Richard was the ideal boy in high school. He was a football and track star. He set records for his speed and was in the newspaper all the time. He was really intelligent and absolutely gorgeous. Needless to say, he was also very popular.

I was not popular in high school. The crowd I hung with was mostly geeks and nerds, but I wasn't especially nerdy. I was just really smart so that's who I had classes with. The popular kids in my class always seemed out of reach to me, and honestly I didn't really like them all that much. Their lives seemed so dramatic. They were always crying in the bathroom over some guy or fighting with each other over nothing. Chances were I'd never even have met Richard but for the fact that we had the same after school job.

Richard and I had a strange relationship. We worked really well together and because of that were often paired up. Mostly everyone at my job (a fast-food restaurant) was a teenager, and teenagers are not known for their work ethic. There were people that had to be separated from each other or no work would get done. Richard and I were not such people. Probably because we didn't have much to say to each other. Richard was this popular, beautiful, older guy and I was this dorky girl. But eventually, through all those hours working together, we became friends. We talked about school and our families and our lives. Richard really opened up to me. I don't think any of Richard's friends really talked to him the way I did.

Gradually, I found myself becoming extremely attracted to Richard. Richard always had girlfriends and he was way out of my league in the world of high school, but our innocent talking turned into flirting and before I knew it Richard and I were talking in school and talking on the phone. Richard loved to talk to me, I discovered. At one work Christmas party we spent the entire evening in a small room in the basement of my boss� house, Richard talking and talking. It was a bizarre relationship. I seemed to fill some need Richard had, but we didn�t have the kind of relationship that could be classified as a normal friendship.

High school operates on a caste system. And while I certainly was worthy of being talked to in classes, I was nowhere near the social standing required to be part of the �in� crowd. And Richard, he was the king of the popular kids. But if Richard ever saw a difference between his crowd and me, he never showed it. He invited me to sit with him at lunch, he stopped talking to his jock buddies in the hall the say hi to me. It drew bizarre looks from those around him, but he never mentioned it and neither did I. After a few days sitting at his lunch table at his insistence, a girl who I knew from my soccer team, Beth, sat down next to me and said, �What do you think you�re doing? You know Richard never mixes. He�s true.� I had NO idea what she was talking about, but now is the time in the story when I should tell you that Richard is African-American and I am not. It turns out Beth was telling me that if I had any plans of dating Richard, I had better forget it. Richard doesn�t date white girls.

That night at work I asked Richard if he had ever dated a white girl. He said no. I asked him if he ever would. After a few minutes of flirty, �why do you want to know?� conversation, Richard told me that he doesn�t think he would ever date a white girl. With that one sentence, my heart sunk. I was angry; it seemed terribly racist. When I demanded to know why, Richard told me that it was complicated, but generally, black people had spent their entire time in America being treated as second class citizens. There is so much in being black that a white girl could never understand, and he doesn�t think that he could share his life with someone who couldn�t understand that part of him. He also said that after so many years of being told by society that black women aren�t as good as white women and the trend of black men dating white women only serves to reaffirm that.

Richard�s argument and convictions impressed me, but I wasn�t finished with him yet. Our strange relationship continued. Sometimes I sat with him at lunch and put up with the stares of all the girls around me. It was a blow to my self esteem to have popular girls in my grade come up to me and say, �what are YOU doing hanging around Richard?� A few times Richard came to my lunch table and helped me with my math homework. Our relationship continued to hover somewhere above the level of �just friends.�

Richard graduated from high school a year before I did. During the summer after he graduated, he and I were talking on the phone and he says, �Why don�t get hang out tonight?� I had plans with a friend of mine for the early evening, but told him I�d call him after we were finished and we could get together. My friend was dating a guy who was sort of friends with Richard, so we decided the four of us would hang out. My friend and I went off and did whatever we had planned, and when we got finished I called Richard who cancelled on me. He apologized over and over again, but I was really mad at him. My friend said to forget about him and that the three of us (me, her, and her boyfriend) would just hang out without him.

So off we went to the local carnival. I actually managed to have a good time despite my anger. After having been there for about a half hour, who do we see walking towards us with his arm around some girl but Richard. When he saw me he stepped away from the girl, said something to her, and walked over to me. The way he talked to me was very much the attitude of a guilty man. He�d never talked to me that way. The general tone was, �I�m so sorry, baby. You forgive me, right?� I pulled my hands away from his and looked over at his date, who looked extremely uncomfortable. I told him not to call me baby and that we�re not dating so he should just give it up. But I was furious and he knew it. He ended his plea with, �I�ll call you.� And he did. But it was never the same after that. During our friendship, Richard dated plenty of girls. I knew about all of them and even though I was jealous, I never felt personally hurt because our relationship wasn�t like that. But somehow, him canceling plans with me and then seeing him with that girl, changed me. It changed him too. He�d never called me baby before or implored me to give him a hug the way he did that night.

In retrospect, maybe I should have seen that change as a turning point upon which Richard and I could start actually dating, instead of this limbo that we�d been in for quite some time. But because I was a stupid teenager, instead of seeing Richard�s remorse at me seeing him with a girl for what it was, I turned away from him and got angry.

Richard quit his job working with me at the end of that summer when he went off to college. On his last day he gave me his phone number at college and told me to call him and we�d get together. I took the piece of paper with his phone number on it, looked at it, ran my fingers over it, and put it in my pocket. But I never called him. I could tell that what was going on with us was never going to change into something healthy and normal. At least, that�s what I told myself. But maybe I was just scared. I don�t know. I wish I had called him though.

After that I saw Richard two or three times in passing, but we never spent time together again. I wonder what he�s up to now. Did he become an engineer like he planned? Does he still keep himself in prime shape with those six-pack abs that gave me chills, or has he put on a little belly? Does he ever wonder what might have been between us? Did he ever actually date a white girl? I�ll never know.