Undone
Hi. Tiny author's note. The song =====> over thereish is my inspiration. The story deviated from it a lot, but it really sets the mood, so I added it. Enjoy!
She was gorgeous. Her name was the synonym of beauty and vitality. And I was proud to be her best friend.
But I was sad to see that I was also her only friend.
Of course, she has captured the eyes of many boys effortlessly, but they don’t count. They didn’t know how she immersed herself in her studies, and how she did her AP extra credit homework as slow as possible because she didn’t want it to end, and not because she didn’t know how to do it. They didn’t know how much she wanted someone to love her for her, and not her looks. They didn’t know her, they knew her body. It’s like calling someone, getting their voicemail, and then saying you talked to the person. You didn’t. So you can’t say that.
I’ve been her best friend for a while. Ever since 5th grade. That was the start of my nerdiness. Like a ray. It started at one point, and then kept going on forever. I’ve learned to accept it. Her life is like a ray too. It was like a ray. Now it’s more like a line segment. Fifth grade was when she started getting curvy, growing more like her single mom every day. Except she didn’t like it. She didn’t relish her beauty like I embrace my inner nerd … my think-telligence. Well, she used to revel it, basking in glory of every boy’s stares. That was when she was taller than them. Then the boys got some of their immature courage back, when 5’ 6” wasn’t considered tall anymore. They started making fun of her… sort of. They would steal her pencils to grab her attention. Shoot spit wads in her luscious blonde hair. When the teacher wasn’t looking, of course. That was when the teachers actually had some control over the students. Freshman year was when it really started. Then came the light slaps, here and… here. In between classes, right before the bus, and stuff. It was awkward. And there was only one reason we even became friends. We shared a mutual need, a symbiotic relationship.
It started in the summer after fifth grade. I felt it would be cool to get a job. And Mom wouldn’t let me go to a stranger’s house to baby-sit, so I started tutoring. Only to sixth graders and below, of course (I’m two years ahead the normal math curriculum, because of five years of relentless summer school. Thanks, Dad). She was my student, because her mom couldn’t afford normal summer school, and my salary was only ten dollars a session. We weren’t close then. She looked down at me with contempt. And I looked at her frankly and talked to her like she was an idiot. Then we got to middle school. I was the nerd of all nerds, the pariah. My habit to incorporate academic terms into my regular sentences like a mixture bound to the molecular level made me sound intolerably like a smart-ass bitch. But surprisingly, she was also a social outcast. I guess girls didn’t appreciate the snide glances their crushes snuck at her. That day, during lunch, I sat with her. Everyone else had already formed their own cliques, so she didn’t protest much when I slid into the seat across from her. Better to be sitting with a geek than alone. We figured that we had to actually converse in order for our charade to really work, so we started talking.
At first it was just stupid stuff like schoolwork and classes, but when we asked each other about some more personal stuff we both opened up pretty quickly. When I asked her about boys and the like, she said they were all imbeciles. I laughed, and she cracked a smile. Then I told her about how my parents took so many business trips, and how it made me sad. She said at least they came back. I asked her about that, and she said her dad never married her mom, and that she probably had half-sisters and half-brothers that she didn’t even know about. That was the first major thing that I learned about her. That her family wasn’t like mine. Not that family-dinners-are-an-every-day-occurrence type.
