Brown Eyed Boy

Damaged Goods (Jessie POV)

In a way, he was right. I was seventeen, a drunk for a father, a mother I rarely saw because she was always at work or with her boyfriend, and nothing to set me apart from any other girl in our neighborhood. It all made me self- conscious which didn't help me much but to make me more paranoid about things. I flinched away when people got physically too close and when it came to making new friends I sucked at it. I only spoke to those who spoke to me first and even then I didn't hold enough conversations to actually have more than a few friends. The whole reason Jared had been my best friend was because we grew up together, our parents being friends in high school and keeping in touch over the years. We were thrust together so much as kids, especially in school, that we grew up with the same interest and knowing everything about each other. It was why I had trusted him so completely in the first place. So if someone who I grew up with and supposedly knew better than I knew anyone else could be so cruel and I not notice it until it was too late then who could I really trust in the world?

            When I thought about my life this way, it made it easy to see why he would say I was damaged goods. My birth father only ever wanted contact with me when he was drunk and feeling all alone because no one else in his family acknowledged him. That was pretty much the only time he remembered that he had a daughter. When I was younger I never really noticed how he behaved when he called, but now that I was older it couldn't be clearer and so I avoided any type of contact with him. But I guess him putting me down in his drunken ramblings registered over the years and that was where my sudden lack of self confidence stemmed from. And yet somehow I managed to meet someone who looked past it all, looked deep enough inside me to know who I really was and show me that I should never let anyone tell me otherwise. So when I think about him and I think about all that I can't help but think that maybe I wasn't the damaged goods. Maybe the whole time, it had actually been Jared and not me.