The "almost friends" zone

Many of us have heard of the so called friend zone, and some of us have experienced it, myself included; But I have also experienced something even worse: What I call the “almost friend zone”. This is where a boy likes a girl, but is happy to settle for being “just friends”, and the girl pretends to be friends with him even though she wants nothing to do with him. There was a girl in my high school that I used to have a crush on since the fourth grade. She said she wanted to be friends, but in reality she went to great lengths to avoid me… sometimes. We had many mutual friends, but she would never be around when I was hanging out with a friend of hers. Sometimes she would come up to me and say hi in the hallway. Other times I would say hello to her and she would blatantly ignore me. She, a friend and I all went to junior prom as a group of friends. She barely spoke to me the rest of the school year. One night that summer, she snuck out in the middle of the night to meet me. We spent a good two hours just sitting in the dark, talking, at a park nearby her house. For the rest of the summer I tried to make plans with her, but she was always “busy”. At one point a friend asked me to come over to help fix their computer. When I went over, she was there. I said hi and she didn’t answer. The whole time I was working on the computer, she refused to acknowledge my existence. I’m still not sure what happened between us, but I have realized that whatever it was just isn’t worth it.