(continued)

My friend's house was right there, so I rang the doorbell but nobody answered. As was often our custom, I went around the back. The porch was open, indicating that my friend was home. I went in and knocked on his closed bedroom door. I heard some muffled noises from the bedroom, some feminine voices. Eventually he came out with a very strange look on his face.

"Hey, I just wanted to see if you wanted to go to the park-" I began.

"Leeeeave," he said slowly in a tone of voice I had never heard before. I couldn't tell if he was being ironic or serious, since he was rarely serious. "Nowwww."

"...What?"

"Leeeave," he repeated in the same drawl. "Now."

"What is going on? What are you-"

"Leave," he said with a meaningful look on his face, so I let myself out the front door and went to the park thoughtfully.

I went to his house later that evening. He had the look of a changed man. His eyes were wide and he spoke dramatically as he explained why he had kicked me out of his house. The two girls, my crush and her friend, had come over, wanting to practice, he said. Wanting to practice how to give a blow job. They blew him. He said it was the most amazing thing he had ever felt.

I didn't believe him. This was a guy who you could not take at face value, and I didn't want to believe my crush was capable of such a thing. I knew that sexual experimentation was popular at this age, but I couldn't believe it. Sensing that he might be fishing for a response, I simply feigned apathy and pretended to believe him without shock. The most I did was express doubts at his claim that it was better than sex (neither of us had even had sex, of course).

We dropped the subject and it never came up again. We spent our days playing video games and going to the park, but slowly drifted apart as our friends changed. I stopped semi-stalking my crush, and never talked to her again. Whether my friend's unlikely story was true or not, and I was leaning toward not (or exaggerated), I somehow felt disillusioned. I often wondered to myself alone at night, was his story really true? Did my crush really give my best friend a blow job? Even through high school, after I had moved far away, I would still sometimes ponder this question.

Years later, in my senior year of high school, I got a clue into what might have really happened that day. I found him on Facebook and learned that he is now openly gay. I realized that it's possible that when we looked at porn together or talked about sex, he was actually getting excited because of me, not the girls. He was a smart guy, and had most likely realized that I had a crush on this girl, even though I tried to keep it secret. It is very possible he told me the story to get a rise out of me, or even as a precursor to blowing each other.

Whatever the truth is, I'll never know why those two girls went to his room that day, or what occurred after I left. I've moved on, and now have a wonderful girlfriend that's just as pretty and far better in personality than my old crush. Yet even after all these years, her facebook profile picture still holds a little bit of that sense of betrayal and unrequited love I once felt.