Ross had been my younger brother Doug’s best friend since sixth grade. I’ve always loved the semiscandalous feeling of admitting that to friends—how we transgressed the “off-limits” pact for friends of siblings. But the truth is that ours was no long-simmering, forbidden crush. We pretty much ignored each other all the way through high school, when he and Doug, smart-asses and soccer players, far surpassed me on the popularity and attractiveness scales. Ross was not so much “off-limits” as “hopelessly unattainable,” and therefore an object of my derision. Those were the years when he developed the annoying habit of strolling into our house unannounced, via the door from the garage, and tossing a casual “Word up” over his shoulder at my shocked scowl.
Ross and I had actually spent a few years in junior high and high school band together before he surprised everyone and quit in his junior year. By then, I was a senior and had doubled down on my band nerd identity—sure, there was the unbearable ridiculousness of marching season, but then concert season started and we all got to sit down like actual musicians and play beautiful, complex music. Ross had had enough and decided to devote his time to soccer and acquiring college academic credits. To our band director’s sour comment that he had his priorities all wrong, he shot back, “No, I think I’ve finally got them right.”
I spent my Friday nights itching and sweating in my blue polyester uniform and toy soldier hat with the twelve-inch feather plume, and Ross, cut from the soccer roster just as the season began, came up with his own solution for how to spend his time by appointing himself the team’s mascot. He assembled a superhero costume with a cape that read “The Guy” and ran up and down the sidelines at soccer games with a giant flag every time our side scored, much to everyone’s delight.
If you’d asked me then what I thought of him, I would have said he wasn’t my type, but the truth was that I didn’t yet have a type. I was awkwardly tall and 1800s pale in the central Texas world of compact, athletic, sun-kissed blondes, and for the vast majority of my high school career, I didn’t date. Ross’s broad shoulders, piercing blue eyes, and explosion of messy brown curls meant that he had what my brother called a “case of terminal girlfriend,” one long, steady, largely unremarkable relationship that lasted most of high school, which meant that he was exempt from the ongoing intrigue of high school coupling, and yet always the not-entirely-ignorant subject of several crushes. He could, and did, flirt with impunity, and for this I decided that he was dangerously full of himself.
My opinion of him remained static through our college years, when I heard that he had again acquired a long-term girlfriend at the small private liberal arts college he attended. She was beautiful, I heard, Iranian and premed, and Ross was learning phrases in Farsi, all of which made me roll my eyes and think, “Of course.” I was muddling my way through a far less focused syllabus of failed relationships at the University of Texas, trying on wildly different versions of myself in the process. By the time I was two years past graduation, underemployed and single once again, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with Ross at my brother’s birthday party. We were all standing outside of a Tex-Mex restaurant in Austin, waiting for a table, when Ross asked me, “So, what’s going on in your life these days?”