Twas Brillig

I’m hosting SOS today because, um, I kinda forgot to secure a guest host this week. haha. Oops! So, you’re stuck with me again! The Mr. Linky is at the end of the post.

About a million years ago, I started a Soap Opera Sunday saga about a guy we called “Adam.” Remember? Seriously, it was so long ago that if you’d like to go catch up, it’s here (and it’s very short). I’ll wait.

Back already? Great. Moving on.

So six years went by…

I’d heard that Adam and his family moved to Ireland and then he went to serve a mission for his (our) church and then he went to college… somewhere.

I’d been great friends with Tara, Adam’s sister, while we’d all been in Jerusalem. But once they’d left, we all lost touch.

A few years later, while in high school, I met a girl named Sara who had also spent a lot of time in Jerusalem and, though we’d never actually known each other there (she left before I arrived), there was a certain bond by having shared similar experiences— both the magnificent and the horrifying. Sara and Tara had been great friends in Jerusalem.

Over those six years, I… well, I grew up. I was no longer the insecure 12-year-old child that Adam had known. I was 18, confident, flirtatious, and comfortable.

I was a freshman at BYU, majoring in looking good and making out with virtual strangers, when Sara called me to say that Tara was in Utah and they wanted to come and hang out with me. Sounded great! So we all went to lunch, along with a couple of Tara’s girlfriends from Ireland who were also at BYU. It was great to catch up, to see how we’d all “turned out” etc.

We had such a good time that we all began hanging out regularly.

One day, we were all having lunch together when the conversation turned towards their plans for that night, which was to stand in line all night for tickets to some big movie that opened the next day (I’m thinking it was the new Star Wars Episode One or something equally nauseating that I couldn’t have been LESS interested in…). Did I want to join them? No, thank you. Who all is coming? Sara, these Irish girls (whose names were Ginny and Monica), Tara, Tara’s brother and his roommates…

Now I had, of course, already moved on from my obsession with Adam. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t become suddenly VERY interested in the various details of their conversation. It didn’t mean that my heart didn’t speed up. It didn’t mean that I wasn’t instantly contemplating ways that I would run into him and dazzle him with my grown-up-ness.

“So, Adam’s here? Is he a student at BYU?” I tried to sound as casual as possible, but I watched Ginny and Monica glance at each other, and I suddenly realized that of course these girls were also interested in Adam. As I thought about Adam’s excrutiatingly handsome face and his dark wavy hair, I understood that every girl within a ten mile radius of him would bask in his perfection. I almost wondered if that’s why Monica and Ginny were such devoted friends to Tara…

And yes, Adam was here, and he was a student. He was living in an apartment, but only for a few more weeks until Tara and Adam’s parents finalized the purchase of a house here, where Tara, Adam, Monica, Ginny, and one of Adam’s friends would all live together in the basement. I smiled at Ginny and Monica’s transparent delight over this arrangement.

I was thrilled that Tara would be living here on a more permanent basis. I’d enjoyed catching up with her and I knew that we could all have a lot of fun with her nearby.

After I left that lunch, I confess that I considered joining them for their sleeping-in-line-for-tickets-to-see-a-dumb-movie fun. But that was just so not me. Still, I couldn’t get the idea of seeing Adam again, SOON, out of my head.

So, I did what any other good friend would do… I enlisted Matt’s aid (Matt was an invaluable accessory in any social situation… and he had a car… plus, he and Sara had always been friends, as she was one of the few people who didn’t run for the hills when he’d come out of the closet a few months before) and we took hot chocolate and cookies to our friends out in the cold.

I was a bit disappointed as I approached the line of crazy people waiting in the cold—Adam’s face wasn’t in the group. Sigh. So much for that. Still, I greeted the girls joyfully and distributed my goodies to the eager recipients.

As Sara was introducing Matt to the group, there were some guys right next to them, playing cards as they waited in line, who were clearly checking me out. Ever boy-crazy, I flashed them a flirtatious smile and one asked me if there were any more cookies for them. I laughed and brought some to them. There were four of them and they were funny and flirtatious and easy to talk to. But after a minute, Matt was bored and I was cold (and Adam wasn’t there…), so we decided to move on.

Just as we were walking away, I heard the guys I’d just been talking to yell, “Adam! You made it!” I turned and saw Adam sitting down with them— realizing that this wasn’t two groups after all, but the same group, and that my flirtatious new friends were Adam’s roommates.

My heart was racing. I found myself moving back towards the group. Tara said, “Brillig, you remember my brother Adam.” Adam instantly jumped back to his feet. I couldn’t believe that the real Adam did, in fact, live up to my memory.

“Hey,” I said, smiling, but doing my best to appear poised and confident.

“Hi,” he said, grinning like an idiot.

to be continued, natch…
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