Being in love with a straight boy is a straight-up nightmare. Especially if it's been like that for years. But it's even worse when he's your best friend's brother, who has a girlfriend that's there to remind you how straight he is. That's when it b...
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I still remember the first time I met Mason.
Ever since I sat down next to an energetic kid who went by the name of Jackson Prill, all I heard for weeks on end was the ceaseless complaining about his brother, Mason. Nothing else. Mason was supposedly the most annoying sibling one could ever ask for, and considering the fact that Jackson liked just about every single kid in our class, he'd given me the impression that I wouldn't like him, either. So when he invited me over to his house, I was not particularly looking forward to meeting him. I thought he would just be another one of those older siblings that couldn't and shouldn't be relevant to the lives of ten-year-olds, because all they cared about was parties, drinking beer, getting high and getting laid, but Mason was only two years older. He was just a kid like us. He wasn't all that different.
Jackson and I were playing video games on his PlayStation 2 in his room, sitting against the baby blue wall that would later become pitch black because it supposedly helped him sleep, when Mason came to harass us. Without a care in the world, he came in, plopped down on his little brother's bed, and said, "You suck."
He never should have said that.
"No, I don't," Jackson retorted, reaching out to punch his brother on the leg. "I have way more points than Kenny."
Not quite sure what to make of the older boy with dark curls and an upturned nose rather than the short spikes and straight nose Jackson had, I stayed silent and watched the two argue over the video game until Jackson got so mad that he almost broke Mason's arm. This was apparently a normal occurrence. Their mother came in to pull the two boys apart and gave them a speech I'd hear many more times in the future. "Play nice. You have a guest over."
They grumbled and played nice. They had a guest over.
When Mason asked me if I could hand him my controller, I did so without question. Perhaps it was because I felt bad at the sight of the bruise on his arm, and perhaps it was because Jackson insisted I should just ignore the boy, but at the end of the day, it was probably just because he wasn't as annoying as Jackson made him out to be.
Quite the contrary; he seemed nice. While Jackson had that irritating but amusing way of never shutting up, Mason was interesting to listen to. And from that day on, I couldn't stop listening to him.
Fast forward to middle school, I finally started to understand why I liked Mason in a different way than why I liked Jackson.
There was a girl. A blonde girl about the size of a bunny. A girl with big blue eyes and earrings shaped like a pair of horseshoes. A girl who walked up to Mason after school one week, and the next, was holding his hand. Always a girl.
"My brother has a girlfriend," said Jackson, nodding his head in his direction, in the sense that 'my brother' was, quite obviously, Mason. I knew, he knew, everyone knew, yet he kept saying it.
