I'd like to think I have a pretty hilarious track record with girls.

Really- if my love life had a theme song, it would be a tough competition between Simon & Garfunkel's "Cecilia" and Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me".

It's not like I'm an unlikable guy, or at least I don't think I am- here's to hoping! What ends up happening most of the time is that I get the most dreaded, awkward answer you can ever receive from a girl. You fellas out there know what I'm talking about:

"I'm really sorry," she says, "But I really think of you more as a brother, and I wouldn't want to lose you. I think it's best if we just stay friends, I hope that's okay!"

Obviously, that is perfectly okay. I've come to realize that such words are really a giant compliment more than anything else. Again, I at least I think they are. But honestly, I'm totally fine with being friends with a girl, even if I had wanted something more. If I'm being honest, a lot of my closest friendships with girls have grown after these "Office"-worthy awkward conversations. Even so, one after another has left me wondering what piece of the puzzle I'm missing that allows "just friends" to translate into...well, a girlfriend.

That's not what I'm here to write about, though; because, let's face it, that could get really sappy, really fast. A far more entertaining idea is for me to simply reflect on some of that aforementioned "hilarious track records". So here we are, my first post in a series I'm proudly calling King Of The Friend Zone. In these posts, I'll be sharing some humorous anecdotes of me and girls of yesteryear, and hopefully, they'll make you chuckle just a little bit. The girls themselves will not be named in these posts, for obvious reasons. And, on that note, if you're one of those girls, and you recognize yourself in one of these stories, do me a favor and please keep it to yourself! Thanks in advance! :-)

So, for my first entry in this series, I thought it only made sense to start with the youngest of young love, the summer before sixth grade, to be exact. What made this particular girl particularly notable was that I actually knew her in pre-school, and had an equally large crush on her then. Elementary school separated us, but middle school was finally about to reunite us. In my mature, rational, elementary-educated mind, it was as if it was meant to be. "Casablanca" had nothing on Decatur, Alabama that summer.

This was the summer of 2010, and younger kids were just starting to get cell phones. If you were a really cool kid, then your phone had a TOUCH SCREEN- super advanced stuff. So, being the creative genius that I am, I came up with two ideas for wooing this young lady that were nothing short of brilliant:

1.) Serenade her with the song of the summer, "Hey Soul Sister"

2.) Save up, buy a new phone, and impress her with the high-level technology at my disposal

Since I had been told by my own mother many times before that my singing was worse than a dying cat and I had only taken like two(ish) guitar lessons with my cousin-option #1 didn't look like a very safe bet. Still, I must thank Zac Efron, a.k.a. stud muffin Troy Bolton, for the inspiration.

So, I moved ahead with option #2. In a perfect world, I would've been allowed to save up for an iPhone, like some other friends of mine. The parentals vetoed that one really fast, though. The technology was coming along, but it wasn't to the point that it was justifiable for 5th graders to own the same devices as professional business people. So, instead, I decided that my target would be the coveted Samsung Reality in "Piano Black". It was a beast, to say the least, complete with the touch screen. And if a situation arose in which you felt like going QWERTY, you were in luck-it even had a slide out keyboard.

It should be noted that I did own a cell phone at the time, but it was one of those phones that parents got their kids in the late 2000s for "emergencies"; in other words, it was a go-phone. And let's be honest, why would any girl say yes to putting her number into a go-phone, when there are a plethora of other, fancier phones to put her number into. I mean, let's face it, it took a really long time for a guy to text "hey", or "wrud", or " ;) " with a go-phone. She could've gotten much faster responses from guys with better phones. That crisis would be averted, though, because, after a little bit of saving, I finally had enough to get that plastic beast of a communicator. Next, however, would come the hard part that would take some serious strategizing.

The place to be that summer was the pool. We would all kill hours playing epic deep end games, like "Categories" and "Silence". So, if I was going to see this girl anywhere, it was obviously going to be at the pool and what better place was there to impress her with a slick new phone and a shirtless, lanky, undefined stomach. The thing was, I didn't have any way to get in touch with her; I was waiting to ask her for her phone number with the hip phone, not the flip phone. So basically, I had to just kind of hope she would come on her own without me calling her.

The big day began like any other normal pool day. I had my trusty Samsung Reality on hand, ready to get out (of my mom's pool bag) and act like I was texting at the first sign of her mom's car. Looking back on it, though, it must have been a cruel irony that the phone was called the Samsung "Reality", because what happened next was definitely a healthy dose of reality in my perfectly planned, kind of weird 6th-grade daydream.

In the parenthesis above, I said that my phone was in my mom's pool bag. That isn't exactly true, though. That's where it was supposed to be, but where it was-unbeknownst to me-was in the pocket of my swim trunks. I dove into the deep end head first. Upon entering the water, my hand came down on my side, and I felt it...I felt the rounded plastic curve of my new baby. My heart stopped for a brief second, and the very next second, I fled the water like the shark from Jaws had just been spotted.

From the side of the pool, I went to my mother and told her of my rather unfortunate mistake. I don't remember details, but I would imagine there was a slight whimper as I explained the situation-not a whimper of sorrow, but a whimper of fear that I was about to receive the biggest public butt chewing of all-time. I don't remember exactly how much of my butt my mom chewed that day, but I do remember that she sent me to the dining room to get a bag of dry rice for my phone. Explaining to the waiter what I needed and why I needed it was definitely awkward, but it wasn't as awkward as what happened next. Oh yes, you know what happened next...

Right as I was walking back from the dining room with my rice bag, there it was: her mom's car. My walk turned into a hurry walk, and there was probably an awkward wave thrown in for good measure. I presented the bag to my mom, hoping she would let me go but no, I had to sit there with it as she explained how I should learn responsibility from this whole mishap.

Now to the ladies out there, let's be honest, what's more attractive than a lanky tween with a new phone? Duh! A lanky teen wrapped in a towel, sitting next to his new phone in a bag of rice, as his mom explains what happened to your mom! I believe this is the method DiCaprio used on the Titanic, right?

No, that's not right. She laughed, and I attempted to laugh at myself as believably as I could. If it had been a 5K, this would've been the part where I tripped over a stick and fell on my face. It was really as epic of a failure as there has ever been, the Lord Of The Rings of "smh moments" if you will.

The summer moved on, though. I didn't woo the girl that summer, and I never did. That's okay though, really, because she's actually one of my coolest friends as I write this piece going into my senior year of high school.

To that girl: I hope you're reading this right now and laughing your butt off. You can haze me about it later. :)