If You Want To Laugh At High School Jakob and I... This Is For You

I was a sophomore and Jakob was a senior in high school at the same small Catholic high school. My best friend was also a senior. Her and I had a bad habit of drinking in the woods behind my house in the middle of the day. (By bad habit I mean we did it like 3 times lol) One time when we were heading out, with my giant bag full of Four Lokos, my mom was on the phone and said to whoever she was talking to, "There go Daisy and Sophie, heading to the woods. They think I don't know what they're doing out there." I've always wondered if she actually knew we were drinking or thought we were doing something else. At the time I assumed she knew we were drinking. It's not like we got trashed, we'd end up splitting a four loko but only drinking like half and putting the rest on the top of my closet for next time. (The only thing more cringy than a Four Loko is a Four Loko that's been open sitting on the top of someone’s closet.)

The one day, August 5 right before school started for the year, Daisy wanted to invite Jakob, whom she'd been friends with for years. I knew of him, from seeing him around school, but we'd only exchanged words once. The year prior Daisy had told me that he thought a girl in my grade was hot. I was in Daisy’s hallway (Junior hallway) with her one day while she was talking to Jakob when the girl walked by. I looked at her then looked back and Jakob and screamed, "You think SHE'S hot!?" From that point on he decided I was the most annoying girl on the planet and on more than one occasion told Daisy so. I was surprised he said yes to hainging out with us, because I knew his opinion on me, and wasn't necessarily looking forward to hanging out with him anyway. We started to talk about him, before he got there of course, and I said, "Jakob is so fat and ugly who would ever want to date him." Lol. (Disclaimer: Jakob wasn't actually fat at this time, or ugly for that matter, but he had been years prior before he'd lost weight and so I still pictured him in my mind like that because again, I never really paid attention to the guy.)

When Jakob got there, he texted us and Daisy sent me to go get him. I'm not sure why she didn't go. I headed off away from my house towards the school parking lot on the other side of the woods. When I got there, I don't even remember what about but immediately I started yammering on. The first thing he said was, "You're drunk aren't you." I remember explaining I wasn't drunk, but I definitely wasn’t sober. Over the course of the afternoon, Jakob and I flirted. A lot.

Like intense, very obvious, I'm sure made Daisy uncomfortable, flirted. Regardless of the flirting, I never expected it to go anywhere because he had told Daisy and I that he would not be dating anyone before bootcamp the following year because he didn’t want to get “Dear John’d.” I want to say Daisy and I had to leave because we had volleyball practice, but I'd like to think we didn’t drink before volleyball. Who knows though? Regardless, Daisy and I headed back to my house and Jakob headed back to his car. The picture is from that day. Charming, I know. I thought I was cool.

Later that night, Daisy put Jakob and I in a group chat to send us pictures from the day. I spent more time than I care to admit trying to come up with an excuse to text Jakob outside of the group chat. I came up with sending him one of the pictures from the chat and to inform him he looked like a guy in my grade. He disputed it, but it worked, and we texted the rest of the night. At the end of the night Jakob asked me, "Hey this might be weird, but do you want to hang out again tomorrow?" I said sure, trying not to let onto how excited I was, and we agreed on a time to meet in the woods again.

I was taking a summer class at the time called Computer Applications. The next day I packed up my laptop, told my mom I was heading to the woods to work on Computer Applications, and left. Only now do I realize how suspicious that was.

I don't remember exactly how long Jakob and I were hanging out, but only an hour or so, when my mom called. I answered the phone call to find it was actually my younger sister by 20 months. She told me mom was leaving to go get her nails done. I don't know what I said or how I said it but her second sentence was, "You sound too happy to be doing homework... there's a boy there isn't there!" Now, this would seem really far-fetched, except for the fact that this was at least the second boy that I was found to be hanging in the woods with. I tried to deny it, but she put my mom on the phone and my mom knew better. She told me my two options were to tell him he needed to leave or bring him home while she was gone so my sister could keep an eye on us.

When I gave Jakob his options, I was incredibly surprised he said he'd come home with me. When we got back to my house, I introduced my mom and sister and my mom left. My sister sat in the sunroom with us for a while, but then got bored. She set up her iPod touch to record us and went downstairs. Immediately upon leaving I got up and turned the iPod off of course. A little while later Alexis returned and asked why it stopped recording. I told her it probably stops recording after a while and was able to convince us we weren’t going to do anything bad considering 1. We’d just met 2. We were in the sunroom of my house, with windows on every wall, and 3. my step-brother was in the room beside us. It took her about 5 minutes to leave, watch the video, and return yelling at me for turning it off.

A little while later my step-brother came out and sat with us. He was in college at the time but home for the summer. At some point while we were talking, he looked under the table then back up. I asked what he was looking at. He said he was checking to make sure I was wearing pants since his friend’s dad was coming over. I don’t know if I was more embarrassed or just incredulous that he thought I wouldn’t be wearing pants in the sunroom with a boy the first time we met AND WITH HIM IN THE ROOM as well.

Later in the afternoon Jakob told me he was hungry, and I said I could make him a chicken patty from the freezer. Microwaving frozen food was about as close as I got to cooking. I warmed it up in the microwave, slapped it on some bun, and handed it to him. He picked it up to eat it, made a face and set it down. He pointed at a spot on the bun and said, “Uhm... is this mold?...” Sure enough, it was. I don’t remember how soon after this Jakob left, but I didn’t have high hopes we’d hang out again.

A couple days later Daisy and I made plans to hang out. I want to say it was a Saturday because my dad was planning on going to mass and I was going to miss mass by hanging out with Daisy but assured my dad Daisy and I would go to mass. Spoiler alert: we didn’t. My dad didn’t want me to go with Daisy because Alexis had already told him about the boy and he told me, “You’re going to hang out with him and then you’re going to want to date him but won’t be allowed because he’s too old.” I assured him there was no way Jakob would ever like me back even if I did like him. Little did I know…. This picture is from that day.

At the time, Daisy smoked cigarettes sometimes, but she’d left her pack with me because she didn’t want her dad to find it. When I’d hung out with Jakob alone, I’d had him put the pack in his car. When Jakob picked Daisy and I up, Jakob pulled the pack out of his middle console and gave them to Daisy. We’d decided not to tell Daisy we’d hung out without her because we thought she might be upset, but that was a dead giveaway. She said, “Why would I care if my two best friends hung out?” But I don’t think she realized where this was going.

We ended up going to Mount Jeez, a scenic overlook outside of town. Jakob was helping me balance on top of one of the posts that held up the wire to keep you from driving into the grass. I’m not sure of the exact way it happened but I ended up jumping down and immediately upon my feet hitting the ground Jakob and I were kissing.

Like a week later I was at this thing called “Art in the Park.” My nieces had spent all summer going to the park once a week to do artwork and this night all the artwork was being displayed. I was texting Jakob and asked him to come. He was going to come but couldn’t figure out what park it was (this is Mansfield. It wasn’t that big of a town I feel like he didn’t really put in much effort), so I ended up inviting another guy I was sort of talking to. That guy came and we ended up kissing. I went through a wild phase except my wild phase was just kissing people I never slept with anyone. At the end of the night, I ended up telling Jakob this guy had come to the park. He was not happy. He informed me that we were talking, and I wasn’t supposed to be hanging out with other guys. This was news to me; we’d literally met a week earlier. I told him I wasn’t ready to commit we barely knew each other I thought it was too soon to be anything exclusive and I wanted to get to know both guys to decide what I wanted. Well, that wasn’t flying with him, so I ended up cutting the other guy off.

We continued to hang out for a few weeks but never really labeled it anything. The photos here are the first photos Jakob and I ever took together, about a month after we'd met. I wanted to post one on instagram and he felt the first one we were too close in it so he made me retake it and post the second one. After a few weeks he decided that my sister was too “up my butt” and so we needed to just be friends. Even though we were ‘just friends’ we were still texting all the time. Since he said he wanted to just be friends, a couple weeks later I decided to hang out with another guy. I didn’t really like the guy, but he was super into me, so I decided to go on a date with him. We went out to eat with my family at Apple Bees, then him and I went to Walmart and walked around where he bought me a stuffed animal. We finished off the night hanging out in the Walmart parking lot sitting on his tailgate just talking before he took me home.

The next day Jakob and I decided to hang out. "As friends.” Alexis, my sister, Jakob, and I all went on a walk and Alexis decided to bring the stuffed animal the guy had gotten me the night before. She then proceeded to inform Jakob that I’d gotten said stuffed animal on a date with the guy the night prior. After Alexis left, he informed me I should have known that we were more than just friends since we’d been texting every day and it wasn’t okay I went on a date with another guy. I told him, first off, I wasn’t even into the guy, and second off how was I to know he wanted to be more than friends again if he didn’t tell me.

We were back to officially talking when a few weeks later Jakob, again, decided he just wanted to be friends. I don’t even remember the reasoning this time. I ended up getting back in touch with this guy I’d gone to church camp with. (Surprise, surprise, we’d kissed at church camp.) I had messaged him and said something about wanting to kiss him again. This friend of Alexis’ dad owned a funeral parlor and was doing a haunted house for his daughter and her friends, including Alexis. He asked me to be one of the scarers and I got Jakob to do it with me. While there Jakob ended up reading my messages. He was, again, not happy and informed me I should have known since we’d been texting every day we were talking again. I said the same thing as last time, how was I supposed to know. Even though he was mad, I was able to get him to chill and we were once again “officially talking”

At this point I started trying to get Jakob to officially ask me out and call me his girlfriend. In actuality, we were doing everything a couple does just not calling it “dating.” He was not on board. He would just dodge the question and say not yet. The one day we were hanging out after school in his car in my driveway. He had to leave to go to tutor someone for the ASVAB, a test you must pass to get into the Marines. I went to get out of the car and “bye, love you” came out. I immediately covered my mouth and turned red. He pulled me in and kissed me. In the middle of the kiss, he said “I love you too.” After we kissed, I said, “Do you really love me?” and this man said, “Well… I don’t love you yet, but I can feel myself having love for you.” That was good enough for me. I believe this happened in October, so two months in. Around Halloween I remember asking Jakob if he knew what I wanted to be for Halloween. He said, “My slut?” That was definitely not what I was going for, I was going for girlfriend. That didn’t happen though.

In November Jakob asked me to go to homecoming with him by writing “Homecoming?” in a Chinese take-out box, our favorite. I remember him saying to me, “my prom-posal will be better” and my mind screaming, “Jakob thinks we’ll still be together in April!?” All the second half of November I had been hinting at him that he should ask me to be his girlfriend on December 5, since that would be exactly 4 months since we’d started talking. (We’d been essentially texting every day since we hung out with Daisy that first time. The 5th came and went and nothing. The 6th was homecoming.

We went together and afterwards when we got in the car to head to his house to hang out Jakob said, “If I make it out of this parking lot in 6 seconds you have to be my girlfriend.” He threw it in gear and zoomed out while I counted. He made it. Later that night, when he was driving me home and we were listening to music he reached over and grabbed my hand. Normally, we’d say, "I like you a lot," but this time he accidentally said, “I love you.” I turned to him and said, “What did you say?” He said, "I like you a lot" and I looked back straight, disappointed. A few seconds later he said, “Do you want to know what I actually said?” Of course, I did, and he said, “I love you.” I told him I loved him too. So both our first times saying I love you was an accident, which I think is really cool.

Jakob and I spent New Year's together that year. That night Jakob asked me if after I graduated high school, I’d marry him and move in on base with him. This man went from finally agreeing to officially date me and telling me he loved me in the same day to asking me to marry him as soon as I graduated high school in one month.

We finished out the school year strong and the prom-posal was even better than the homecoming one. He laid out a bunch of candles in shape of "Prom?" August 6th we celebrated our first anniversary with me giving Jakob a photo album of every photo we'd taken that year and him giving me a promise ring. We've always considered August 6 our anniversary since that’s the first day we hung out and when we started talking every day and liking each other, even though Jakob was on some BS and didn’t officially ask me out for four months. A month later, in September, Jakob left for bootcamp. Sometime soon I’ll tell you about the long-distance season of our life that followed, which lasted the next 5 years.