The other girls wanted to go on a little longer, but I couldn’t bear it, the shy looks he was darting at me across the classroom, the air of suppressed glee from my other friends, the fact that he was “so excited about this.” So, one empty classroom, one boy asking me if I wanted to go out or something sometime, and me, feeling like the biggest asshole I’d ever felt in my whole life, saying what we’d rehearsed, “Oh no, I don’t like you, this was just a thing we did.” He recovered nicely, “Oh ha ha,” he said, and sped out of there and I was left, thinking about what I’d done.

Until finally came the day we’d been planning for-he would enter an empty classroom and ask me out and I would say, “Oops, no, changed my mind” or something similar. That’s what his friend told me, the girl we didn’t let into the prank. The boy got really excited that someone finally liked him, even if he hadn’t thought of me “in that way” before, suddenly, he was all in. You can guess how this ends, right? The other girls did some build up-I was told all I had to do was nod and smile, maybe blush to confirm, which I did. Really, I think they were afraid that she would tell them they (we) were being bullies and would put a stop to the whole thing. This brought us together, an us-against-the-world adventure! I was still cool! I still had friends! I was told not to tell one other girl in our class, also a friend, but who was close to this boy. It was sort of nice being conspiratorial with these girls, they’d been my friends for a while, but recently, I’d been feeling like they were slipping away, somehow.

So, persuaded that it would be a Very Funny Thing to do, I gave in.

A horse walks into a bar