Fan Fiction ❯ Dream ❯ Chapter 1

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Silent tears streamed down my face as I stared, unfocused, at the wall in front of me. The door was hard and cold against my back, but that didn’t motivate me to move. I was vaguely aware of the screams of my mother, and the enraged crying of my brother in the background. Some could say I was too young to fall in love… and I could call them clueless.

He wasn’t particularly attractive or smart, or funny, or charming or admirable. A bit of everything I guess. He wasn’t popular and none of the girls paid attention to him. He was considered kind of weird, actually, if truth be told. He had some strange interests, like kung-fu and eighties mullet bands, but hey, he liked what he liked and he wasn’t afraid to show it. I think that must have made people respect him, because everybody liked him all the same. Everybody except me. I hated him. He was pompous jerk; self-centered, conceited and over-confident. We were in the 7th grade at the time, and I thought I knew it all.
The teachers had a tough time giving him a seat where he wouldn’t talk to anyone, because he had so many friends. So who better to place him by than me, right? I suppose that was their reasoning, but I hated them for it anyways.
He was probably about as smart as I was, and everything between us was a competition. I remember one incident where he was gloating over getting one mark better on a test than me, and I told him he was conceited. “Confidence and pride” he told me. For some reason, that stuck with me until this day. We fought about everything and nothing, and there was nothing more pleasing than taking jabs at each other. It started small, we slowly came to hate each other less and less, considering it would be very hard to absolutely loathe someone you have to spend around seven hours a day with. Not that we were friends, you could say we tolerated each other.
Then things started to change for me. A funny look here, a small favor there and I found myself actually starting to like him. There is no way you could ever imagine how hard that was for me to admit, even to myself. Slowly but surely, as we moved into the 8th grade, I liked him more and more. I really couldn’t tell you how that came to be, I can only guess.
It would be an understatement, if you said that I didn’t have a good outlook on the male species. My mother had been married twice and was recently divorced. We were extremely close, and she told me almost everything. There were so many stories about the abuse she had gotten, the drugs, the alcohol, the gambling she had had to deal with from her first husband and my dad. She never told me these things before the divorce, it seamed to hit me all at once and I realized that my father wasn’t the hero I always thought he was.
It gave me a different outlook on the world. All men had become demons, and the more I paid attention to it, the more their actions backed up my notions. My father and I grew very distant, we couldn’t talk anymore like we used to. I couldn’t seem to find anything in common between us. And he made chauvinistic comments that I hadn’t noticed before. The boys at school were no different. They were self-absorbed, sex-crazed jerks (I have reason to doubt very highly that any of them had any experience whatsoever, but they thought were proving something by talking about things they didn’t really understand). But not him. He was the only one of the bunch. As they all let me down time and time again, he didn’t. I guess he became a beacon of hope for me, that there was hope for the male species and that there were at least a few normal people out of those I had mentally categorized as “the demons”.
I considered myself above boys. They really did have pathetic existences, I honestly didn’t believe they thought at all. I considered him my equal. After all the months of evenly matched competition, I had finally come to respect him, which was a huge accomplishment on his part.
But half way through the eighth grade, we stopped talking, I don’t know why, but it’s not like we were all that close anyways. That didn’t stop me though. The moments when we did talk became important to me. I became nervous around him. I had no experience with guys, I wasn’t exactly a social butterfly. So I just did what I always had, I threw sarcastic comments at him and otherwise ignored him completely. When asked about him, I would answer as I always had, I hated him. It didn’t matter to me if it was true or not. My worst fear was that someone would find out. I couldn’t let that happen.
I continued to watch from afar, I couldn’t seem too interested. I tried to convince myself more and more that I didn’t like him as time went by. I shouldn’t like him, when we were younger he was rude to me and played mean tricks on me (one involving glue in my hair comes to mind). Even so, I could still find myself staring into space, thinking about him when I let my mind wander.
I entertained myself by letting myself think he liked me back by over-analyzing things he said or did. Every once in a while he’d throw a compliment my way, laugh at my jokes or help me with something I was doing, but I knew that I was kidding myself. He was just like that, really sweet and thoughtful, that only made me like him more.
I would have to say I had reached an all time low. I didn’t act on anything though. Nobody liked him, he was just a weirdo that was everybody’s pal, I had no reason to worry about anybody stealing him. Eighth grade graduation came and went, and soon, I had started high school. I had so much going on, I completely forgot about him for a while, we talked occasionally because we were in the same English class, but I had just come to a new school, chocked full of brand new boys, so I didn’t pay much attention to him. It didn’t last long. Soon, the enthusiasm of having new guys wore off, and I realized that they were all the same bastards I had known in grade school, there were just more of them now. My infatuation came back with a vengeance. Not that I would do anything about that.
In the time that I had adjusted to high school, I made some new friends, one particularly good one. A friend of a friend of mine, I guess you could say. Anyways, she and I became pretty close. She also had been one of my crush’s better friends for a while. An added bonus for me, even though I had my suspicions about the two.
One night, I had had a fairly good day, but it was ruined by my mom and brother fighting. Ever since my dad left, my brother had become very rebelliant, and my mom had a hard time controlling him. My brother threw a tantrum over something unimportant, and now they were having a full fledged row.
I was talking to my friend on msn to try to preoccupy myself. It was probably the strangest msn conversation I had ever had. She asked me if I was a judgmental person, I honestly told her “sometimes” and asked her why. She told me that she was just wondering how I would react if she told me some things about herself. I immediately feared for her safety, thinking that she was talking about a suicide attempt, or a drug addiction. She assured me it wasn’t. She then asked me if had ever been in love, I answered her “no”. I wasn’t about to spill my soul to her, I hadn’t even told my best friends. Then she said she thought she was in love. I asked her if it was the guy I liked. She asked me why I asked and said he was a friend and awesome. I just said because they were pretty tight and rolled my eyes at the “awesome” comment. Inside, I was rejoicing. I tried to guess who it was, but she said that she didn’t think I could handle it and that I would treat her differently if she told me. After some consistent nagging and asking I finally dragged out of her a crucial comment. She said that she had said something that would make me think that I was on the wrong track, then she exited the conversation.
I sat in my computer chair, dumbstruck. It was him. She thought she was in love with him. The information hit me like a ton of bricks. They were close. She had a lot better of a chance with him than I did. This fact wasn’t what hit me the hardest though. It was how much I cared.
I then realized that I had lied to my friend when I told her I had never been in love. I had been in love, I had for a long time, I just didn’t know it.
That was my moment of revelation. My family’s fighting had reached a peak, I had to get away. I went to my room, closed the door and leaned against it. Slowly I slid to the ground and stared blankly into space. I was then hit by an overwhelming urge to cry. And I did just that.
How had I not realized earlier? I had been so busy trying to deny the fact, that I had missed what was being screamed in my face. “I love him.” I whispered aloud. Hearing the words made me even more sure that it was true.
All that time, spent watching from afar, and now he was beyond my reach. I couldn’t act on my feelings and hurt my friend. She had trusted me enough to tell me her secret (something I had never been able to do to anyone) and I just couldn’t do that to her, no matter what the cost to me. She had won before the competition even began by admitting it to me first. I felt like I had been cheated out of my chance because of my own failure to see what was staring me in the face.
I guess there was never really much hope anyways. I would probably have gone through high school watching him and waiting for something that would never happen. Now I would be free to move on, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. I couldn’t help but cry about how he would never know about how he broke my heart.
It was a beautiful dream while it lasted, but I should have realized that a dream… was all that it could’ve been.