JOHN PAUL BRAMMER I met Rebecca on MySpace. She had a widget on her page that allowed anonymous commenters to share their thoughts, because tweens are nothing if not self-destructive. “You’re an ugly slut,” one commenter wrote. I gallantly responded, “I don’t think you’re ugly. You’re very pretty!”I wasn’t going to be knighted anytime soon, Wasted, but I really did think she was pretty. Rebecca had long brown hair and an apple-cheeked smile, and I liked the way she dressed. Scrolling through her pictures, I noticed she would cycle through punk band shirts and preppy sweaters without fully committing to either aesthetic. I thought this was a bold sartorial vision.One night, while I was fully immersed in my typical routine of playing around on Photoshop on the family desktop computer, I checked my typically lifeless MySpace. I was surprised to see I had a private message from Rebecca. “Hey!” she had written back. “I just wanted to say thank you. That was really sweet of you to say.”I must admit that message got my heart racing. Cliché as it is, it must be said that Rebecca was a cheerleader, and I was like most middle to high schoolers who operated in rote hierarchies beaten to death by movies. That Rebecca would pay me, an ambiguously Latin potato, any attention at all was pretty staggering. “Of course,” I replied. “And hey, I meant it!”I was an incoming high school freshman. At that point, I’d never been in a romantic relationship that… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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