The Era of Dana Chapter I - New Beginnings

It all started on my second day at college. I walked up the steps to the Annexe, where my first A-level German lesson was to be. I’d made sure I was a few minutes early, of course. I stepped round the corner, and pushed open the heavy doors. Standing just inside, leaning against the wall next to the door to Languages 4, was a girl, looking down at the floor. She had shortish blonde hair, and a friendly face. She gave me a brief smile, and looked back to her feet. Looking around at the wall, I saw a couple of dated German movie posters, and a couple of old chairs. Standing parallel to this girl, I also leant back against the wall, before glancing out of the corner of my eye to her.




Within 20 seconds, another couple of people arrived. Then, our teacher arrived, a cheerful, young woman who shuffled to the door, beamed at us saying ‘Hello!’, then unlocked the door to let us in. The blonde girl was the first to follow her in, and I, on the prowl for someone in the class to latch onto, swept in after her. I followed her around the U-shaped desks right round to the front of the room, and sat next to her. Neither of us said a word. A quiet girl sat to my other side, and timidly said hello. The lesson started.

Little did I know it, but that day was the beginning of one of the most whirlwind and powerful friendships of my life. That was the day everything would begin to change. That was the day my life turned mad.

The first few weeks of the new term went by, and I started talking more to both the girls I sat with. They were both friendly yet quiet, and all three of us interacted kindly yet cautiously. The blonde girl intrigued me. She seemed sweet, giggly, and she played and twiddled with her hair an awful lot.

The blonde girl was Dana Umlaut.

The weeks went by. My birthday came and went. Eventually, we started talking more outside of classes, and this kind girl and I slowly became acquaintances. I should point out that it usually takes quite a while before I consider someone a friend. Most of my friends tend to remain acquaintances for months before I would dare label them as “friend”. However, Dana managed the transition in approximately two months.

By early November, I began to grow anxious about this girl. We were getting better friends, but there was something that I feared. I’d been going to an all-boys school up until a few months before, and therefore had generally not had any female friends for many years. In fact, I’d never really enjoyed having female company on the rare occasion that I’d had to. And I eventually realised that I was no longer in junior school. I was at sixth-form college. Mixed-gender friendships would surely now have a different dynamic. What I feared, like nothing else, was that one day she might ask me out.

Now, most of the time I thought this fear was unfounded. After all, she had a boyfriend. And I was hardly acting flirtatiously with her.

It was just the damned hair-twiddling that worried me. And the rest of our German class was becoming convinced that we were sleeping together. Every lesson we would have to put up with the constant sniggers and comments. And every time such a comment was made, she would blush and look sideways at me to see my reaction, and I’m certain I would look embarrassed in spite of myself. No wonder they thought something was going on. My old school friends were also noticing me spending time with her. Comments of ‘Get in there Joe!’, ‘How is she in bed?’, and ‘How’s your new shag?’ were commonplace.

So, eventually, enough was enough. I had to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that I would never be interested in having a girlfriend. That any girl interested in me would be barking up the wrong tree. So, by the first week of November (just quick-referencing with my old diary), I’d decided to tell her.

It would be another month before I would. One fateful Friday, I went out with one of my old friends to meet her and a couple of other friends near where we go to college. He had brought a bottle of vodka, and when we met up with Dana he gave her the bottle of vodka to stuff into her tiny black clutch bag. He went off to sort some stuff out (I can’t remember what now).

We were under a bus stop. She got up from the bench to put the bottle in her bag, and then started texting. I stared at her, waiting for the words to come up my throat. Cars and vans hurtled by. I would need to raise my voice. It was already dark, and the only light was coming from the reflection of the car lights off of the white advert on the side of the bus stop. Her eyes glanced up at me as she was texting, and then back down to her phone.

“Dana?”

“Yes?” She carried on texting.

Pause.

“I’m gay.”

The texting stopped. Her hair covered her eyes, but I imagined they had widened and gone blank. Her body was still. The sound of traffic vanished into the background. I stared at her, not moving a muscle or saying a word.

Silence.

“Oh.” She stared blankly at her phone.

Pause.

“I’m bi.”

She glanced up for the briefest of seconds, then looked down and resumed texting.

“Oh,” I replied blankly, “cool.”


Silence.

To be continued...

It would be another month before I learned what was going through her head that night.

I had barely begun to scratch the surface of this magnificent, marvellous and mysterious young woman. In the coming months, further developments would push us closer and closer together. And, after sixth months of friendship with her, I would eventually begin meeting her friends. And what followed was the start of a new life, and a new me.

But those are other stories, for another day...


Farewell!


The Gent
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