It’s amazing really how much can change when high school ends. The summer had just begun and all my exams were finally through and I could at last kick back and relax with my friends. Towards the end of my high school career I had made a few new friends, not with popular kids but with art kids who I finally had something in common with. This brought a whole new friendship circle for me without leaving my old one behind.
It just so happened that my new friends also happened to be quite close friends with the boy I had had a crush on at twelve (not a conscious decision I assure you). However, I never really saw him, he and his girlfriend were very much an isolated couple who had no interest in socialising outside the two of them. I won’t lie and tell you that I wasn’t attracted to him anymore, because I was. It was just a no go zone: he had a stable girlfriend, and even if he didn’t he wouldn’t be interested in me.
Or at least that’s what I had thought until my best friend Hayley came over one day during the first week of the summer holiday. She was a tiny thing and fair skinned and haired. A little pixie. She also happened to be close friends with Jamie, who I had been in love with for the last five years.
‘You know that Jamie and Bella broke up right?’
I’ll admit that I hadn’t been fully paying attention to what she had been talking about before this, but she had certainly found a way to get me to concentrate on her conversation.
‘What?’
‘Yeah, she broke up with him, said it wasn’t working anymore.’
My head reeled with this news. It was something that I really hadn’t been expecting. Jamie and Bella had always seemed so close. Sometimes I would catch glimpses of them in the corridors holding hands and smiling.
‘Wow.’
Hayley smiled at me, maybe a little knowingly.
‘He’s coming to the cinema with us tomorrow.’
Panic set in. Not slowly and uncomfortably like I would expect it to, but immediate and sickening. I would have to speak to him, and act normal, and function like a regular human being. Oh my god.
‘Anyway, he lives just around the corner from you, so I told him I’d give you both a lift if he came here so it was easier. That’s ok right?’
That’s it, I was definitely going to vomit. Jamie was going to be here? In my house? With me in it? I was definitely dreaming, there was no way this was real.
‘Erm…um… yeah, of course, that’s totally fine. Not weird at all.’
Hayley simply laughed at me whilst shaking her head. To her the conversation was over and it was as easy as that. To me it felt like a whole war had just started inside of me. What was I going to wear? What was I going to say? Shit. What had I gotten myself into? I was so awkward it was painful to witness. I couldn’t just let this boy stroll into my house as though I hadn’t spent the last five years cooped up in it thinking about him.
