Hiding In Plain Sight

I fell in love with a girl the summer after my freshman year of college. It was six months after my dad decided to move the family back to Texas after nearly a decade of growing roots in Atlanta, GA, and even though I was at Baylor University I just wasn't ready to give up on the Jewel of the South quite yet.

Through the magic of AIM I kept in touch with my best friend Nick's older brother Michael who had worked at a day camp the summer before and knew they were hiring. Sensing an opportunity for one last goodbye to the city where I grew up, I asked him to recommend me for the job of day camp counselor- a position fraught with responsibility and even danger. More liability than danger, perhaps, considering there was a low ropes course and climbing wall involved, not to mention the zip line.

Since my family no longer lived in our beautiful green house with the white trim and front porch I imagined I would bring dates home to my senior year if I have been confident enough to ask girls to come over, I was fortunate enough to live rent free at the home of some family friends. The Schneiders went to our church and their kids went to the private school I graduated from in the class of '01.

Their older son was away for the summer doing an internship or some such thing that people do after their sophmore year at Harvard. He was the member of the family I was closest to, since he was just a year older than me and friends with my brother Ben. I also pretty much idolized him because he was everything I wasn't in high school. If Zach Morris was real and half Korean, then he would be Johann Schneider. Which I suppose made me Screech.

But as I said, Johann wasn't home this summer, which meant I spent the majority of my non-working hours playing video games with his little brother Justin who was still in junior high and already well on his way to being cooler than I could ever hope to be. He's at Notre Dame now on a track scholarship. I ran a half marathon this year and was beaten by my friend Bryan who was wearing nothing but longjohns.

The rest of my time was spent becoming acquainted with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I previously thought was lame and later discovered was one of the best written shows in history, and avoiding Shiloh, Justin's older sister who was killing time before going off to surf camp in California. Shiloh was like something out of a Beverly Cleary novel in terms of annoying bratty sister-ishness. She had a pet turtle and a pet bird and her favorite band was Blink-182, and she could have taught a clinic on classic middle child attention seeking behavior.

And of course I completely fell for her. I remember the exact moment it happened. My brother Ben proposed to his girlfriend that summer, and it was during this time period that the computer game The Sims was at the height of its popularity. This made for a perfect excuse for me to get hooked on Justin's copy of the game; here was an opportunity to simulate my brother's potential married life. It was during one of these sessions of turning my future sister-in-law into a professional cat-burglar that Shiloh bounded down the stairs and I realized deep down to my core that I would be married to her someday.

It would be a lie to say that the scene is perfectly clear in my mind. I can't say that she was wearing a t-shirt of a rock band I never heard of or that I said something witty and she laughed. All I can remember is that she came down the stairs and her dark hair whipped around because she turned the corner so quickly and she changed my life forever.

That was seven years ago. It took me three and a half of those years to get out of college, one year to save up to get to New York, two years to decide that I wasn't supposed to be there, and one year back in Texas to save up for LA. Shiloh went to USC, got a boyfriend who could've married her if he hadn't been too scared to ask, broke up with him before going on a yearlong worldwide mission trip, and picked up a new boyfriend along the way. He lives in San Diego and she is moving there to be closer to him.

I know all this because I've kept up with her, off and on, ever since that summer. We even met up a few times since then; once when I went to LA for work and another time when she lived in NYC for a summer. Every time we talk she makes jokes about how we will get married someday, never meaning it and never noticing that she is shooting flaming arrows at my heart.

She invited me to come visit her in Atlanta. She's been living with her parents in that same house ever since she got back from her trip three months ago, and I think she only invited me out of boredom. Still, I'm going. With no expectations save a grain of hope that she will see me taking a sharp turn on that basement landing and feel for just one second what I felt seven years ago when she stepped into the deepest part of my soul just by walking into the room, I'm jumping in my car and driving eight hundred miles to have my heart broken at Christmastime. I'm bringing her a present, too. A book by Donald Miller. It can keep her company on the long drive to San Diego.