Pita, continued

Chap.3, The Aftermath

At the beginning of summer, he was all I could think about. But as the summer went on, I found myself not thinking about him anymore. Infact the only crushes I had that summer were at church camp, but that's a different story. I was living my happy single life. I still liked him, just not really as much. Seriously, what I did in 7th grade is stalker behavior and I completely understand why I was labeled as "creepy" by him months ago. But now HE was the creep. Staring at me when I walked through the door in English like he was waiting for me, watching me like a hawk in the hallways, and so on. I didn't get it! What did he want from me?? It's almost like he was expecting me to say something to him, which I would never do. I wasn't going to let him have the satisfaction of me paying any attention to him. He wanted to ignore me after everything that happened? Fine. Two can play at that game. It's hard, but I always try to ignore him. Over summer I swore to myself that no matter what happened I wasn't going to let him ruin my time. I was upset when I found out he was in my English class, but I love English and I wasn't going to let him get in the way of that. (Turns out the class was shitty anyways but nevermind). No matter how hard I tried to ignore his existence he always became to butt of me and my friend's jokes. I didn't want to shut down their jokes or ignore them because let's be honest, I did find them very funny. And I would never pass up an opportunity to laugh. But it's kinda hard to ignore him when he's the only thing people ever talk to you about. My friends and I have accumulated a whole list of nicknames for him. The most used one being Pita Bread Man. Now, a bit of backstory for this is when I first sat down in English, I didn't have any friends. But then a girl I sort of knew named Allie sat by me. She told me she wasn't really friends with anyone in the class either. I told her a little bit of the backstory on Haris and how I still liked him, and she told me how he was actually her NEIGHBOR and family friend. Needless to say, we were best friends after that. 

One day in English, we were giving "all about me" presentations where we had to say four things about ourselves. Haris's presentation went as follows:

"I love my family. I love Bosnia. I love basketball. And I really love pita bread!" 

Allie and I looked at each other. From that moment forward a legendary nickname was born. We call him "Pita bread" or just "Pita" more than his actual name. 

Well now you know the backstory. There's not really much else to tell. I'm not exaggerating when I tell people it's a long story. I think I've only heard him speak out loud one time. He has an accent. It's not terribly heavy, but it's noticeable. Very attractive in my opinion. Anyways, I was finding in extremely hard to move on. I love my best friends, but they weren't exactly making it any better. So, nothing had really changed. The "normal" between me and him was: we would stare at each other in the halls, ignore each other in class, and my best friend Adriana would usually drag me to her locker (which was next to his) to say something embarrassing and grab his attention. Well, I guess his attention span is only two second. Nothing ever happened besides that. I would go home every day, thinking maybe I had gotten somewhere, but then every day was the same as the last. I was feeling incredibly hopeless, thinking I had made NO progress and beating myself up for still thinking about him, even though I was trying to forget him. It was really just a cycle of insanity at this point. I thought maybe he would be able to use his goldfish level IQ to pick up on the fact that we should be avoiding each other now. But no, he didn't even try to avoid me. He would go places he knew where I would be, walk so close to me he would almost bump into me, and act like I was invisible to him or something. Yet he still stared at me! I didn't know what to do.