There she was again, as always, at the very back of the classroom, hugging her limited edition Long Blondes record and sneering at every boy who dared come close. Who said feminism is dead? In hindsight, she might have been responsible for my long and painful personal history of awkwardness with the other gender. I think she was an unfortunate first pick. Gemma Kristensen. I haven't a clue where she is now, what she does, what became of her, but I'm fairly sure she is not thinking of me. It is weird to think how much influence you might have on people that you know nothing at all about.
I remember, quite vividly, the first time I talked to her. It was at gym class, rope climbing. With those kind of exercises we always had to sort ourselves on height, and Gemma and I were the same height to a t so we shared a rope. This whole time she was looking right through me and it took me three failed climbs up the rope to summon up the courage to talk to her. I congratulated her on reaching the top. Would you believe she actually smiled at that? But it was a scornful one, it was a smile that said "I can't believe you can't even do this, you're useless". At the time I must have preferred being useless over being invisible - something I am not so sure about any more these days - so I was strangely encouraged by this.
"It's Gemma, right?"
I knew perfectly well that that was her name.
"Yes." It was the kind of yes that smothers every conversation. I was stopped in my tracks. But it was the start of an obsession.
Music was always my main form of escapism, so when I saw her cradle her beloved vinyl I jumped at the chance.
"I really like that band, you know."
"Hm, yes?"
She raised her right eyebrow just enough to have it form a perfect questioning arc. Derision, too, is an art, and she did it exceptionally well. I couldn't possible be more discouraged, but I soldiered on. I never expected smooth sailing, anyway.
"Yes, especially Giddy Stratospheres. That is a great song."
A pause. Did I see some amusement in her eyes? The faint beginnings of interest? I kept going, trying desperately to be of interest.
"I like songs you can get stuck into. You can nestle into them, live in their cramped, furnished, short-lived surroundings."
This did more to baffle her than to really improve my standing, but even bafflement felt like victory to me.
"I see," she said, and turned away to inspect the ceiling, which made me feel as if we were talking on the phone and she hung up on me. Everything I would say from that point on would go unlistened and directly to her answering machine. An answering machine she never actually used, and its tape must have run out long ago, filled with desperate boys pleading for attention.
Years after I left that school we shared, I would sometimes see her sit about at the Monument. We lived in a quite small town, a pillar of uneventfulness, of mundane things and mundane people. If ever there was an average town, this was it. It was everything and nothing at the same time. We had one central square in the city centre, and it had a monument. Even the monument was absolutely uninteresting, it kind of looked like a balloon, because it had a long, thin pedestal with what seemed like an accidentally oval sphere perched on top of it. Despite it being a silly thing, it was the only landmark we had, so we always capitalized it. It was the Monument. It had a pair of steps up to it at all sides and Gemma was often sitting there, scribbling in a notebook or reading something. They were invariably female writers, of course. I have seen her wielding Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse at least four times. Even if I passed her very closely, I always felt as if there was an unbridgeable gap between us. I don't think I ever really saw her, only a mix of what she wanted to be seen as and my own embarrassment and infatuation. She obviously never really saw me, other than as an extra in her own imagined play. An uncontrollable shadow that was nevertheless without the power to screw anything up, never a liability, never a worry.
When I went back home that afternoon we 'discussed' the Long Blondes, I walked right up the stairs to my room, faintly waving away my parents' greetings, and put on Someone to Drive You Home - that is, my digital, illegal copy of it. It wasn't hard to relate this band and this music to Gemma, though I started wondering whether she copied her behavior from the songs' protagonists, or conversely whether she liked it because she had always been like that and found some resemblance. I myself could identify strongly with the second reasoning because that is what music often did for me. It showed me there actually were people in this world who felt the same things.
But once Giddy Stratospheres started, my inner ramblings were rudely interrupted by a far more painful realization. An irony that made me relive that conversation of just a few hours ago. That song was way too close to the bone, it was describing a girl that was floating, that was not of this world, and a boy desperately trying to fly towards her, but always returning 'back here on earth'. The song wondered out loud whether the girl was a femme fatale, and concluded that that was what she wanted people to think, what she wanted most of all to be. I realized that that was the best possible description of Gemma. Even if the pair in the song were much, much closer than me and Gemma ever had been, the feelings and result were the same. That boy was however much more invested, and I was starting to feel particularly ominous. Maybe this was all a fortunate excuse to get myself off a lead that had been way too difficult and troublesome from the very beginning, but whatever the real reason, that afternoon I made my resolve and never talked to Gemma again.
