Self Help

Jake, Part 1

I met Jake in my first week of ninth grade. He was 6'2 lanky redhead who dressed like an Eminem wannabe - even his school uniform was baggy and oversized. We were introduced through mutual friends in the atrium of our highschool. He shyly walked up to me as I sat on the ledge of some bench seating and gently kicked my shoes, shuffling back and forth while his boisterous friends talked to mine.

We "dated" for about two weeks shortly after meeting, though that quickly fizzled out after he paid too much attention to my friend Melody, and not nearly enough to me. Shortly after we stopped seeing eachother, he and Melody began dating, and I could have imploded from jealousy. I was the outgoing one, the flirty one. She had been quiet and unassuming and I felt like she stole him right out from under me. I put on an angry front, when in reality, I was heartbroken. She had betrayed my trust, and that was the end of our friendship.

Still, this didn't stop me from quickly resuming my boy-catching mission, and soon I was on to the next. (see "The Black Album). By tenth grade, we were both single and somehow began speaking to each other again. I could never put my finger on what made us so attracted to each other, but there was a spark between us that couldn't be denied. I think that a big part of it was that he was hugely sensitive and seemed to be expecting relationships to unfold like a Nicholas Sparks novel. This alone should have sent me running for the hills, but of course, instead I was drawn to his flare for drama like a moth to flame.

Case and point - after we began talking again, I went to my locker between classes one day to find a single red rose inside. The note with it read, "You once said a guy who gives a girl roses knows what he's doing". This should have seemed cheesy, unoriginal and even slightly cocky, but instead I was elated. And that was how he got me.

Jake was from a bigger town just outside mine, and having been raised by strict Christian parents, he had gone to a private Christian school for elementary school. We were alike in the sense that we were both desperately trying to reinvent ourselves in highschool. I'd spent hellish years in elementary school dreaming of the days when I would have friends and get the attention of boys. I treated ninth grade like a year long social mixer, and my grades showed it. Jake joined just about every sports team in an effort to make friends and find a way to intergrate himself into cliques that had existed since most of his classmates were in kindergarten.

He lived in a small bungalow located just off a busy road, but his back yard faced a huge plot of open land, making it feel far removed from the bustling neighbourhoods he was surrounded by. My parents were so annoyed that their fifteen year old daughter had chosen to pursue a boy who lived twenty minutes out of town, so Jake used to ride his bike to see me when neither of our parents would drive us to see each other.

Soon we were deep into the kind of puppy love that every highschooler feels is forever. There was just one problem. Jake was highly emotional and mercurial in his moodswings. From the outside, his life was perfect, but the more I grew to know his family, the more that I saw things were not nearly as functional as they appeared to be. Jake's father was a somewhat functioning alcoholic and this kept his family permanently on edge. His mother tried her best to keep family life smooth but she was exhausted and Jake resented her for glossing over his father's problems and pretending that everything was okay. Jake had two younger sisters and I think it really got to him that as the eldest, and only boy, there was so much pressure for him to keep it together. He was an angry teenager, and he had a right to be.

After a few months of being together, we were head over heels for each other. We wanted to spend all of our time together and almost each night we would spend on the phone having marathon discussions about nothing. We would end each phone conversation the same way:

"Sweet dreams"

"About you"

"Think about me"