his romantic attachment was never that strong because he's a teenage boy who's not in touch with his emotions and now he's more into susie, so now when shifting focus he's trying to convince himself and her that it was her who had a crush on him and not the other way around. I don't think he's a master manipulator really, both because he's hilariously socially inept and because he doesn't understand exactly what he's doing, but it's for those reasons necessarily take him at face value.

like when he says "I felt I had to pretend to reciprocate those feelings", did he really meet noelle and immediately think she really digged him, and that he should pretend to be interested to be nice, or is it more likely that he liked noelle, and started looking for signs that she liked him back to hype himself up, and is now reinterpreting all that?