Maddie's Girls

Chapter 21

I'm not selfish nor am I jealous.

I don't think I am, anyway.

Ever since I was a little girl, my parents taught me to share my toys, my food, my space. They wanted more kids, they wanted to adopt mostly, but they wanted more kids and they didn't want me to be an 'everything is mine' type of person, so from a young age, they taught me to share.

I think the problem with that was that certain things were not mine but I have always had a deep need within me to protect them, to keep those things safe from anything that could cause it harm.

One of those things was my dad's music sheets. Those were precious to me that I kept them in a safe at the bank. I didn't want to see them, touch them or even breathe near them out of fear that they might somehow break. Another thing would be a little clay toy that Maddison got me for my birthday when she went to Morocco with her family when we were 11. I kept it in a little transparent box at the top of my bookshelf, away from anything that could break it. Another thing would be Mum records, her record player with all the music she adored. I kept that home because I didn't trust grandma to look after those properly.

So far, these things were always material which didn't speak too well of me but— there was this one thing, one person for whom I've always felt the need to protect even though I knew perfectly well he didn't need my protection.

That's just what you do when you love someone, right? You want to wrap them up in bubble wrap and keep them away from anything that could hurt them. My mum once told me love is very complex and you should be careful with it, just like everything else in life. If you give a plant too much water, you'll smother it, drown it. Yet if you don't give it enough, you'll kill it.

There was such thing as too much love but that didn't always mean it was a bad thing. And up to a certain point, I see what she meant because right then I was afraid that I, maybe, suffocated Danny so much that he felt like he couldn't come to me to tell me about his things, not like he did with Maddison.

And that both hurt me and made me slightly jealous.

I watched from afar as he talked to Maddison. She was finding whatever he was telling her very amusing but he looked frustrated, annoyed even. We were in tutoring and Mr Miller, our tutor, had been us in pairs to do a 100-word essay about the thing we liked the most this past year.

I was doing it with Cassie because as soon as they said pairs, she came rushing to me and Nina went to Becca. I would've liked doing it with Danny but he ignored my stares and went to Maddison instead. It had been a week since I ran into him, Maggie and Lottie having sex and it everything has been a little awkward.

Becca told me I was perhaps exaggerating a little. Nina told me to talk to Lottie and Cassie laughed pretty much all the time.

"If you keep staring, you'll make them look at us," Cassie sighed, pushing my hand away from my book and copying my work. "I don't know what's up Mr Miller's ass, giving us homework when we got four months left and tutoring homework as well... he needs a girlfriend."

"Have you talked to Nina yet?" I asked her, tapping my pen on the table. Danny shook his head, blowing air out of his mouth in an annoyed manner. Maddison looked around, making me look away. I gave all my attention to Cassie; her smirk was long gone and her posture is tense. "I thought you liked Nina."

"I like Nina."

"Then why are you being weird about the kiss?"

Right after Nina told me, I cornered Cassie. She told me pretty much what led to the kiss and all but she wouldn't tell me why she was being weird about it. I thought if I annoyed her enough with it, she'd eventually tell me.