Yes­ter­day was great! I wanted to give a rose to Rachael and was plan­ning on it, but my mom didn't take me to school yes­ter­day so I wasn't able to get the rose. So I'm won­der­ing what I'm going to do, and then I run into my friend Shane. He said that he would run me to Steele's at lunch to pick up a rose for Rachael. Awe­some! Except for when we got to Steele's. I only had five bucks. They didn't have any sin­gle roses. Damnit! Instead, all they had were large bou­quets for more than I had to spend. So I fig­ured I would get a choco­late rose. That's cool, right? They were out of them! Damnit! They only had half-dozen boxes of them. So Shane, being the cool guy that he is, spot­ted me the cash to get the six-pack. One obsta­cle down … At the end of lunch, I found Rachael in the hall and asked her if we could talk after school. She said okay, and I asked her to meet me in the hall­way in front of the office. She agreed …

I ditched Amer­i­can Lit. to setup for the con­cert in the com­mons. Since she has 4th hour off, Amy was in the com­mons as I was doing this. Need­less to say, this was very uncom­fort­able for me. Espe­cially because when I was work­ing, she kept star­ing at me. I ended up stay­ing at school the whole day until after the end of the con­cert, but I'll get to that later …

So after school, with choco­late roses in hand being cov­ered by my jacket, I met with Rachael. After some stut­ter­ing, I told her that I just wanted to thank her for being such a good friend, and that I didn't want to seem too for­ward, but I did want to show my appre­ci­a­tion for her. Then I handed her the roses. She was almost on the verge of cry­ing when she saw them. And her first words were, "Oh, Chris, I love you so much …" I just about died. We talked about how I didn't talk to her. And she said that she under­stood if I wasn't com­fort­able talk­ing to her. I told her that wasn't the case. But the rea­son was that no one had cared so much about me, and that was hard for me to deal with. Truth quo­tient: about 7 out of 10. This is a major rea­son, but per­haps more rea­son­able is that I'm falling in love with her. We hugged a few times and she told me to call her any time. We hugged again and held each other's had for a minute. Then we said goodbye.

The con­cert: The music was absolutely fan­tas­tic. The dec­o­ra­tions were great. But the light­ing was another story. Brett and I had spent about two hours set­ting lights for the show. And we obvi­ously put too much into it because we blew a cir­cuit, caus­ing the lights to go black in the mid­dle of the per­for­mances. We attempted to fix this dur­ing the show, but were unsuc­cess­ful until the last group was per­form­ing. But that's okay. Cen­tre Stage did great. So I'm happy.

After we went on stage, I sat and talked with Nicole. I finally told her that I've had a crush on her since last year. She seemed sur­prised, but not. It felt good to let that out. But the bomb­shell of the night belonged to her. She had come to the con­cert a lit­tle late because she was mak­ing Mike and Amy din­ner. So she went off about that for a lit­tle bit, and then she told me that Mike was extremely happy because he found out that Amy isn't leav­ing. Wow. To be hon­est, I was kinda glad that she was leav­ing, if only for the sake that Mike and I might be able to repair our friend­ship. I've wanted to apol­o­gize to him for a long time, but I'm scared. And I have the feel­ing that even though she's not leav­ing, for me, she might as well be.

In any case, even though I didn't get laid, and I didn't have din­ner with a Valentine's Day sweet­heart, and I was kinda lonely, this day was cer­tainly bet­ter than I thought it was going to be. I may hate Valentine's Day, but I sure hate it a lot less now.