Brandon Cole #1141

I can remember nearly every single girl Brandon Cole dated.
I met him when I was 13 years old, and a few months away from my freshman year in high school.
“This is Brandon! He’s going to be a junior at Overbrook next year.”
“Hi. Brandon.”
We looked at each other across my parents’ living room. He was older than me, and at the time, that scared me.
And excited me.
Of course.
I remember wanting to rip the kitten off of the white fitted tee I was wearing with rigor. I wore white tees a lot back then. They all had something different on them, but I thought the white made my skin look darker. I was very pale.
“Nice to meet you.” Brandon stepped forward and shook my hand warmly. It was the first of many times I would see him do it. “So you’ve done pretty well at speech and debate, huh?”
Our parents went off into the dining room to discuss wood paneling and wall paper.
“I think so. I won first place at every meet I’ve been to.”
Brandon chuckled a little bit and crossed his arms.
“High school speech isn’t like that. They're tournaments, not meets. They last all day, and only one person at the whole contest wins first place over all. Middle school speech meets are totally different.”
“Oh.” Crush my dreams, why don’t ya.
“Yeah. And you have to watch out for Mrs. Barnes. She really knows what she’s talking about, but she’s not exactly the warmest person when you first meet her.”
“Thanks for the advice.”

Telling me I was out of my league might have been a dick move on his part, but I didn’t care. I was already into him. Albeit mildly, and from a distance. Never once did I consider he might actually like me.
I don’t think he ever did. Maybe I scared him.

I dated his best friend, who did like me. Russ went to Brickmore High. Brandon and my mutual like for Russ, along with our parents’ friendship, kept us in touch and a sibling-like understanding stood between us. I respected Brandon for qualifying for Nationals with top in the state debate ranks, and I liked being invited to sit with him and Russ, and other Nationally recognized debaters. I liked being near him. He exuded confidence that in some way, I knew he didn’t really have. Debaters are always good at lying.

Heather Almeda: Brandon dated her his junior year. She had an identical twin sister, and I never quite understood how he could tell them apart, or why he liked one over the other. They split up because Brandon was too eager to please. I made a face when I heard, because Heather wasn’t great looking anyway.

Sarah Starnes: He dated her for almost a year. She looked just like me. Long dark hair, big poofy bangs. She was more light and ditzy sounding than me, though. She was outgoing. I wondered if I just didn’t have the personality to keep up with Brandon. I wondered if he wanted a sunshine-smiling, Laura Bush-esque girl. After enjoying some success competing with two more mad-man type speech performances my freshman and sophomore years, I was not sunshine-smiling.

Brielle Heffinger: Also looked like me. She was short, with long thick dark hair. Her eyes were large and pretty. She had a distinct look to her nose and face shape that was shared by her entire family. They all looked like little European hand puppets, and they could perform like them, too. They loved theater, and they loved Brandon. Brielle and Brandon broke up some time after Brandon went to college. I was still dating Russ.

Brandon took up multiple clubs and organizations in college. He had a serious ambition to be President some day, and joined the Young Republicans. He created a new social club on campus. He became active in a Human Rights organization. All of this he did from his college campus at Lavery. Lavery College just happened to be the same private Christian establishment I went to straight from high school.
Our next few meetings went like this:
“Hey!”
“Hi.”
“It’s so good to see you!”
“Yeah.”
“I’m just so busy with everything, Young Republicans, you know, I never get to see you. And you’re here, aren’t you! Don’t you love it!?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I gotta go.” His phone would ring, and he would pick it up while walking away, never looking back at me.

Carly Lewis: She was the same age as me. She lived on the same hallway as me at Lavery. She was a die hard, conservative Republican. Her father was a local Republican politician. In the required class, “Matrimony and Christian Family Values” Carly had called anyone who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate a person who wanted babies to die. She was thinking of abortion. Carly had chunky legs and a round happy face that was usually smiling beneath her strawberry blonde hair. She even smiled while making the assertion about baby killers. She was always so cheery. Brandon had found his Laura Bush. And he married her.

I didn’t go to the wedding. I don’t know if I was still sore about Lavery, or whether I was somehow disappointed that Carly Lewis was getting married at 21 in a totally acceptable ceremony with parents and a church full of guests who were all happy for her.
Maybe it was because Russ didn’t come to the wedding either. He had moved out of state. Though we had dated for a near solid four years, we had grown apart. I had grown into myself, or whoever I was then. Russ had grown into himself too. And he had grown hundreds of miles away.

Sometimes when I think about Brandon Cole, I feel alone. Brandon grew into himself while loving Lavery, and he turned it into an identity for himself. I freaking hated it, and I’m still trying to make my own identity. In high school I felt like Brandon was so much like me we could have been siblings. In college though, he went the way I couldn’t go. My pride and my somewhat arrogant disgust for all things definitively conservative kept me from embracing some person I could have been.
But I’m not Carly Lewis.
I’m not a Republican.
I’m not a baby killer.
I’m not branded by that place and that persona I refused to try on.
I’m not married because I want to live my own life, not someone else’s. And I think that if I had ever dated Brandon Cole I would have found out that we did too have something in common. He was damn good at lying about being happy.
I guess I’m just not as eager to let someone tell me what happy feels like.
I want to really feel it.