My First Boyfriend’s White Jeans
I met Josh the first week of eighth grade. I never had a real boyfriend before, and I had only ever kissed one boy, on a dare. Josh was a year younger than me and lived down the street from my best friend Kelley. He was really silly and nice and he paid attention to me.
Josh introduced me to using pagers for flirting. If you were teenager in the 90s you know all about this. You probably flirted with a boy through a pager at some point in your young adult life, but if you didn’t I’ll explain… Before there were cell phones, there were pagers, and they only displayed numbers. They were invented so that, if you were trying to get a hold of somebody, if you could call their pager number and leave a number for them to call you back. But somebody caught onto the idea or you could just leave any number because it would register up to 16 at a time. So, long before text messaging we figured out how to send encrypted messages with our pagers. We would essentially create word scrambles for people with numbers that associated with the numbers on the phone pad. It would take a few minutes to unscramble the message, but that just added to the excitement of it. There were also short pager codes like 143, that meant I love you.
I remember the first time that Josh sent me 143. He was so flirty and so cute and I had never actually encountered that with any boys before in my whole life. I was totally enamored with him, it was puppy love. We met the first week of school and hung out all the time. My parents just thought I was spending a lot of time at Kelley’s house, because I wasn’t ready to admit I had a real boyfriend.
And then Halloween came around. Even though we were probably a little too old to go trick-or-treating, Kelley suggested that we all go together. I don’t remember what we dressed up as, but I remember that for some reason when Josh showed up at Kelley’s house he was wearing white jeans. We mercilessly teased him, and it didn’t help his argument by telling us that he borrowed them from his sister. He left them in Kelley’s room when he changed into his costume, but the picking on him didn’t stay behind. We were so mean that at some point during the night he grew tired of our witchy cackling and left us out in the neighborhood. He walked home and sent me a sad pager code to decode later.
Kelley and I were drunk with power over chasing away a boy, and it felt good. I didn’t even feel guilty that he had been so sweet to me for weeks. When we got back to her house, we discovered the white jeans still on her bed and thought it would be hilarious to take magic marker and write horrible things all over the them. I folded them, and left them on his front porch giggling as I walked home that night. I had a great time with my friends and reasoned that girls always picked on boys (and vice versa) so there was no harm done here. What’s a little light bullying between friends? I had no awareness of the delicate bond between us because I had never had a boyfriend before.
Josh didn’t respond to my pager code that night when I got home, I figured he was already asleep. But imagine my surprise when he ignored me on the bus the next morning. He sat with somebody else, and I didn’t understand why he was so upset.
I know you’re reading this, thinking I was a piece of shit kid who is completely clueless, and you’re not wrong. This just wasn’t in my nature and I didn’t understand the repercussions of what I had done. I see this kind of behavior now in adult women all the time, being nasty to men and then complaining that men don’t like them. I’m guilty of it myself, I have perpetuated the #menaretrash initiative and have engaged in many fights on social media over the stance. But that’s now, with all my experience with trash men who have hurt or disappointed me.
Let’s go back to when I was just a stupid teenager, where I hurt a boy for no reason. He never did anything wrong to me, in fact he was the nicest boy who ever paid attention to me. He didn’t deserve that kind of abuse. I let my friend peer pressure me into bullying this poor guy because that was more fun to her than watching us be blissful in our budding relationship. Kelley really won here, now that I think back. She was kind of a shitty friend as it turns out, and this was just the beginning of it.
Maybe if I had just been a little nicer to Josh, it would have sent good karma into my relationship future. Or, on the other hand, maybe he wouldn’t have come out of the closet. Yep, I reconnected with Josh later, thanks to the age of social media. And years past our pager flirting, I discovered that he is an openly gay man who also was considering becoming a trans woman. Explains the white jeans, I guess.