My knowledge of popular music is scant, as anyone who looks at my Spotify playlists will realise. As a teenager, I listened mainly to Mix 102.3. There were two programs I liked - Love Song Dedications, because it made me feel hopeful for the future, and Dr. Feelgood, because it made me feel funny in my downstairs area but also educated and prepared. One day, I hoped to have sexual intercourse. I wanted to be ready.
At 15, I thought the person I wanted to eventually end up having said sexual intercourse with was Michael Barton*. We were perfect for each other, and had been since the moment he made me laugh outside Miss Prentice's' English class with offbeat talk about canned asparagus. His was an abstract humour, and it appealed to my deeply held belief that there were certain kinds of humour only an adolescence spent watching British comedies could prepare you for.
![My hopes were high. Like, John Hughes-level high.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170615082728im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/r/k/e/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwrjtr.png/1497493784817.jpg)
Daydreaming became my favourite past time. Daydreaming about Michael Barton on the bus, daydreaming about Michael Barton during Morning House, during recess, after school, at the dinner table (where I visualised clearly the day when he too would sit with my family, laughing and joking over one of our many inside jokes). I stole fervent, desperate glances at him during English, delighted at the days he chose to sit facing in my general direction (YES! Secret signal!) and tormented on those days his angle skewed away.
My best friend Natalie (who was coincidentally also my only friend) and I formed a secret Crush Club, which just meant we hung out together and discussed in endless and minute detail our respective crushes on boys we would ultimately never have (Michael Barton: Distant. Christopher Sanderson: Homosexual).
But still, I dreamt that Michael Barton might one day take me in his arms and kiss me on the lips. As the end of the school term drew closer, I despaired. What was I to do over the long and arduous summer? Natalie was moving to Port Lincoln and all I had was my Wendy's job to keep me in the practice of speaking to people outside of my immediate family. There was only one opportunity for romance left.
Jenny Turner had organised an end-of-year social for all the Year Tens, and the entire grade was in a tizzy about it. It was to take place on the last day of term. In preparation, I spent a good number of class hours envisioning that determiner of all things infinite and life changing - the final dance. I had the bulk of an 80s childhood's worth of research behind me, and I was pinning my hopes on that disco ball daydream in exactly the way John Hughes had taught me to.
I fretted over my outfit. It had to be perfect, which was a difficult feat for someone who owned enough cargo wear to build a tent city. I settled on a short black dress (worldly) with stockings and Doc Martins, plus a brown second hand men's jacket (edgy) and a silk scarf around my neck (for a touch of vintage, Grace Kelly charm). I looked in the mirror.
"Nailed it," I thought approvingly, though I think we can all agree I was wrong.
At school that night, I tentatively entered the small assembly room. It was decorated in brightly drawn posters exclaiming YEAR TEN SOCIAL!!! in bubble writing. There were flashing lights place intermittently around the room, but I tried to avoid those. An old science teacher had once told me that looking straight at burning magnesium for too long would make you blind. Admittedly, this had nothing to do with $12.95 fairy lights from Bunnings but I just made it a rule to be careful around anything which emitted artificial light. As a chronic hypochondriac, I assumed I would lose my sight one day - I just didn't want it to be before Michael Barton and I had shared in the transformative experience of our first water birth.
Natalie and I quickly found each other and, alcohol having not yet found its way into our lives as a social lubricant, made an awkward show of dancing together while our eyes furtively scanned the room for our Great Loves. My eyes quickly locked onto Michael Barton and my tummy immediately responded by sending a fit of butterflies racing through it. His hair was doing that adorable floppy thing that I liked so much, while the colours of his red and black acrylic jumper really highlighted the warm brown of his eyes. He was standing in the 'cool' corner of the room, that curiously delineated scrap of space that seems to become protected by an invisible forcefield the moment someone of social rank steps into it. Michael Barton was not of a particularly high rank, but he did have entrance privileges. He was like a Backstreet Boy, but not Nick. Maybe Howard.
I loved him.
As the evening progressed, Natalie and I went outside to pore over the developments so far. Despite the scarcity of any such thing, we entertained ourselves by scrutinising matters of importance in great depth, like what did their body language mean and how lucky it was that even though neither of them were talking to us, they weren't exactly talking to other girls either. (In Christopher Sanderson's case, this would turn out to be an early clue.)
As we stood there, a boy from my House Group approached to ask what we were talking about. Perhaps I was sick of wallowing in action, but I threw caution to the wind and shared my Very Serious Secret with him. He promised he would take it to the grave, but I suppose by 'grave' he meant to say, 'inside to tell everybody and laugh at you behind your back and then in front of your back.'
I was hit with the full force of this betrayal the moment I re-entered the port-a-cabin that functioned as our sophisticated disco hall. The night was turning out just like a John Hughes movie, but it seemed to be finishing at that scene at the end of the second act where the protagonist realises that life is cruel and teenagers are just massive arseholes. Inside, I could feel everyone's eyes on me, laughing at me, pitying me. I was mortified - this is what people meant when they wished for the ground to open up and swallow them whole.
But then, Michael Barton appeared and stood silent and brooding. He leant against the wall looking at me. This was literally the closest I had ever been to him, and there was a high probability that my excitement was about to render me either irreversibly mute or immaculately pregnant. Dare I hope? I stole a glance, and re-entered the earthly dimension.
Michael Barton was asking me if he could have a word outside.
My moment had come! Romance had not failed me! All the disappointing boy crushes I'd endured in my short (but, I felt, passionate) life had led me to this. I was to be victorious, kissed for the first time at the school dance. JOHN HUGHES WAS RIGHT!
I followed Michael Barton to where he stood outside, he with his foot on a bench and head down, me a little away from him and trying to catch his eye.
I took a deep breath and began. I had to get the wording just right.
"So. Michael." I gulped. "You've probably heard from people inside that....I like you. And well...... [interminably long pause] .....it's true."
Michael Barton listened to my awkward declaration and nodded his head. The air crackled with tension. When he kissed me, would I know what to do? Just as I was preparing to lean forward and close my eyes, he stood up, spun on his heel and walked back inside.
He hadn't looked at me once.
I waited outside, my failure to comprehend the situation moving me to sit cross legged on a picnic table in a state of high drama with my head resting heavily in my hands. I hoped beyond hope that Michael Barton would return and reveal it had all been a dreadful misunderstanding. That he was confused, lost...sensitive. Wasn't that the problem with men? That they just didn't know what they wanted? Weren't they always afraid not of feeling too little, but of feeling too much?
The thought comforted me. Somewhere between feeling sorry for myself and sneaking looks at the door for Michael Barton's possible return, I began to float above my body, watching the depressing scene below. I felt curiously satisfied by my observations, seduced by my own torment in the same way that one gains enjoyment from interrupting a furious and genuine flood of tears to go and watch themselves crying in the mirror.
But when it became apparent that Michael Barton had no plans to rejoin me and declare the strength of his contradictory love and fear, I knew the only thing I could do would be to walk back into that wretched school room with my head held high and dance the final dance by myself with a smile on my face. This I did...and though it was a struggle on a number of levels to dance happily to Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You, smile and dance I did. It wasn't until I was safe in bed that I let the deluge out, replaying over and over in my mind the horrible scene I had just been part of. It seemed to me like I would never find a boyfriend, because in my silly clothes and awkward skin I would just never be good enough for them. Life was so cruel.
Of course, all those boys live in the suburbs now and have cars or motorbikes for a Facebook profile picture. So I guess the point is that even though you might not know how life is going to turn out when you're a 15-year-old dork with a wardrobe full of shiny plastic sacks, at least you probably won't end up married to a wanker. And the older I get, the more I realise that that's pretty much the best thing you can ask for.
John Hughes should make a movie about that.
This is an adapted transcript of a performance piece read for The Full Catastrophe at this year's Sydney Writers Festival.
*Names have been changed