Why I Laughed When He Sipped His Water

“Oh, Tara, did you see the guy behind us?” I whispered to my best friend on the first day of Creative Writing lecture. She nodded with raised eyebrows and we started giggling obnoxiously. He was amazing. If I looked sideways to her, he was directly in my line of sight. This caused problems for me for that whole first lecture. I would lean over to whisper something to Tara, catch a glimpse of his starlingly perfect face, and dissolve in a giggly swoon. She gave me a look of confusion at one point and I blushed in embarrassment.

This guy didn’t look anything like the other guys at the University of Minnesota. He was sharply handome, romantically handsome. He looked like he belonged in another time period. Black hair, strong jaw, dark eyes, pale skin. My dream. He would notice when I looked back in amazement. I must have done it five times in those fifty minutes. His eyes would meet mine and then go back to the lecturer, no annoyance visible on his angelic face.

Several days later, I discovered with a falling face that he wasn’t in my discussion class. I would only get one hour a week to ogle this boy. But I did well at ogling during that hour every Wednesday. By some miracle, he ended up sitting directly in my line of sight every single lecture. If I was to look towards the lecture podium, there would be my dream guy, waiting to be admired. He wasn’t exactly hot like other guys were hot. He wore weird clothes and didn’t speak. I doubted that he had this kind of effect on any other girl in the room. Beyond acknowledging his good looks, Tara never mentioned him again. I guess I saw potential in him. I could picture him in a new black leather coat that I would buy for him, walking next to me around campus and looking achingly handsome.

It became a habit on Wednesdays to dress a little nicer than I usually did. It was silly, really, to get all worked up about some nameless guy in one of my classes. But I never found boys that reminded me of a literary character, and the romantic in me grabbed at the chance to swoon over someone.

And remind me of a literary character he did. He shouldn’t have reminded me of Edward Cullen. Not physically, at least. Edward is supposed to have bronze hair, not black, and golden eyes rather than brown. But this mystery boy had something Edward-ish about him. It might have been his stiff posture, or the elegant way he held his pen. Maybe I just associate any beautiful guy with Edward. But if there’s one way into my heart, it is to remind me of Edward the vampire.

Edward Cullen exists in the dense, rainy forests of Forks, Washington, in a popular teen book series called Twilight. He is a perfect example of what men should be like. There’s something intangible about Edward that has made millions of teenage girls love him obsessively. Even my mom loves Edward Cullen. Suddenly, we all have higher standards in men after we read the Twilight series. We need our men to be gorgeous, protective, mercurial, seductive, mysterious, funny, intelligent, and a little bit dangerous. If a guy like Edward exists in our real world, I haven’t heard about him yet.

But from time to time, I sense some Edward in a random guy I encounter. With this Creative Writing guy, I couldn’t shake the comparison, so my crush grew. I wrote poems about him instead of listening to the guest lecturers. I gazed at his profile as long as I could without letting my friends know I was doing it. That would be awkward. I was aware that it was ridiculous to be so infatuated with someone I had never spoken with. It’s such a shame that looks attract, was how I would always end the poems about this guy. It wasn’t fair for him to win all my attention like this. How did other guys have a shot in my over-romanticized world? I would look around him at the other guys, the nondescript boys that I would never notice, and it seemed absurd that I had such a strong preference for one over all the others. But attraction is a strange phenomenon, and it isn’t really worth your time to ponder it.

One Wednesday, about midway through a forgettable lecture on fiction writing, my mystery boy made a sudden movement and caught my overly-aware eye. He reached for his backpack and pulled out a Nalgene full of water. He untwisted the cap and brought the water bottle to his lips. He took a sip of water and my shoulders shook with silent laughter. He was not Edward Cullen after all, for vampires cannot drink water. Silly me.