The Player's Best Friend

Chapter 1 The Beginning of it All

"You do not. Are you seriously serious?"

How'd I know he'd have this reaction? Must be the fact that I've known him for six years. Gosh does he sound like a teenage girl. Well, all that time spent with them must've rubbed off on him. "You know why I'm talking like this?" Crap. He knew what I was thinking. "It's because if I were a girl, my reaction would've been worse, and the fact that this is, like, your first crush, ever, right?" Good thing I told Summer and Autumn first. Even their reactions were more civilized than his.

"The reason I don't get crushes is because there are, like, no guys here that are crush worthy. And no they don't, Summer and Autumn's reactions were nothing like yours, meaning, way more mature than yours. In fact, you sound more like a girl than all three of us combined!"

"What?!" he said, feigning shock. "For all I know, you could've been crushing on me since the fifth grade. And yeah they do, first hand experience."

"Pshh. You wish. To both."

We've been talking back and forth disjointedly for a while now. He would start something, I would reply a bit, then I would start something and he would reply a bit. We'd always do this during the classes we have together. Usually though, he'd be the one that starts the conversation and I would reply as best as I could with as little words as possible because I need to listen to the teacher. However, today, the teacher was extra boring.

By this time, the people sitting around us listening to the science teacher talk about uselessness were very much annoyed. Though mostly at me. After all there're some girls that stare in our direction nonstop everyday, all the time, while drooling. Don't even get me started on the note passing! We're juniors in high school already! That is so middle school. I mean, it wouldn't be so childish if the content was actually poetic, thoughtful, or not the usual  "you free later?" or some other message meant to be something along the lines of: do it with me!!! Whatever, his sex life has very little to do with me. As long as he doesn't pass any of his STDs to me.

What the teacher's teaching now was in our homework yesterday already. Why is she talking more about it? I turned away from Ernest and tried to think about other, more important things, like how I'm going pull this one off if the teacher ever called on me and I didn't know what she asked. I mean, I really don't want to get into trouble with a teacher. It'd ruin my image. My best friend may leave trails of broken hearts everywhere he goes, but I pride myself in being a good student. I know I need to focus, but intead, my mind wandered off to how the two of us met, all the way back in fifth grade.

We were always in the same school, just not the same class, or the same group of friends. He was the more or less born-to-be-popular kind of person. There are always people crowded around him, and everyone had good things to say about him. During recess, he and his group of friends would always play different forms of tag, and anyone could join. I guess that's one reason he was so popular, his friendliness.

One day, my friends and I could not think of anything to do during recess, so we decided to play tag with Ernest's group. This happened for several days and we became moderate acquaintances. After some time, for some really, stupid, reason, Ernest and I started punching each other back and forth and decided that it was a good way to pass time. Very twisted for ten year olds, I know. One person would punch the other, and the other would get the person back. This also went on for a long time.

In fact, there was this one time we were playing tag, and I was just walking around, not bothering to chase anyone when he ran up to me, said, "I know how to make her run faster!", and punched me in the arm. Which resulted in, the predicted result, of me chasing after him trying to punch him back. In a way, he won that round.