cringe along with me, if you please

For a few years in a row when I was in high school, my family went to a resort on St. John for winter break. One year, when I was sixteen, I became smitten with a guy named Roger who was on vacation there with his family. He was tall and handsome and in law school and I didn't have the nerve to talk to him; at that age, I didn't have the nerve to talk to anybody, really.

On New Year's Eve, there was free alcohol all over the place, and because the resort was contained enough, and because I never did anything impulsive or dangerous the way teenagers are supposed to, my parents trusted me to go have fun and stay out till I felt like coming home.

On that New Year's Eve, I drank lots of champagne, and so did Roger, and before I knew it we were making out on the beach, and then, because I was even more smitten after the kissing, I suggested we go for a swim, hoping he would realize that a spirited girl who could make such a suggestion--just totally off the cuff!--was surely a girl worth keeping.

He stripped down to his boxers and dove into the dark waves. As I watched him, I became suddenly stone cold sober, realizing that underneath my fetching, flowery, off-the-shoulder New Year's Eve dress, I was wearing really giant underpants.

Paralyzed, I yelled to him that I was too cold to swim, and after a bit he came out. We kissed good night and walked our separate paths back to our rooms, and I left with my family the next morning.

But the shame and embarrassment of that night didn't stop me from becoming still more smitten with Roger, whose address I got, when we returned home, from my parents, who had grown friendly with his parents over the course of the vacation, and to whom I wrote a letter professing my undying love for him.

Instead of blowing me off for the lunatic child that I was, he actually wrote back. I think I had some sense even then that this gesture was gracious beyond measure, even though all the letter did was dis me.

My mom visited last week and brought with her a manila envelope full of random things I had saved from that period of my life--postcards and photographs and matchbooks, and also the letter from Roger.

Part of it says this:

I thought I should write you. I won't even frame this as a response to your icky January note. You must have long since concluded that my silence was the only response you could expect.

I can't say I actually blocked out the Roger episode from my memory, but I also haven't thought about it in the intervening nearly 25 years either. I'm really glad I saved his note and have had a chance to review it now and allow all the painful details to come back to me with such clarity. I was starting to get just a wee bit full of myself, and it's helped knock me back down to size.