Chapter 1
Young love is a damn lie. No matter what people say, no matter if you’re a little kid, if you’re an adult, it’s a lie. Frankly, being fifteen in this generation, you’re expected to have had your first kiss, a steady puppy love romance going on with the most romantic cliché boy that’s written in stories, books, and fan fictions, all that jazz. In this generation, you’re even expected to have already lost your V-Card at the age fifteen or at least on the verge of doing so. It’s predicted that by the time you’re at least sixteen, you will have a boyfriend, experience young love, do all the things you’re too young to do with him, do all the things you’re too old to do with him (a.k.a. the perks of being a teenager), and just live your life without a single care in the world. Society, they think they know adolescence these days, but they’re wrong.
I’m only fifteen, and for me, I doubt that will ever happen to me. It is not because I am Sylvia Burke, the unlovable, disgusting, creep nerd that nobody could possibly fall for. That’s not who I am at all. It is because well I came to believe, actually believe that I would have that cliché teen romance. All the past crushes I endured didn’t mean anything when I got to the last few days of eighth grade.
First there was Luke, oh Luke, he was that cliché best friend that every girl is supposed to have when they are young, grow up with, and realize you loved them forever. Truthfully, I did like Luke, and he liked me. Back then it wasn’t just like, like is something for your friends, we “like liked” each other. We were only five years old. We both had managed to stay in the same class for kindergarten and first grade, until he moved away. He gave me a good friendship, and to this day I wonder how he’s doing, but I have no clue where he is, looks like, or his relationship status, not that I even care much to know.
After my early childhood crush on Luke, it took me three years to develop another one, his name started with an L too, but since I know where he attends now, I’d rather just use a code name as Mr. Tall because in fact, he was really tall. We were both known to like each other, that even without telling people, everyone in the school’s class of 2017 knew that we had a crush on the other. That lasted for 2-ish years. It wasn’t until he’d already moved away in sixth grade, that in seventh grade we had a “long” distance relationship over Facebook chatting and a failure to meet again. He ended up stop responding to me, and I never looked back.
Even though we technically “dated” in seventh grade I had a crush on this other guy code named Bad Boy or at least that is what I just made up because frankly I can’t remember having a code name for him because there was no need since he knew about my liking him. He never liked me in return but, he enjoyed being the boyfriend of my best friend, Jennifer, for a good while. When I found out that Mr. Tall had gotten a girlfriend in sixth grade, I decided it was time to move along. The reason why I call him Bad Boy is because he just didn’t care about anything for that matter. He wrote a paragraph worth of a mock writing test, then drew on the back, he called girls bitches and got away with it, probably has been to a few red cup parties and etc. He got expelled and arrested in the eighth grade though, for smoking and selling weed at school, sort of ironically this is how I developed a new crush.
Code named Justin Bieber, because he had swooped hair and his initials were J. B., I had not even noticed he had existed at our school until Bad Boy left, but I developed feelings for him too. He was funny, adorkable, and sociable unlike my last crush. By the end of the year, May 21st to be exact, I told him that I’d had a crush on him. I didn’t actually speak it, I was too nervous to that even my leg was shaking from nervousness, but I’d wrote down on a piece of paper ‘I have a crush on you’ and showed it to him, let him read it, in which he nodded as if accepting this information, though he wouldn’t do anything about it.
