Jared Freed

But you bet your ass I remember her name.

In this audiobook, I'll never use real names.

I can't shake the idea of a woman in the suburbs being bothered by this audiobook while trying to get an iPad out of her kid's hands before bed.

Once I decided I was going to call, I thought about it the whole day.

My life was going to change.

It was the 12-year-old equivalent of buying a Peloton.

You know, how you start imagining yourself with abs and hanging out at the beach like, totally, let's take more pictures of ourselves.

Well, that was me, except instead of confident swimsuit posts, I had visions of us holding hands in the hallway and slow dancing at parties.

This was it.

I was about to move from an adolescent side character into the cool, confident main character of maturity.

I was going to be dating someone.

As soon as I got home from school, I went up to my room.

I practiced saying, hi, is Morgan home?

And would you want to be my girlfriend?

Over and over and over again until I felt sure I couldn't mess it up.

I got her number from the previously mentioned phone book and picked up my house's second phone line.

Do you remember the second line?

When a call came through and someone was already on the phone, the call would push through to the other line.

Our second line was one number away from our first line, 9022 and 9021.

Yes, like 90210.