“I don’t appreciate what you said about my friends today.”

The voice on the other end of the receiver was terse, borderline hostile. And it was a girl! Someone I knew from school.

“Your friends are both bitches!”

My mind was reeling. What did I say about your friends? What happened today? I couldn’t remember a thing. So, I did the only thing I knew to do. I started backpedaling just as fast as possible, apologizing for anything. Everything. No matter how small it might be.

“Oh wow,” I said, stalling. “You know, I’m really sorry about that.” And I was, too. Even though I couldn’t remember what I said about Marcelle’s friends. This telephone call, this accidental, furious phone call? I had to turn it around. Quick.

It was spring 1987, my sophomore year at Valleyview Christian High School. Our school sat atop a hill in Dublin, California, overlooking I-580. The school was isolated and expensive. The kind of place where most kids’ clothes and lifestyles announced their families’ wealth without trying. Dad had negotiated with the principal to keep my brother James and me enrolled.

To say I was a social outcast would be an understatement. I didn’t play sports. I worked on the yearbook instead, shooting with my dad’s Canon AE-1. Dad had multiple lenses and three bodies. I had 30+ rolls of ISO-200 black-and-white film, a zoom lens, a macro-lens, and a telephoto lens that captured some of the best candids of kids coming out of our makeshift cafeteria, a.k.a., the fireside room. My candid shots were never blurry, unlike the auto-focus, auto-everything cameras carried by the rest of the yearbook staff. At home, my biological mother, Beverly, emotionally beat me up, telling me how worthless I was. At school, kids who called themselves my friends heaped on more of the same. By the time I got home each afternoon, I was threadbare, emotionally speaking.

The thing is, Marcelle Wade? She was the one girl I actually wanted to talk to. She was kind when others weren’t. She’d usually sit outside our biology classroom during lunch with her two friends, Jonelle and Linda, and I’d glanced her way more times than I’d ever admit.

Valleyview had a closed campus — once you were at school, you stayed. Fifty minutes of lunch, no cell phones, no internet. Many of us wandered the halls. I ate a Snickers, drank a Coke, all for one dollar. I called that lunch. On this particular spring afternoon, I came across Jonelle and Linda sitting outside their Spanish classroom, giggling and pointing at me. They’d been doing it every time I walked by them, and I was fed up.

I don’t know exactly what I was thinking. I found Marcelle right outside the administrative offices. That’s where Mr. Freeman, the principal, and our secretary’s offices were. I let loose all my pent-up anger I’d been carrying, both from home and school, from months of being on the receiving end of everyone’s cruelty. I was done.

“Your friends are both bitches!” I shouted as loud as I could. Screw the admins. Screw every single teacher at the high school who knew it was happening, the adults who could’ve said something, could’ve protected me, but didn’t. They all failed me. My tank was overflowing with abuse, and someone else was going to pay for it.

Then I stormed down the hallway, out the doors, running upstairs just as the bell rang for Mrs. Seldon’s English class. No one said a word to me. Not one teacher addressed my language. I’d have thought in a private Christian high school, someone would say something. Right? But, no. When I got home that afternoon, I had completely forgotten it had even happened.

Dad caught me at the front door. “Hey, kiddo. Someone called for you. Some girl.”

No one calls me except Tim. And Tim? He’s got basketball practice.

“I think her name was Marsha. No. Mar-co. Mar-shawn. Marcel?”

“Marcelle? Marcelle called for me?” Now I was really confused. Why would she call me?

“I didn’t get her number. She said she’d call back around 4.”

I looked at my watch: 16:04.

Right then, at that exact moment, the phone rang.

I ran into Dad’s office, slamming the door, and picked up. “Hello?”

No greeting. Just: “I don’t appreciate what you said about my friends today.”

“Oh wow,” I said, stalling. “You know, I’m really sorry about that.” And I was, too. Even though I couldn’t remember what I said about Marcelle’s friends. For the next fifteen minutes, I dominated the conversation. I told her how long I’d wanted to talk to her. I told her I’d tried, and failed, to find her number. (She would later tell me it was unlisted because her dad was a firefighter.) I told her everything I should have said months ago. All the things I wanted to say. And then, at the end of all of it, I asked her out.

“How would you like to see a movie? The Secret of My Success opens Saturday.”

Silence.

More than a few seconds of it. It was long enough to freak me out. I thought she hung up on me.

Then she answered: “Um, yeah, okay, I guess. Sure. We could do that.”

“Great! I’ll pick you up.” I hadn’t asked Dad yet. I figured he’d get over it. I didn’t know that whole ‘better to ask forgiveness than permission’ thing. Not yet.

And that, boys and girls, is how I got my first date.