Bookish London

Chapter 16 - Kyle

As we left each other go our separate ways on this late Saturday evening, I start to think back to the crazy day that has just passed.

Surely, half of our conversations was made up of bickering back and forth without reaching any real point, but apart from that, I must admit I had a great time, unexpectedly.

As I always thought, but never bothered to confirm so, Elizabeth has that kind of light that instantly makes you want to sit comfortably literally anywhere and simply listen to her rant about whatever crosses her mind.

She has that style, like...I don't really know how to put my thoughts about her into words, but just know this: she's definitely something...or someone, actually.

It's hard to describe her, seeing as I've known her yes, my whole academic life, but also, I haven't really known her at all...just studied her at a distance, trying to set a path for myself, which did not include falling, ever, in love with her.

I guess it goes without saying that that plan has failed. Utterly and completely.

I believe this is it, my realisation of my feelings, or rather, my inclinations, towards Elizabeth. She cannot know any of this yet, though. She'll just take me for one of those prankster guys we have at our school, who play with other people's feelings as if they were toys meant to be broken.

I hope one day she shall see that I am quite different from them, despite this cold, sarcastic façade I wear since I was in middle school.

I do hope she understands that what I was born into doesn't define me as a person, my actions and my words do.

Because I've always been taught that money and fame make you great. Not friends. Not books. And definitely not love.

But I've grown to learn that this is completely untrue. And Elizabeth is one of the reasons why. One of the only reasons.

Since we were kids, we both aspired for greatness, wanting to top each other in class and trying to find ways to do it in the outside world, too, competing in writing contests, bake sales, getting cast in plays performed on the big West-End theatres we so often visited as spectators...there was nothing we weren't reaching out to grab for ourselves.

Ahh...the innocence of youth. As we turned twelve, and puberty was at the end of the tunnel, waiting its turn to tumble our lives upside down, everything changed.

I had tried to keep up the same image of the good, almost nerdy, reader boy I had in primary school, but it didn't roll as smoothly through my fellow classmates' eyes. We didn't call it bullying, at least I didn't, because when you go through something as painful as finding your favourite copy of your book torn out and marked upon with hideous and disrespectful things you had a hard time understanding on your own, you didn't sit there and label everything. You rolled through it, for better and for worse.

My broken book wasn't the worst of my problems, anyway. I had to face things like the stealing of important essays I had to hand in, and having the teacher be profusely disappointed with me and calling my parents to talk about it...but the worst of all was when I had that important presentation about The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, which my favourite teacher had asked me to do, and the older kids decided I should be locked inside the janitor's closet, after the shoved me in it during lunch break. 

Nobody came looking for me, because they made the lame excuse, I later discovered, that I did not feel well and had gone to the infirmary (which I definitely was not, obviously). I stayed locked in there, in the dark, knowing I was missing one of my most important lessons of my whole school week, and not being able to do anything about it. This event fuelled my always-growing Athazagoraphobia, also known as the fear of being forgotten, or the fear of forgetting someone/something. 

I know it's kind of irrational to feel afraid of being forgotten at barely thirteen years old, but I did. And the screaming I forced out of my lungs did nothing to make me be herd by anyone, because they were all having classes. Except for me.

But at one point, a voice answered. I didn't know it at that moment in the middle of April, but I would soon connect that voice to a person so very endearing to me. You guessed it; it was Elizabeth.

She heard my knocking and constant yelling, and as she was coming back from the bathroom along the hall, she noticed the thing (I still don't know to this day what was blocking the door) blocking me inside the closet and removed it without a second thought. After hearing the door come free from its lock, I burst out, sweating half my body weight in cold shivers of fear, feeling like I was on the verge of tears.

I thanked her so very much, but it was not nearly enough for what that moment meant, and means, for me. Slowly, she helped me calm down and I went to set myself right in front of one of the bathroom mirrors, while she went to talk in private with our teacher about the situation. If I recall correctly, Elizabeth never seemed to take rest s she searched for the authors of my scary experience. She was and still is, a force of nature. Once she set herself to one goal, nobody could avoid her achieving it.

I thought this throughout the tube ride home, dinner with my family and almost an hour lying awake in my bed...so long for sleeping my good nine or ten hours...

The truth is, Elizabeth has changed my life in so many little ways I couldn't enumerate them if I could. That girl deserves the world, but maybe I'm not the best choice in people who should give it to her.

I'm possibly the worst choice, because I would fight her over every single detail of our relationship, and I would never be able to accept the fact that she is an icon in the making and I'm just the journalist behind the interviews with big Hollywood stars. And I don't mean an icon as in "she's got a great body" or "she should be a model or an actress". No.

I mean an icon like those activists for climate change or those women who speak up for feminism and the freedom of women. She's an icon because she knows where she stands and where she stands is, more often than not, on the right side of matters. There's nothing to add.

She knows her value as a person, as a voice, as someone with ambitions and talent and ideas, and she uses it to the benefit of all. She will do great things when she's older. I know that for certain.

And this is the last thought I have before falling asleep, and the first I have when I wake up and go through the next day.