Age: 15 Years Old
Day of Challenge: Day Eleven
Date: 4 February 2005
Location: Greeley, CO

As I matured, the internet matured with me.  I got to experience all the strange and incredible things that the youth of the internet offered.  One of those was called AOL Instant messenger (AIM for short).  I thought AIM was the best thing in the world.  When I was 15, it gave me access to my friends at any time of the day or night.  Being 15, that was a big deal.  I couldn’t drive yet and I was part of a group of lovely outcasts.  I loved being in contact with them all the time.

The group looked like this when it started.  Me.  The only Guy.  Tanya.  The loud one.  Laura.  The quiet one.  Aymie & Nessa.  The Lesbian Couple.  We were close friends throughout our sophomore year of high school.  Although I talked with all of them through AIM, it was Nessa that I could talk with for hours.  And when I say hours, I mean hours.  On some flash drive somewhere, there are saved AIM conversations that would go on for pages and pages and pages.  I knew I liked her a lot.  There was no reason to tell her.  She was dating Aymie and I enjoyed the flirting.  I had never had a real girlfriend.

In January of 2005, I through a wrench in the system when I started dating a new girl at school—Cyndi.  It was easy to tell that Nessa was jealous.  My relationship with Cyndi lasted precisely long enough to get my first kiss and for her to cheat on me.  I waited a few days to break up with Cyndi after she kissed her other friend.  During those few days, I spent a lot of time on AIM with Nessa (and updating my Livejournal now that I actually had something interesting to talk about).  That’s when I realized Nessa had broken up with Aymie.  Aymie was a cutter and Nessa couldn’t handle it anymore.

I broke up with Cyndi.  That night, on AIM, Nessa and I tricked each other into telling each other about are secret crushes.  To no surprise, it was each other.  We agreed to go to school early the next morning so that we could talk about it.  We arrived and sat at the lunch table for about an hour—finding dozens of conversations to distract us from the reality that we liked each other.  Before we knew it, we had to go to class.

After school, Aymie and Nessa forced me over to Aymie’s house.  Aymie proceeded to lock Nessa and I in her bedroom before she left to go grocery shopping with her mother.  I remember that situation quite well.  There I was, sitting in the bedroom of my crush’s ex-girlfriend.  She was a complete Goth so the room was decked out in Evanescence, Tool, and Marylyn Manson posters.  I sat on the bed next to Nessa, not sure what to say.

After avoiding the conversation for a bit, Nessa finally gathered up the courage.  “You like me right?”  “Yeah.”  “Well.  I like you.  We should date.”  And that was that.  Nessa and I started dating in early February of 2005.  She would teach me how to kiss.  She would be the first person to take me to second base.  She was the first person I ever fell in love with.  In the end, she would be the first person to break my heart.