Rachel Patrick: The Girl Of My Dreams

"Rachel," the Kim's say, in perfect unison, "but of course you are. Welcome to the group, Rachel!"

They're beaming at her their normal amount, but I would have excused them if they were beaming a little harder. This is Rachel, after all. Rachel Patrick. The girl of my dreams. The girl of everyone’s dreams.

It's not hard to understand why Rachel was the object of nearly every guy's desire on campus, because when you looked the way that Rachel did it's perfectly understandable why everyone in the whole damn world would want to know you.

Blonde hair and Blue eyes. Bubbly and vivacious. Thin and slim and willowy and beautiful.

Rachel Patrick was, to me, the picture-perfect representation of a college student, for women at least and at least in my little corner of the globe. If you looked up the term in the dictionary you would be well served to base an entire description off of her, because she was the Aristotelian ideal.

She had that sort of flawlessly angelic quality that you think of with the perfect girl. Perfect skin and perfect teeth and perfect hair and just perfect everything. When she smiled, like she did now, she just lit up the space. You found yourself smiling as well, frankly you couldn't help yourself.

Either that or you caught yourself dreamily wondering what it would be like to have her smile like that at you alone.

The first time I’d been in this position I just made a few sarcastic and hushed remarks that Eddie overheard and then Rachel would have walked over and both of us would have been stunned. She would have smiled, like she did right now, and she would have given me hope and I would have made a mental promise not to leave this group without her name and her number and without her knowing mine. Because I wanted to date her, yes absolutely I did. I wanted to have the Queen of the Campus on my arm and I was just so convinced that it would change my life if I did.

It really would have, but maybe I only think that because it never even remotely happened.

Well it half happened. Rachel knew my name and she even smiled at me and remembered it. Once in our third year she even called back to a little joke from our orientation group, so she actually did remember me.

But dating Rachel? I never came close. I realized that I set my lofty goals far too high.

I could never be with a girl like Rachel, not then and certainly not now. Now when I didn’t exactly fit her type which was far more star quarterback than it was girl next door.

"Thanks for having me," Rachel smiled at the Kim's and then turned to all the rest of us, "I'm really looking forward to getting to know all of you. I'm super excited about this, I hope you all are too."

She made sure to catch each of our eyes, and when they fell on mine I found myself smiling a little dumbly, a little shyly. I remembered the way that she looked at me in my other life. I remembered the way that my heart did flip flops, the way I swore I fell in love right then and there and the way that I swore this would be a story we'd tell to our kids someday. The two of us old, me insisting that I loved her from the moment she laid eyes on me and her begrudingly admitting the same to me.

I guess the knowledge it wasn't going to work out that way made it different this time.

Oh, I still felt drawn to her. I still felt like her gaze was lingering on me a little longer and that her smile grew a little brighter when she saw me but the connection, I knew that wasn't real. I was more cynical, maybe, and more jaded certainly but I knew enough to know that love at first sight wasn't going to happen.

Not last time. Not this time. Realistically, not ever.

So no flip flops, no rush of roaring blood. I saw her smile at me and I smiled back because you couldn't help but smile at her but I knew that when it felt like she was lingering she was just staying the same length of time as everyone else and when she looked away I knew she didn't have to tear her gaze away. Not really. That was, and always had been, nothing but my imagination.

Eddie, to his credit, didn't even entertain the possibility. And two nights from now while we sat talking after having run into her making out with some stranger he told me he'd called it the entire time. And the memory of that led me to the memory of something else, of the other person I had forgotten about.

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