It may surprise you to know that in my time, I’ve creeped upon a boy or two. (Or three or four.) But I’m strictly a harmless Facebook stalker. And okay, sure, in high school I was known to abuse my library helper privileges so I could look up the schedules of cute guys to orchestrate hallway meet-ups. Who hasn’t done that? Only once did I stray from my general strategy of Internet creeping to dabble in the art of actual creeping. And it wasn’t even my crush.
It was Valentine’s Day, and we were in middle school. Valentine’s Day kind of sucks in 7th Grade, because everybody looks really awkward and store-bought cards are no longer mandated, and actual declarations of affection are either displayed in note-passing form or not at all. Anyway, my friend Keira had a MASSIVE crush on this guy we’ll call Squidward. I always felt he had a Squidward-like persona. Keira apparently found this kind of thing attractive, because she put together an anonymous homemade card and coerced me into giving it to him.
“You want me to what?” I said for at least the fourth time.
“Slip it in his backpack at the end of the day,” she repeated. “Seriously. This is a good plan.”
“Keira, do I look like the kind of person who could pull that off gracefully?”
“You don’t need to be graceful,” she said. “You just need to be sly. Tap into your secret stealth mode.”
“I don’t have a stealth mode,” I said, slamming my locker shut and predictably dropping all my books and binders in the process. “I have two modes: clumsy and clumsier.”
She held up the valentine—it was the most adorable thing I’d ever seen—and said, “Please?”
I sighed. Just because I thought Squidward was a sad sack of gloomy didn’t mean I had the right to ruin Keira’s Valentine’s Day. I awkwardly gathered all my crap up off the floor, snatched up the valentine, and said, “Fine. But you owe me a Fruit Roll-Up,” because Fruit Roll-Ups in middle school were basically currency.
The end of the day rolled around, and I scoped out Squidward’s locker. He was pulling out books and shoving them in his backpack with reckless abandon. So as not to seem like a total creep, I tried to blend in with the tide of students bulldozing their way to the buses. I started getting nervous. How the hell was I supposed to do this? I was a 13-year-old klutz. I had not mastered the art of stealth. And Squidward was rummaging around in his disaster of a locker and sighing a lot, but he wasn’t exactly placing his backpack in the greatest position for secret Valentine drop-offs.
The final bell rang. My palms were sweating. My face was hot. I had to do something. And then—while I was sweating and my face was all red and my heart felt like it was running a marathon—Squidward stuck his head all the way in his locker, feeling around blindly for whatever earthly object had been sucked into the vortex. His backpack was slumped on the floor like it was waiting for me. Perfect. It was now or never. Do or die.
I darted forward. I whipped out the valentine. I stuck it in his backpack. And just as I was inwardly congratulating myself on the ninja-like swiftness with which I had completed this mission, Squidward yanked his head out of his locker. He saw me. He did a double take. He was fully justified in doing that double take, I think, because I was still standing there with my hand in his backpack.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
I didn’t even shoot for damage control. I simply left the card, yanked my hand out of his backpack, yelled “BYE!” and raced down the hallway. It didn’t even occur to me until I wrote this that he probably assumed the card was mine, which now explains all of the awkward encounters we had throughout Sixth Form, in which he saw me and then sprinted in the opposite direction. Oh, to be young and a creeper.
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