The Experiment (Draft)

Girls

Lydia:

When they entered the closet, it only seemed to make things worse. Being there in their arms ruined me, knowing I was, and never would be good enough for either of them. They were too sweet, too attractive, too popular to be with me. I knew that as soon as this experiment was over, so was anything that we ever had. Lucas would go back to being every girl's daydream, just like he was my daydream for so long, and he wouldn't date any of them, not wanting to hurt any of them. But in the process of keeping our hearts intact, he would break them all with uncertainty. Owen would go back to his string of girls waiting to date him, picking and choosing the prettiest one, or the funniest one, or the smartest one, and none of them would be me.

I couldn't handle walking out there in my bathing suit, knowing that all they would be thinking about how much prettier another girl would be in my place. For crying out loud, I wore the sexiest dress in my closet, and they didn't say a thing!

"Lydia, please, I beg, tell me what's wrong!" Luke pleads.

"Guys, honestly, you wouldn't understand." I explain, and I know they wouldn't. They would never have to worry about not being good enough, not getting enough attention from the opposite gender. For heaven's sake, I couldn't even get a pair of high school boys to think I look good!

"Well, at least let us try to understand!" It was Owen's turn to plead. I weighed the options of telling them.

"Guys, I just feel as though you would rather be with another girl, a prettier one. I wore the best dress I had, and you guys didn't say a thing. You all have girls who have better personalities and better bodies than me waiting for your attention. You both deserve better girls than I, girls who aren't selfish, girls who take better care of their bodies, girls who don't cry over themselves on their closet floors.

" You don't even need to worry about girls like me, girls who have huge purple gashes on their thighs, girls who only hate themselves for what they have become, girls who care more about their own problems than others. I'm so sorry I'm wasting your time, that I ever liked, no, loved  you Luke, because I did. I gave my whole heart and attention to you, and I never even did anything about it, and it's my fault I let myself fall for you as hard as I did.

"I created this false image of you in my mind, a Luke that would save me from myself, and it seems as though on one can do that. I'm too far gone to let anyone help me realize that I'm not worthless, and it took me so so so long to realize that I might be able to be lovable, but just as soon as I did that, I only continued to drag myself down with fantasies of you caring for me, fantasies that maybe you could love me a fraction of the way I loved you.

"I came home after homecoming and cried harder than I ever have before, and I don't even know why. Those tears seemed to clean out my attachment to you. I still thought of you as perfect, though you are not. Nobody is. I suppressed the feelings I had for you, and never really got over them. Being here with you brought them out, and with the new knowledge that you felt attracted to me left me in a predicament. Do I want to risk you rejecting me for real? Do I let you in and be susceptible to double the pain I already felt for you? I still don't know if I can believe  that you can accept my many imperfections, and like me, and I don't know if I ever will be."

It's dead silent in the closet, and Owen looks at me with with a hard look. I am so scared to look at Luke, now that he realized how much I felt for him, so I don't look him in the eye. All I see is he jaw clenching and unclenching.

We sit like that for at least half an hour. I eventually stop sobbing, and I pick myself back up together again before we get in the hot tub. Not a word was ever said about it all night long.