Need You To Need Me | Jenlisa

XLIII.

Everywhere her eyes turned, they saw black. In the gowns her classmates were wearing, in Jisoo's hair who was standing right next to her, giggling with Chaeyoung as the principal was busy trying to make sure the microphone worked for her speech. And lastly, she saw black in Lisa's eyes, her pupils dilated as she looked at her, a smile on her face as she brushed her hand lightly against hers.

"We did it" she whispered to Jennie. Not because it was a secret, nor because she didn't want anybody else to listen. Jennie knew that those three words meant a lot more than they gave out. It was not just about graduating. It was about them, the two of them and the four of them.

So, she intertwined her fingers with Lisa's steady ones and smiled, too. "We did" she said, gladly welcoming, for once, the warmth that was quickly making space in her chest for something she did not know she had been waiting for all this time.

She kept looking at Lisa even when she turned her head to look at the stage they would soon walk on to receive their diplomas. And in those few moments the girl spent unaware of being observed, Jennie could not help herself reminiscing all the years that led to that exact moment, seeming to have gone by both too quickly and infinitely too slow at the same time. A lifetime together.

It was the first day of elementary school and Jennie had never dealt well with change. Her parents had to work early so they could not take her to school. Entrusting Agatha to do so, instead of her mom, she had been the one to pick out Jennie's outfit for her first day of school in the same way she had been the one to tie her hair into two tiny pigtails. She looked adorable and her parents were not there to tell her, let alone hold her hand through one of the scariest days of a child's life.

"My name's Lalisa, but people usually call me Lisa" that's when another five year old girl came up to her, wearing way too many colors in one outfit for it to be a casualty and grinning her toothless smile to greet her.

Jennie slowly bowed her head to the exuberant girl in front of her before muttering her name so quietly that she wasn't sure Lalisa, or better Lisa, had gotten it.

"Jennie! Such a pretty name! My auntie's name is Jenny, but only I call her that. Her real name is Jennifer. Is your name Jennifer, too?" The girl spoke so fast that Jennie was too busy trying to keep up with her to be intimidated.

"Just Jennie" she answered, this time a bit louder. Her full name was indeed Jennifer but she did not like it. She was only called that way when her parents were mad at her but she did not tell Lisa that.

"Our names have the same numbers of letters, we should be friends" Lisa said again, her excitement through the roof as she took Jennie's hand with hers and led to the opposite side of the classroom, to her desk.

Jennie was too shy and too fascinated by Lisa's character to tell her that their names could not possibly be the same length. But, she kept that to herself. Something was telling her that it would have made Lisa's huge smile disappear. She did not know a lot of things yet, but she knew she did not want that to happen.

"Best friends!" Lisa shouted again, dragging the shortest girl around as they both started giggling at Lisa's silliness.

Too bad, nobody told five year old Jennie that change didn't stop after elementary school. Life was changing, continuously. And she had to find it for herself the hard way: by living.

Middle schoolers don't know who they are. They talk about thinks they know nothing about and do things they have never done before. But the worst is when they say they do things they know nothing about.

Jennie had just turned twelve and she had never kissed anyone. But just like her, neither had the other sixty seven kids in her grade. It would be nothing to worry about if not for the fact that people lie. They start in middle school and keep going all their life. So, how could twelve year old Jennie know that the boys and girls who claimed to have such fervent romantic life were lying? The answer's easy, she simply couldn't. Yet, just like them, she involuntary did: she started a rumor about herself.