Hello, Jordan Sandberg

Hello, Jordan Sandberg.*

Remember me? We knew each other way back when. We went to school and church together. You were a year older than me. I don’t remember how we first met, and I have absolutely no idea why you liked me, but apparently you did. And now here I am, looking you up out of the blue and sending you a letter.

Don’t worry. I’m not hitting on you. Happily married I am. Two adorable daughters. So seriously, not hitting on you or stalking you. This is probably making you wonder: why exactly am I writing to you?

Well, I have to make a confession. You may or may not remember this incident, but I sure do. (Although the crazy part of me says, “Of course he remembers it! How could he forget something so life altering as a teenage crush? It probably scarred him for life; I’m sure he never recovered.”—but don’t worry about the crazy voice; I mostly ignore her.) I remember it so viscerally that I still cringe when I imagine it.

So I thought, well, there’s only one way to get past all that embarrassment. Share it really, really publicly! Let everyone else revel in my mortification! Especially make sure Jordan sees it!

And here we all are. The confession awaits…

I think I was in seventh grade, or maybe eighth. You were in the grade above me but not really on my mind. I think I had a crush on Peter Fletcher. My friend and I were at the ice skating rink. So were you.

We saw you there. We glanced furtively, we giggled, we pretended you didn’t exist. But we felt your presence. Boys. Our age. Whom we knew. Be still our beating hearts.

So we skated and we watched you surreptitiously. We tossed our hair. We laughed with just a shade more enthusiasm. We tried to broadcast a signal: “We are awesome and amazing women. We are having a fantastic time without any boys. But perhaps, if you draw closer, you’ll have a fantastic time too.”

But we were seventh graders, so we probably weren’t doing a very good job. You were also in middle school, and therefore also completely clueless.

And then I took a break, leaning against the rail and watching the other skaters zipping by. You must have seen your chance. Following time honored tradition, you sent Peter to talk to me.

“Hey, Jeanna,” he said as he toepicked to a stop.

“Hey.” Awkward small talk.

“Sooo… Jordan asked me to come over here and talk to you.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. He wanted to know… will you go out with him?”

Do you remember my response? Did you ever really know it, or did Peter somehow soften it for you? I remember what I said, word for word (granted, two words are not all that difficult to remember).

“No. Never.”

Let us pause and zoom out for a moment, shall we? Let us consider for a moment all the ways in a which a nice girl can reject the advances of an unwanted suitor. “I’ve got a boyfriend in Kentucky.” “My parents wouldn’t let me.” Even “You’re so awesome, I’m just not good enough for you.”

So why would a presumably nice girl like me answer like that?

Let us now rewind a few seconds and zoom in. Let us eavesdrop on the radio chatter in my mind.

“He did?” I said. Even someone as socially awkward as I was knew what “he wants me to talk to you” meant. I was suddenly a deer, frozen, staring idiotically at approaching headlights. My brain whirred fuzzily, my adrenaline glands took over, I was getting stupider by the nanosecond.

Oh my gosh, said the voice in my head. Jordan likes me? I had no idea.

Wow, that’s totally flattering.

And completely unexpected. Agh! What do I do?

Well, I can’t “go out” with him. I mean, yes, it doesn’t actually mean dating like the “can’t date before you’re sixteen” thing. We’re not going to go anywhere really. Right? Doesn’t “go out” pretty much just mean say hi in the halls and, I dunno, send each other dumb notes and sappy Valentines? That’s not a big deal, right?

I think it might be the end of the world as we know it, actually.

Dad would kill me.

Dad wouldn’t have to know.

Dad would know.

I don’t even know if I like Jordan. Honestly, I’ve never really considered it.

But he asked you out! Somehow he noticed you. Let’s just enjoy the ego stroking for a minute here, please.

It can’t last. He’d realize how wacky we are and probably dump us in about a week.

Hey, a week is good.

But it’s so weird. I don’t know how I feel about this whole “going out” thing anyway. I need at least an hour to analyze it.

Really, the best thing would be for us to just say “no” politely and explain to him why we can’t go out now but if he could just wait a couple years, that would be super cool and we could go to a movie or dinner or just on a walk or something. Yes, we’ll just tell him we’re flattered and we would love to go out… in about three years.

“No. Never.”

What? Did we really just say that? My internal jaw dropped. No, we couldn’t possibly have said that. We had a beautiful, polite, even downright poetic response planned. Our mouth could not have betrayed us this way.**

And that, Jordan, is the answer to the question of my, ahem, lack of tact. My voice betrayed me. It really wasn’t my fault.***

I hope you will find it comforting and/or amusing to discover the following:

Shortly after your offer and my rejection, I developed a crush on you.

This crush lasted, to varying degrees, for … oh, something like three or four years. Maybe a little more? I can’t remember for sure, but I do have “Jordan S’s missionary scripture” scrawled in my old copy of the Book of Mormon, and I wouldn’t have bothered with writing that if I’d been completely over you.

This crush caused me to do a number of embarrassingly girlie things, including (but not limited to):

• Frequently walking home the long way so I could go by your house just in case I might accidentally run into you.
• Reading The Chosen (quite visibly, at our ward’s youth conference, where you would see me reading it) just because I heard you say it was good. (Thanks for that, by the way. I really liked that book.)
• Paying attention to pretty much everything about you in a slightly obsessive, but not fully stalkerly, manner (I got to recognize most of your wardrobe pretty well).
• (Speaking of your wardrobe) Deciding that I really really reaaaally liked that olive greenish sweater you owned. Sigh.
• Trying to capture your attention once with this elaborately written out dumb joke about Descartes and sandwiches that I showed you and you were supposed to take and treasure but that you just looked at, read, and handing back to me without even thinking about how you were crushing my soul by your cavalier blank look.

So, I think that’s that. Now you know. Now, if you ever wondered why, you have the answer. And if you didn’t wonder, you can at least accept my massively embarrassing admission as… well… massively embarrassing.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled life.

Sincerely,

Jeanna

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent (you) and the embarrassed (me).

**You may be wondering at this point why my internal monologue is sometimes spoken in the plural. I don’t know. Maybe it makes it easier to argue with myself.

***You may have also wondered why I never responded to that note you stuck in my locker. The answer is this: It fell to the bottom of my locker, was quickly buried in moldering piles of whatnot, and was not discovered until about a month or two later.