Locura [U]

For some reason I had this story come back into my mind the other night. Let me set the stage for you:

This happened when I was 17. My senior year of high school was about 1/4 done. That summer I’d started dating a girl I met at my job at Busch Gardens. She was older than me, 19-years-old, although she claimed that her paperwork was wrong, her name wasn’t her real name, and she was actually 21. That there should have been enough of a warning sign. Honestly, I don’t even know how much of what she told me was true. I did believe that she was Peruvian, at least, since she definitely looked and sounded like she was from Peru, but there were tons of little white lies told here and there that made me think that she may have been a pathological liar. Not to mention that, well, what kind of girl of her supposed age would be dating a high school guy?

She told me a story once about the former Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori. This guy allegedly faked being born in Peru, stole lots of money, and fled Peru in a corruption scandal. In fact, he was at large until 2007 when he was apprehended in Chile and extradited to Peru. It’s actually a really fitting story, at least in terms of the deception and its ridiculousness.

Toward the end of our relationship, Stephanie became convinced by someone in one of her classes (I can’t remember if it was GED or community college classes at HCC) that I was cheating on her with some girl in my school. The best part about it was that she was kind of fumbling around latching on to every name of the different girls I’d been hanging out with, lending zero credence to her story. She eventually decided that I had been cheating on her with my friend Heather, who I had never even had any kind of flirtation with. It was patently absurd, but, hey, she was convinced.

One day I was walking out to my car and, lo and behold, there was Stephanie. She had made her way by bus from either her job or her classes (easily somewhere between 0.5 to 2 hrs depending on where she was before) to my campus, sneaked into the parking lot in the back, and was lurking around the portables waiting for me to get to my car. That meant that a girl who claimed to be 21-years-old was lurking around my high school campus to see if her 17-year-old boyfriend was cheating on her with one of his classmates.

It’s maybe not the most irrational thing I’ve ever seen a girl do out of jealousy, but it does remain one of the weirdest, semi-scariest things I’ve ever personally seen. If you’re wondering, we broke up not long after that. Things were getting really weird with her, I had quit my job at Busch Gardens to focus more on my other job at Publix, and I just wasn’t really into her any more.