We never really leave high school

A woman I used to know back in the day posted a photo of me at age 16, eyebrows tweezed to the brink of oblivion, on Facebook. This woman was the friend of my older cousin, the one everyone said I looked like. Even when I was 13 and yearning over the supreme comfort and sophistication of older and beautiful teens like my cousin and her friend, knowing I would never be like them, even back then, this woman paid attention to me. She was 18 and she looked at me with her big kind brown eyes and pulled me into the fold of grown up camaraderie and bursts of laughter and I sat in their midst and pretended I belonged and I loved her with silent devotion.

We recently reconnected through Facebook. She has raised sons, and is newly a grandmother, and her eyes still hold that deep brown wistful sad sweet expression they always did, as if she understood the ones who didn't feel a part of things. I always suspected that even though she was simply stunning, with gleaming dark brown skin and a tremulous smile that always made me want to hug her, she didn't truly know she was a beauty. I can still see that in her photographs. There is something that flickers in her eyes, in her smile, that tells me she still doesn't know.

So here's what happened today. She put up this picture of me that she found in one of her albums, and someone, a man who used to be a boy a couple years older than I was, who was the cousin of the woman who posted the picture, and who I have not seen since we were teens, made this comment: "I used to be hopelessly in puppy love with this girl."

This boy never said a word to me, ever! I had never once noticed him noticing me.

And then I realized he must mean my cousin, the one I resembled, except that my cousin was lean and athletic and charismatic and I was chubby and awkward and shy. Yes, of course he meant her. Even though the picture was of me, I figured he was mistaking me for my cousin and so I wrote under his comment, "I think he means Maureen."

And my friend, the woman who posted the picture wrote this underneath.

"No. I know he means you."

It kind of made my day.