VALOR

Part 3

After we started really talking about the important things, we became best friends, but I was never satisfied. I wanted something more. So one Valentine's day, I decided to talk to you about it.

"Hey, Valerie. I want to talk to you. Uh, alone."

"Okay..."

"I... I just need to tell you how I feel."

"Okay, cut to the chase, here."

"Tt's just... We've grown so close over the past year, and I think--"

"No, no, no, no, oh god, I know where this is going. I SWEAR I am not hitting on your or crushing on you at all. You're just a really good person to talk to and that's it, I swear."

"Oh... you don't like me?"

"God, no. I wouldn't want to make things awkward. Besides, it would be, like, incest to me!"

I cringed at the idea of incest. "Oh... okay. Um, good. Yeah. Well, uh..."

I was saved by the bell and I ran for my sixth period class. So much for candid displays of affection on Valentine's Day. They don't end well.

It hurt. I was so broken up about it, that I hardly talked to you the rest of the year, which lost me my only friend, which just made my depression worse. that that summer, I took the knife that my grandfather had given me for camping and tried to slit my own wrists. Fortunately I panicked and ended up breaking  the knife. I never told you because I didn't want you to worry. Please don't cry, it's not your fault. It's my fault for letting you matter to me so much.

You spent summer attending art shows and doing summer stock and doing SAT prep, and I spent summer alone and miserable. I managed to avoid you the first few weeks of school, but when my schedule changed and we had the same lunch again, and I decided to seek you out one day.

I found you, and the rest of the gang, and decided to keep coming to lunch for the company.

This, I think is where the soul-bearing begins. My sister Katie, as you know has Down syndrome, but she is very high-functioning. But when she was little she wasn't so high-functioning, and our grandfather took advantage of her. In all honesty, she wasn't hurt by it. She was just doing whatever would make Pap-pap happy. The rest of us were the ones broken up by it.

So I was standing in the line for food wallowing in my own problems. The trial against my grandfather, my own flesh and blood, was coming up and I was going to have to testify. I picked up various food items and tried to focus on you guys's table discussion nearby.

"I am so tired," you said.  "At this point, exhaustion isn't a state of being anymore, it's a part of my personality."

"I know right?" said Daniel.  "I was at the Salem Haunted House until like 1 am last night and--"

"Don't talk to me about tired until you play football." Jason.

"Uh, excuse me," said Valerie. "Jason, you did theatre once, so you can empathize with me here. None of you can talk to me about tired until you have to get up for school at 6 am, attend 7 classes, rehearse after school until six, take an hour for dinner break before the show, BUT you have to use it to get special effects makeup done, and then on top of that a show with a 7:30 curtain that lasts until eleven at night, which puts homework time from 11:30 to 2 am. And, on top of all of that, make sure you've created some good art work to sell at the trade show next week. Ha. I win."

"Yeah, good point. The Crucible was nearly the death of me."

"True. I don't know how you lived through it."