searched up his number on my Multilinks phone and wrote “I know you like Monsuroh, well, she likes you too. Just make sure you take very good care of her”. I sent the text and switched off my phone for about an hour. I remember sending the text around 7:30 pm that day.
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I turned my phone on an hour later and the first call I received was from Tee. “Hi, I got your text”, he said. “Me? Text? When? I never sent any text”, I responded. “Oh, did someone else use your phone today?”, he asked. “Yes, my sister did”, I said. “The text probably came from her”. “It is possible”, I said. After a minute of silence, we said our goodbyes, and we hung up. And that was it.
We resumed school the next term to see that Tee had transferred to another school. I was kind of relieved and sad at the same time. Relieved because I couldn’t face him after I crushed myself in the presence of my crush, but sad because the very first man I would have a crush on left.