Last night was a high-school-redo dream. We were all in the gym and I was making eyes at the cute boy I liked freshman year, and I was thinking that now that I had the advantage of NOT BEING THIRTEEN, I would go over and talk to him instead of just staring at him across an English classroom for 9 months. And then a song started playing in the background; it was a boy band singing about a girl. They’d finished the segment praising the girl’s awesomeness, and now they were at the part where one of them has a solo mournfully/dramatically listing the hurdles standing in the way of the relationship:

But she’s a size 16
I’m the skinniest guy at school
And she’s a…QUEEEEEEEEEEN

So my brain wrote a song. To call me fat.

That boy I liked, by the way, was the son of another teacher at school. I’ll bet the English teacher TOLD him in the teacher lounge. Because _I_ would, if I were a teacher. “There is some girl who just STARES at him! The whole class! Every day!” I wonder if they worked together on the plan she put into action, which was to suddenly move me from the very last seat in the back corner to the desk next to his in the very front row. She did it abruptly and obviously, like: “Okay, settle down everyone. First, I want to make a few changes to the seating chart. Swistle, move up here next to Jason, and Andrew sit where Swistle was. Now, let’s open to page 37…” I’ve wondered if that was a cruelty-based plan, or a helping plan, or a “I am so tired of her staring at him instead of paying attention in class, and in fact I can’t stand it even one.more.day” plan.

This morning I looked the guy up on Facebook. Facebook is excellent for snooping, but also can be a terrible dream-killer—even more than unkind brain songs. The guy I liked is now a serious outdoorsy person. (Maybe he was back then, too—I never talked to him.) There are pictures of him camping without a tent in March, and biking a mountain trail in full biking gear. There is no way that would have worked out.