It was the best date I had ever been on and it was with the most beautiful, sweetest, and funniest girl I know. She was perfect, and we had known each other throughout high school. We occasionally hung out because she was friends with a close friend of mine, plus there was the fact that she was two years older than me. Although we didn’t spend that much time together, the few times we did were always memorable. She was one of those girls that was almost always smiling and laughing. She was also super smart, beautiful, and kind of weird but not a bad type of weird, the good kind. The kind that makes you always laugh and makes your heart beat faster. She wasn’t really popular per se, but it did seem as if everyone knew her and liked her. She even became Deputy Head girl and our Valedictorian in her final year of high school.
Brittney really loved music. You would always see her during recess at the back of the library behind a few bookshelves, so that teachers or the librarian didn’t see her because the school had a no-cellphone policy. She would be sitting on a beanbag reading some romance novel with her earphones on, swaying to the music. She did this a lot when she wasn’t hanging out with her friends. It seemed to me that she occasionally ran out of her social batteries and just wanted to be alone.
A few other guys noticed this and tried to talk to her when she was sitting there, but she always ignored them or simply gave them a flat stare with her glasses slightly tilted downwards. This usually worked. As I said before, she was beautiful. She had a slim thick figure, light caramel skin, and cute frizzy hair which she always either kept in an Afro or those afro pigtails. She also had these huge marble-like black eyes that just absorbed you into them.
I was at the library a lot too, but I was usually there to look for new books to read at home. I never read at school; it was a policy of mine because every time I read during school, I would not stop reading. Every time I read, I would get completely absorbed in the world that I was transported to, which would cause people to either trip me, snatch the book from my hands, or do other annoying things to me that they, for some unknown reason, found humorous. My teachers were not fans of me reading too because I would read during class, and when a teacher told me to stop reading, I would devise ingenious ways to read without them noticing. This obviously affected my grades negatively, and after a parent-teacher meeting with me present with my Math’s teacher, Mrs. Schmidt, talking about how distracted I always seemed during her classes because of the books I always read, I made a deal with her and my agitated parents that I would stop reading at school and only read out of school and at home.
So instead of reading at the library, I would spend my time looking for interesting books to read later, mostly sci-fi and fantasy zero-to-hero stories, and hang out with my friends there. The library was our favorite place to hang out because of the aircon since it was almost always hot in East London. We played a lot of board games and obviously talked trash and got into heated debates about the most random things. From comic books, the hottest teachers in school (ranked), physics, and the weirdest sex positions out there. As you can imagine, we would always cause a racket, but since three of us from the group of usually ten were library monitors (corrupt ones, of course), we didn’t get kicked out, but we would occasionally get told by people that weren’t library monitors that we were making noise. Yeah, we usually kicked those guys out or struck a deal with them, usually to allow them to eat in the library as long as they stopped complaining and as long as they did not spill any food. We would try to keep it down a little; that usually worked until they spilled food. Then they would instantly get kicked out because we didn’t want a mess in the library, so we didn’t get in trouble with the librarian after recesses because she would always leave during that time and let us manage the library. But we did try to keep the noise levels down because we would feel sorry for those who were trying to actually work, read, or do some last-minute homework that was for a class that was going to be after recess.
Anyways, as I was saying, Brittney, that’s her name, was always at the library if she wasn’t hanging out with her friends. Which was the other reason we tried to keep the noise levels down, for obvious reasons. As a group, we were really obsessed with chess. It was the one game that we almost always played. Brittney also seemed to like the game. She would occasionally watch us play or play with us, but those moments were rare. When she played with us, she would almost always play with me. The reason being was that I was surprisingly really good at chess, and she always wanted to play against someone challenging.
Like most friendships after high school, we lost touch, mostly because she graduated two years before me and because for some unknown cosmic reason, you always lose touch with most of your friends from high school. She moved and went to Cape Town to study tourism or something like that; I don’t really remember. I moved to PE after graduating high school to go and study IT, specializing in AI development and machine learning at a college, and graduated from that three years later. Unfortunately for me, I graduated in the year 2020. I had to move back home with my parents and younger siblings in my final year. It was tough, and I barely passed in a course that required me to get 80% and higher in order to get my degree. And with two younger twin siblings, a brother and a sister, it was almost impossible, but I somehow managed to get through. So after I graduated in 2020, I decided to move out and look for a job. Unfortunately, since it was 2020, that was basically impossible, but I got lucky and managed to get employed by the Buffalo City Municipality’s IT department after three months of searching because my parents had pressured me to apply there even though I told them that East London was not really big on IT and that it would be almost impossible to get employed by them. But thank God for my parents' ability to consistently pressure me to do things I don’t want to do because I somehow got the job. The best part was that I could work from home. So after I had paid my parents back for the three months of rent and grocery money they had provided me whilst I job searched, I knuckled down and threw myself at my work.
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One day during one of my lunch breaks, I was on Instagram, and Brittney popped up on my suggestions list. I friend-requested her, and she accepted the request 20 minutes later. I looked through IG and saw that she has been doing pretty well for herself since high school. Lots of pictures of her going out with her friends in Jozi, going to lots of parties, and pictures of her visiting murals and vintage-themed areas. She was still very attractive, but it seemed that she had matured a little more since high school. She now seemed to braid her hair a lot with a lot of blonde highlights or a blonde afro that she looked really good in. I then noticed her most recent post, which was of her at a fancy restaurant at the beachfront in East London. She also posted in one of her stories that she was getting nostalgic vibes from her new apartment, and I could kinda see East London beachfront. Oh snap, does that mean she lives in or near Quigney? Yeah, most definitely if you can see the beach from her balcony. Let me zoom in to see if I can spot a clue telling me whether she lives near my apartment or not.
“Who you stalking, weirdo?”
“Shit, Iz, don’t sneak up on me like that; you know my heart can barely take it.” I respond to Isabel as I simultaneously shut off my phone and turn to face her.
“No, no, don’t try to hide it. I wanna see too. She looked hot. Who is she?” She says as she plops down on her chair, which is next to mine, her blonde hair puffing up, covering her face slightly.
“Crap, I was hoping I distracted you there.” I say as I unlock my phone using the fingerprint scanner.
“Come on now, I’m not the one who never knows what day or time it is.” She says as she moves her hair out of her face and takes a bite out of her warmed-up lunch, which seems to be a piece of steak and veggies, probably last night's leftovers. Smells good.
“It’s an old friend of mine from high school. We hung out quite a lot back then, but after high school, she moved to go study in Cape Town, and I went off to PE. We just lost touch after some time went by.” I say as I slide my phone towards her side on the shared desk, which was the length of the room, so it fit three people's workspaces comfortably with additional space for a fourth person if need be. Izzy’s workspace was next to mine on my left. We started working here around the same time, and over time we’ve gotten pretty close, not just as work friends but as actual friends. Which was surprising because we are complete opposites and barely have anything in common, plus we fight and bicker pretty much constantly. Our bickering is so bad that our supervisor, who sits on the other side of the desk, says that we argue like siblings who have grown up together even though we’ve known each other for a few months. Izzy was wearing blue jeans with the ankles rolled so you could see her pink socks, white sneakers with sunflowers on the sides, a fluffy white jacket that complemented her pale skin, and a bright yellow beanie with thiiiiick glasses, like double-lens magnifying glass type of thick. As she looks over her lunch box to my phone on the desk, I turn to my workspace and reach into my lunch box and take out a banana (which was honestly the last thing left in my fridge. Today is the second last day of the month and Friday, so we’re getting paid today. The money will only reflect later tonight, hopefully around six).
“Ooh, she is really pretty.” Izzy says as she gives me a comically inquisitive look. Instinctively, I know she is asking if I ever dated Brittney or if there was ever anything between us. I respond with a mouthful of banana, so I cover my mouth as I speak.
“Nah, nothing ever happened, but I did have a little bit of a thing for her in our Matric year, but it faded quickly, and I lost interest.”
“Sounds to me like you were too chicken to ask her out because she is clearly out of your league.” Izzy says just before eating a piece of broccoli.
“Okay, first of all, I wasn’t chicken. I lost interest. Second of all, she is not out of my…”
“She is.” Izzy says, interrupting me whilst scrolling through Brittney’s Insta page on my phone.
“Even if she was hypothetically out of my league, this is me we’re talking about. Of course, I could get her if I actually tried to hit on her.” I say with a cocky expression, even though I know Izzy is totally right. I was too scared to ask Brittney out because I was super shy and barely had any confidence because my self-image was so bad back then. Izzy and I both know this, but I’m never actually gonna admit it out loud. Izzy rolls her eyes and says:
“Whatever, Zohan. Why are you cyber-stalking her during work hours? I assumed you did this kind of thing at home with the curtains and doors closed with a tub of Vaseline and tissues next to you.” Izzy says with a straight face as she waits for me to process what she just said. Embarrassingly, it takes me a few seconds before I get it, and I respond.
“What the fuck, that’s gross.” I say whilst we both bust out laughing. After a solid minute of laughing, we both carry on eating our lunches whilst occasionally snickering. Some time passes, and I’m almost finished with my banana, and I carry on with the conversation.
“I was going through her Instagram because she recently started following me, and she’s liked a bunch of my old posts.”
“That’s a good sign. She might like you.” Izzy says with a look that just screams ‘you should ask her out’.
“I don’t know. Maybe one day. But I did talk to her just before you came from the kitchen, and we agreed to meet up later on tonight with a few friends from our old group in high school, so I’ll see her then.”
“Okay, look at you, Mr. Confident.” Izzy says as I perform a smug shrug. Just then, our supervisor/Head of Studio & Development walks up the stairs to the open office space where we all work. He quickly spots me as I throw away my banana peel and blurts out:
“Well, well, well, like a moth to a flame.” He says in an Uncle Ruckus impression (which is pretty good, by the way) whilst heading over to his workspace and sits down at his desk (T’s workspace is on my right side on the super long desk). All three of of burst out in laughter after that comment, and after a few moments we compose ourselves, Iz and I going back to our previous conversation.
“Yeah, I’ll get to catch up with her and see if anything happens.”
“So you have a plan?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Have you guys finished with that update on Spurs website? Remember it’s due in a few days?”
“Still working on it. Still got a few minutes on our lunch break.” I reply, but knowing T, that was just a friendly reminder to get back to work even though our break wasn’t over. It was only 2 minutes left anyways, and we took our breaks 5 minutes early. So we both turn around and get back to work.