Most of us experience some form of PTSD when looking back at our earliest high school dating days.
It’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, and as a young teen, you’re not even sure that you want to formally date someone – but you certainly have your fair share of crushes.
For the sake of saving our own humiliation, most of us kept our crushes to our secret diaries, but the brave few tried to act on them.
Dakota Nelton was one of these people.
The high school sophomore from Gray, Louisiana, didn’t have a date for the homecoming dance – so he summoned the courage to ask a friend.
This was the first time Dakota had dared to ask a girl out, so it’s safe to say there was a lot of nerves on his end.
Still, he planned out the moment and wanted to do it properly, so he made a poster to pop the question.
But when the moment happened, the girl said no – and her fellow classmates mocked Dakota and trod on his poster.
Speaking to WGNO New Orleans, Dakota admitted:
“It was actually a pretty tough moment standing in a small circle with that one shake of the head and you just got to find your way out of that circle.”
With his head down, he tried to leave as quickly as possible. Ideally, the moment would linger in his classmates’ memories for a week, two weeks, tops, but it never works like that in high school.
Dakota only learned later, when a video of his rejection ended up online, that someone had filmed the moment.
In the video, you can see Dakota approaching the girl with his hand-written poster and what looks like a bag of candy.
The next minute, his face drops as the girl rejects him, right there, in the middle of a corridor full of students.
It might just be the saddest thing we’ve seen this year, but instead of patting him on the back in support, his school mates can be heard laughing and shouting about his rejection.
Thankfully, the video of Dakota was seen by the right people – and something incredible was soon to go down.
On a school day that Dakota thought was like any other, as he was walking down the corridor where his rejection had taken place, he came across a row of 13 girls.
Each girl was holding a sign… and then it clicked: they were asking Dakota to go to the homecoming dance – with all of them!
In the end, Dakota ended up getting the last laugh, because he had not one, but 13 girls who wanted to be his date.
He said:
“I felt like one of the popular kids in the school, which I’m not.”
The 13 girls had got together after watching the video of Dakota’s rejection to show him that he was “loved and worthy, and deserves to be going to homecoming with somebody”.
They said that they vowed to see him dancing on the dance floor – and we can bet he was up there with the rest of them!
This story questions the tradition of homecoming proposals, which are becoming more extravagant each year.
With it still traditionally being the “man’s job” to make these proposals, it puts an awful lot of pressure on teenage boys in high school to find a date.
At least in this case, Dakota’s story had a happy ending. You can watch the video below to see the moment he was approached by his 13 homecoming dates.
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