My Unnatural Disaster

The Dance

Two weeks after telling me he had no interest in dating during high school, our annual Sadie Hawkins dance rolled around. Me and Cayden had grown closer and even though he had made his feelings clear and to most girls it would have made friendship awkward in the aftermath, it didn't for us. We texted regularly, talked in our classes and went to football games with mutual friends from class. Even though I still had a crush on him I pushed it down and pursued the friendship, even though he wasn't dating me it wasn't like he was dating anyone else either. Wrong.

A girl I barely knew name Katey asked him to Sadie's and defying all of my expectations he agreed to go. "What happened to not dating in high school?" I asked confused, my feelings hurt.

"Idk, I've been thinking more about it" he replied cryptically, "Someones been changing my mind."

Later he would tell me that it was me that had changed his mind and opened him up to the idea. Looking back however I'm skeptical that this was the truth. 

Feelings hurt, I held my head high, I could have asked someone else and in all truth I considered asking Jordyn just to make a point. Even though we only would have gone as friends but I decided to just skip it. I didn't want to go see Cayden with another girl. 

The Day before the dance Cayden told me Katey had backed out because her family was going on a trip. I was excited I figured this was my shot, I spent the whole day going back and forth internally over whether I should ask him or not and externally debating the merits of the idea with my best friend of 5 years named Nina. 

Quiet in public but outgoing around the people who knew her the best Nina stood at an average 5'6 with reddish brown hair, beautiful blue-green eyes and incredible interest in fashion and makeup. She was my polar opposite but my better half as well. She could always convince me to step outside my comfort zone and go for it. 

That's how I ended up walking into English that day  dead set on asking Cayden to Sadies. It wasn't a secret that I was going to ask him. Nina had told some friends, I had told some friends, he himself knew me well enough by this point to probably figure out what was going to happen which made what he did at the end of class even worse. 

To give some background here there was a group of girls I didn't get along well with in middle school, they had deemed me unpopular, a nerd, and a lost cause. Primarily they just ignored me and we coexisted peacefully with very little conflict. Cayden had become friends with some of these girls as his close friends from middle school did marching band with them. For the sake of this story we will call the leader of this group Paige. 

At the end of English as I gathered my courage and walked over to Cayden where he stood smiling at me, I struck up a conversation and not five words in before I had the chance to ask him myself Paige walked right in between us and announced to the whole class she had something to ask him. 

"Will you go to Sadie's with me Cayden?" She threw a smirk over her shoulder as he looked between me and her and realized what was going on. 

He looked back at her before announcing just as loudly and excitedly as she had " Of course I will Paige!" He looked at me as he wrapped her in a hug and the whole class looked on laughing. Thankfully the bell rang and I was able to leave the room quickly my cheeks red with embarrassment. 

I still remember that night, I got a call from Ryan, the one who shipped me and Cayden originally, " Are you ok Case? That was brutal in there and you looked pretty upset..." he trailed off waiting for me to answer. It was the first time I would lie about something he had done to me but certainly not the last.

"Yeah" I replied, "It's no big deal, I didn't really wanna go anyways. I was just gonna ask him as a friend." 

"OK" He said the doubt obvious in his voice. " As long as your sure your ok, what he did really wasn't cool. In front of the class like that knowing you liked him."

"I'm sure Ryan, I promise its fine, I'm over it." My energy was gone and I didn't want to deal with this any longer. As I crawled into bed that night I knew one thing for sure. Me and Cayden's friendship had effectively been terminated. I didn't need a jerk like that in my life. 

This was true for three months. We stopped texting and talking in class, hung out with our own group of friends rather than mutual ones. For three months my life was Cayden free.