It Was a Typo | ✓

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

It'd been almost a year since my little Snapchat incident – that is, accidentally sending my crush, Bradley, the ugliest selfie imaginable – and honestly? It may have been the best most-embarrassing-move I had ever made, because he'd ended up loving it, and that then led to a series of acknowledging nods when we passed each other in the school corridors, which transitioned to phone numbers being switched, to texting, and then...

Friendship.

Which, okay, I'll admit wasn't exactly what I'd hoped for when he first texted me a cute little 'Hi' (with a smiley face, which, to a fifteen year old girl, is practically a marriage proposal). But whatever. I was fine with being Just Friends. Bradley Cooper (yes, like the actor) was smart and cute and funny—with his immense popularity being a nice little bonus. Being Just Friends with him in itself seemed like a huge privilege to me. Which I guess it was, even though my best friend Moira was quick to tell me that that was just the sort of mentality that perpetuated the whole High School Social Hierarchy thing.

"That's elitist thinking, Mina," she'd told me but whatever, Moira was way too politically involved to pay attention to or take my teenage woes seriously.

Anyway, she likes girls and I guess maybe that's one reason for why she doesn't get the whole Boy-Obsessed-Meera thing.

I knew that, despite Moira's criticisms, my friendship with Bradley – and my feelings for him – began to run a lot deeper a few months into our friendship. The texts between us grew to be more frequent, less jokey, and more—well, I don't know, meaningful I guess? It wasn't like we shared our deepest, darkest secrets with each other at the dead of night (Did admitting to stealing an extra fry in the school canteen count as a dark secret?). Still. Talking to Bradley was fun, and it became less about talking to Bradley, fittest guy in our year and more about Bradley, the weirdo who was obsessed—no, really, obsessed—with Hayao Miyazaki. It became less about his swishy, uncommonly soft blonde hair and more about the contents of his brain.

"Which should've been your top priority in the first place," was Moira's input when I told her of my revelations.

Whatever, Moira.

By the eighth month into my Just Friends-ship with Bradley, I'd already realized I had unwittingly decided to fall madly in love with him. And I wasn't being dramatic. I don't care what anyone says. Fifteen is a perfectly reasonable age to fall in love. Like really fall in love. I didn't see what all the shame was about. I mean, my Nani was married at fifteen. Or was it seventeen? Anyway, the point is, she was married very young and, okay, it was arranged but she'd still fallen in love with Nana, hadn't she?

Not that I expected to get married to Bradley at age fifteen. I'll admit, that was a little ludicrous but I did seriously consider it from time to time. A girl can dream, right?

Of course I knew I could never tell him about how I actually felt. Even a big dreamer like me knew when to wake up, where I had to draw the line. Despite Moira's protests that being in or out of someone's league wasn't an actual thing but merely 'a social construct designed to make us feel like we need to look for love within a certain limit', I couldn't help but think how badly it would go down if I were to confess my feelings to Bradley. He would laugh.

Okay, I now knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't actually do that. But he would turn me down some way.

So that had been it for me. I knew I'd reached the end of the line. Game over. Friends forever. And by the end of the school year, I'd been resigned to my fate of Singledom.