Wow, he thought, smitten.
The next few months weren't a big help, either. Levvy thought about talking to her, drunkenly made out with one of her friends at a party (he regretted it later), and generally hid himself from her whenever possible.
And yet, she was everywhere. At the next table in the cafeteria. Meeting him in the hallways between classes. Running into him at the sound of the tardy bell. He almost knocked her down once, shoving past her locker at 10:32 as usual. But she was early, he thought, and he had no time to follow her to class-- just enough to tumble into his room three seconds on time.
Every time he met her, she was always looking at him. He tried to understand why neither her eyes nor face ever said anything other than, "I’m watching you." She didn’t smile much; her frown and anger were just fleeting, he discovered. Levvy only dared look for a few seconds, then looked away.
The girl was animated around her own friends. Once, she and her group sat drawing a poster for a random class which he was visiting; she was in particular witty form, and had just made a lovely remark, terribly funny. Levvy laughed, but not too loudly. Hey, he wasn’t listening or anything. It’s not as though every line she spoke was a drop of heady wine in his bloodstream, or as though he thought he would die if the next word were addressed to him. He was barely there, but she could find him if she really wanted to.
When she focused her now-shining eyes upon his face, he smiled. He was almost ready to talk to her. But just then, he was called to do his duty as a cameraman. That’s why he was there, he remembered. He was visiting the class to be a cameraman, to tape the actions, to record the lives, to observe, to remember, to forget . . . .
Levvy propped the heavy, unwieldy hunk of technology up on his shoulder. He thought the girl must think he looked so stupid, here with a camera up on his shoulder, taping some stupid segment for the school news channel. Blah, blah, blah. His director kept yelling at him for no good reasons, and the camera wasn’t cooperating.
Finally the director gave up and gave the order to head back to the video journalism room. Levvy leaned back against a table to fix the camera. As he tinkered with he buttons and tape, he casually observed the girl, right in his line of vision, a little to the distance. Click! The camera seemed to be working now, and Levvy pushed himself away from the table.
At the door, he turned the camera on. He panned the room, letting the lens rest on the girl’s still form for over half a minute. The girl, perhaps sensing she was being watched, looked up.
Levvy didn’t quite know what happened next. The whole scene reminded him of his dad, catching a rabbit in the headlights, and the father being unable to swerve, all out of a sense of magnetivity. It was so weird and powerful--they pulled at each other’s awareness and had to look--it had to last a few moments more. He watched her through the camera, slowly letting it drop to reveal his head. She gazed at him levelly; finally she propped up her chin with an unlaboring hand. He mustered a half-smile and broke away, going down the hall.
Levvy wasn’t sure what exactly happened in there, but he seemed to run into her less and less. Before long, the school year was almost over, and he hadn’t seen her for two weeks.
His sister and he attended the graduation ceremonies. The speeches, the heat, the lengthy spectacle of hushed and harried graduates, all added to his sense of end, natural, disastrous, necessary, and relieving. Levvy would be glad to be rid of his crush, but sad, too, and cold and lonely.
He glimpsed her as she was walking with her family to the car. She had a bundle of red roses--she might smell like them by now, he mused--and her eyes were bright with tears. She whirled around as she was just a short distance away and found Levvy again. Was a smile befitting? She almost wore one, though sadness pervaded.
Levvy had a short fantastic episode. In it, she lightly ran across the parking lot and handed him the freshest rose. "We could have been such great friends," she would say, right before she kissed him. He would prick a finger with a thorn, and the pain would be sweet.
But she just walked away, out of his life, except for in yearbooks and for in his mind. Though she hadn’t said it, she had; they could have been such great friends, if only they’d tried. And Levvy remembers when he observed her through the camera lens. He remembered. He almost forgot . . .
He forgot to remember to forget. And he never forgave himself for that.