Super Annoying! 💖

But enough stage setting. It’s time I got to the meat of this unfortunate tale. The main course of this sad, sad story of slap-happiness. Or in my sorry case, slap-misery-for-the-rest-of-my-life-ness. Because that’s how it ends, by the way. Spoiler warning: I get stuck with the woman of my nightmares forever. Glued to her like pages to the spine of an old book. Ever heard of those experiments where they superglue four pieces of string to the posts of a king-size bed, then glue the other ends of the strings to the ceiling, and the bed just hangs there, suspended in midair? And people can just sleep on it, perfectly safe and comfortable, in a bed hanging by the flimsy thread of four pieces of skinny, scraggly string, because that’s how strong the glue is? Strong enough to hold up a king-sized bed?

That’s kind of what my life is like now.

Except in the case of the bed experiment, at least you can relax. I don’t even have that luxury anymore.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again. It’s about time I circled back and planted this story where it started. That way you can see how it slowly grew into such a disaster, follow the seed of the super slap all the way from germination to me getting my block nearly knocked off.

It all started the day the new girl came to school.

Her name was Snowball.

Don’t let the pure, round image of her namesake fool you. Snowball was pure evil.

No, wait. Even worse. Snowball was pure stupid.

She was as relentless as a hungry lion. Bloodthirsty as a Bengal tiger. Hungry as, I dunno, a fatass, goofy-looking hippo hiding just under the surface of the water, its gaping maw full of gnarly teeth ready to snap up any animal dumb and unlucky enough to come close. Or something like that. I don’t know. Point is: she was on the hunt. The hunt, I soon learned, for love. And her prey? Take a wild guess who that ended up being.

Haha.

But before we get to that, I had better tell you what she looked like, especially since we’re already on the topic of things that look goofy. The day she first showed up, she slid into homeroom wearing a white lab coat so long it just barely coasted above the floor as she walked. Well, it would have, if she walked. When I say “slid into homeroom,” I mean it literally. At first I thought she was just trying to reinvent herself , make some sort of insane first impression on her first day at a new school. Figured she was just trying hard to be weird and quirky or something, and that she’d knock it off and go back to looking normal within a couple of days. But — credit to her, I guess — to this day I’ve never once laid eyes on her without that lab coat on.

Even now that we’re technically married.

Getting ahead of myself again though.

Snowball — whose name I didn’t even know at the time, considering I’d only just laid eyes on her for the first time 0.5 seconds ago — skidded to a stop in front of the teacher’s desk, the floppy ears on her pink bunny slippers bobbing up and down. Underneath the lab coat, she had on a t-shirt that I thought was for a band but that actually, I learned later, was sporting the logo for an obscure, defunct brand of canned foods that went out of business in the 70s. She was also wearing a pleated skirt, the only part of the stupid outfit that actually looked somewhat good — or would have if it didn’t look like something a unicorn might have thrown up. It was bejeweled top to bottom. Her glasses could have passed for bullet-proof. Her hair was long, with a ribbon in it. To top it all off, she had the buckiest bucktooth you could possibly imagine.

Except I didn’t have to imagine it. I was staring at it head on. Somehow, it felt like it was staring back. I looked her up and down. I blinked a couple times. Then I looked at myself.

Nondescript black sweater.

Jeans from Walmart.

Off-brand Vans off the discount rack, also from Walmart.

And here I thought I was unstylish. I was practically a fashionista next to her. Or so I thought, anyway.

Then she talked. Lisped, rather. Our homeroom teacher was kind of a weeaboo so she had the new kids do the whole “introducing yourself in front of the whole class” schtick. “Hi,” said Snowball. “I’m Snowball! My favorite subject is science, and I love inventing inventions! I love it almost as much as I love LOVE! 💖”

So. Long story short?

From the moment I first laid eyes on her, I knew she was trouble.

For her part, I don’t know what she thought I was the moment she first laid eyes on me. All I know is whatever I was to her? She wanted it. And she wasn’t about to take no for an answer.

“No,” I told her one orange-cream-colored evening in the second-floor science lab, the whole school practically deserted, nobody else there but me, her, and the tension in the air. It was about a month after she had first shown up. One of the most trying, testing months of my life, I’ll have you know. “And that’s my final answer.”

“Sniffle, sniffle… p-p-p-please…?” Her lip was quivering as her bottle-thick glasses began to fog up.

“No! And don’t start with the whole pseudo-sobbing routine, for the love of god.”

It was the 487th time she had asked me out.

That week.

“Sniffle, sniffle…”

“And wait a minute! You’re not even actually crying!” I realized and decided I might as well add, to drive the point home that, no, whatever she thought might one day happen between us was never going to happen between us any day, ever, for the rest of forever, end of story. “You’re just saying the word ‘sniffle’ over and over again while those stupid ‘Fog Machine Glasses 9001 Mk. II 💖 (in development)’ do their thing!”

As usual, my rebuking her had the opposite effect. “Oh my god! You remembered the name of my prototype exactly!” she squealed, higher pitched than a spitball skirting the top of the strike zone. Then she latched onto my arm, clearly intending not to latch off anytime soon, or maybe ever. “This is reason number 4,783 of 9,999 why I love you so, so, so much!”

Yep. Snowball was lovesick, and apparently, I was the cure. I’ve gotta say, having a girl actually kinda into me for once was, contrary to what I previously might have believed or hoped, actually really annoying.

So was all the crazy stuff she had been doing to win my attention and/or affection, all that first month and well beyond. As it turned out, she was in all my classes. Coincidence? Supposedly, according to her. But I wasn’t sure if I bought that. If anyone could — and for that matter, would — stoop to such low, petty, cartoon-villain-esque levels as to rig the class rosters at a public high school to have her way, it was Snowball.

“Guess who, Comb!”

With my eyes suddenly covered by rubber-glove-clad hands, my vision splotched out to murky black.

“Jesus H. Christ with a side of fries, my hands! They burn!”

She was in fourth-period chemistry with me. Which meant every time we had to use the gas burners in class was yet another chance I was going to suddenly be blindsided by her and nearly sear my fingertips off.

“Holy crap, Snowball,” I said — panted practically, my heart was racing so fast — with my hands on my knees, having narrowly escaped singed fingers. I had managed to shake her off, somehow. “How many times have I told you not to sneak up behind me and cover my eyes?!”

“Sixty-three. So far anyway!” She was smiling. Beaming. “But no need to get your panties in a twist, Comb!” Dammit. How did she know I was out of clean underwear and had to wear a pair of my sister’s this morning? Oh, right, she was practically stalking me at this point. That’s how. “I built and programmed some robots last night to take this class for us! That way we can have some alone time over in the corner over there! Oh, I’ve always wanted to hold hands and whisper our deepest, most intimate secrets to each other next to an industrial-grade emergency eyewash station!”

“Wait… did you say robots?!”

That was when half the class went up in flames. I guess she forgot to design the bots with any safety protocols — or common sense — in mind. She probably modeled their cybernetic brains after her own, meaning they posed a massive safety risk considering we were on the “incendiaries and explosives” unit in class. Luckily no one was hurt, and we even got to leave early that day.

But that wasn’t the end of my troubles. Situations just like that one had become my new, absurd routine. Some people like to describe their life as a movie. Mine was quickly turning into an episode of Looney Tunes. That was what being the object of Snowball’s affections was like, for better or, more accurately, worse. Like most geniuses, Snowball was also a complete idiot. Her only interests — her only goals in life, it seemed — were conducting insane science experiments, me, and conducting insane science experiments on me.

Like that time, for example, when she said she was trying to rearrange the human body, make its internals more efficient. “I’ve found the perfect new place for the human brain, Comb! Now just hold still!” I couldn’t walk upright for a week after that. In the interest of keeping things PG, I won’t tell you how she scooped — yes, scooped — my brain out of my skull, or where her “perfect new place” was.

Then there was that other time when she said I looked cool while running in PE. Beats me why; my mile times were always lousy. The very next day they were even lousier. “Why am I not… *pant pant pant*... getting anywhere?!” Turned out I was running on a ultra-realistic track-sized-and-shaped treadmill she had constructed for the sole and express purpose of watching me run forever, gazing at my sweaty, leg-muscle-obliterating struggle from afar with hearts in her eyes. Even worse: the entire class was watching too, including the teacher, and laughing at me. Would it have killed them to, you know, help me out? That was what I sincerely wanted to know.

But even more than that, I wanted to know why Snowball had to design her “Ultra Clothing X-Ray Stage Lights Special Edition 💖,” install them in the school gym, and then shine them on me during a school-wide assembly while I was accepting my Almost Perfect Attendance award. Did the entire school really need to see me in my underwear that day? And did one of the hundreds of embarrassing videos taken of the occasion really need to go viral nationwide?

As for why she was doing it? Why she had chosen me as the love of her life — her words, not mine — and object of scientific obsession? “Because!” she said when I asked her, chewing through boiled tire rubber (a.k.a. school cafeteria meatloaf), flecks of it flying everywhere and forcing me to dodge like I was in The Matrix or something. Forget bullet time. Welcome to lunch time. For a second, I thought that one word was all her answer was gonna be. But then she continued: “You just looked so… so… how do I put this?” Suddenly her eyes lit up like fireworks. “Experimentable on!”

In my head, something other than fireworks was going off: alarm bells. I looked so experimentable on? Was that even grammatically correct? More importantly, was I even going to make it to the end of high school alive at this rate?

Probably worst of all was this one time me and Snowball had found ourselves alone together, a situation I had been trying my best to avoid. I guess my best wasn’t good enough. As soon as we were alone, Snowball went totally silent, gazed deep into my eyes like she was looking for something hidden, sunken there, inside them. Inside me. And then slowly, ever so slowly, she leaned in so close I could smell the eight-ounce-milk-carton-from-the-cafeteria-lunch-she-had-eaten scent on her breath. Time froze, and so did I. Her lips pinched into a sour-faced pucker, and before I could even think to do anything, she gave me a big, fat ki… ki… ki… ki-ki-ki-ki—!

Err! Actually! You know what? Never mind. That’s enough anecdotes about the stupid situations Snowball’s antics continually saw me starring in. I think you get the picture by now.

I tell you all this not so that I might relive all my most embarrassing moments. Trust me: I’ve had enough of that for one lifetime, as you’ll soon see. The reason I’m setting this table with so much attention to minutiae — the forks and spoons of my eventual social downfall, if you will — is because I want you to know what Snowball meant to me.

What she meant to me was trouble.

And when you understand that, you’ll probably understand how awesome my life became once she went missing for a week. How nice it finally was that the biggest nuisance I had ever met was all of a sudden — Keyser Soze style — gone. Had disappeared, just like that, on an impromptu and uncharacteristic hike in the woods, the only remaining trace of her a silly journal filled with her loopy, girly handwriting and even loopier delusions that me and her were ever a thing.

And when you understand that, you’ll probably also understand how much it sucked that not only was I the one tasked with saving her, but that in the course of doing so, I wound up getting, just my luck, super slapped!

To be continued!