It was the very beginning of junior year, that day instead of the usual nervousness that
comes with the first day of school I felt extraordinarily calm. I knew everyone who would be
there, knew how they felt about me, knew how I felt about them, there was nothing up to chance. Nothing to worry over. Then the unspeakable happened, two unknown variables I hadn’t accounted for: new students.
Of course, my problem wasn’t that I hated the new kids, it was that I fell in love with one
of them. I saw him that first day, he had brown hair, eyes, and skin. His wide doe eyes made him look pure and harmless with his soft fluffy hair. Every time I looked at him I saw something new and more perfect than before. I would say he was my type but before him I hadn’t had one, he made himself my type whether he knew it or not.
He was also silent, he almost never spoke and when he did it was deep quiet pulses of
sound. This added to his tendency to stare openly and with unparalleled intensity made him the worst possible concoction of boy for me. He was my escape, every day I would stare at his side profile from two seats over and four seats back. My budding obsession with him was clocked by my friends only three days in.
They tried to tease me at first, always pointing him out in the halls or telling me he got a
haircut but this proved faulty. My feelings were too strong to be embarrassing, too strong to be
hidden away, too strong to not be reciprocated. Or so I believed.
The rest of the story is as cliché as these stories get. Girl falls in love with boy. Girl
obsesses over boy. Boy stares at girl. Girl becomes more obsessed. Girl finds out boy is staring at her best friend and not her.
When I finally found out, my heart broke so soundly I was surprised nobody else had
heard the splintering. The strength of my love for him was being pushed back onto me, making it hard to breathe. I cried silently and tirelessly, then loudly and tearlessly. I listened to Breakeven by The Script eleven times without reprieve. I liked the song before because of its beat and rhythm but finally the words made sense, they didn’t make the pain better but its lyrics echoed how I’d felt. The lyrics read “what am I supposed to say when I’m all choked up and you’re okay?” and even if the song was about a breakup and I had never actually dated anyone let alone this boy, I still knew what it meant when he sang “when the heart breaks no it don’t break even”.