Tattered Paper Heart

The Prick

The Prick.

A few months after the relationship with the first one had calmed down, i began Deb practice. When you're in year eleven at school, the one social event that every girl looks forward to is the Debutante Ball. The white dress, the pretty hair and makeup, the dances that you work your butt off to learn in the short few weeks after school and on weekends, and the anticipation of being a princess for the day. I nabbed my Deb partner early - a geeky guy in my year level that i had become kind of friends with. He was a sweetheart, and i had many a good laugh with him while we stumbled around the dance floor learning the waltz and the samba and the other assorted ballroom classics that were forced upon us. We both had two left feet when it came to traditional dancing, so it was no shock that we were falling all over each other to start with. As we progressed though, i got slowly better and more coordinated. Unfortunately, he stayed the same which was kind of embarrassing on the night when he slipped and fell while we were doing the samba and i had to catch him; it was one of the only images of me that the camera-man caught while recording the Deb video. Typical. But that's not the point of the story.

One of my friends still didn't have a partner. It was kind of upsetting, as the night was fast approaching and she was desperate to find someone. It was lucky that there was a loop-hole whereby you could ask someone outside of the school to accompany you to the event, and she took advantage of this when another of our friends suggested that she bring in her brother to be the Deb partner. Enter The Prick. You'll see why i call him this later on, but for now, he walked in and automatically took charge of my heart. We got to know each other while we were practising; to start with, it was little glances and cheeky smiles and catching each other out when we were caught perving. This evolved into casual conversation when we were all in a group, and then he started randomly turning up outside the common-room where i would bump into him after school was finished. He was two years older, and finished high-school, which i found very appealing. This was a guy who was new and exciting and noone knew him, therefore he had an air of mystery to him also. The First One had finally left me alone and after a few months of being on my own i decided that i was ready to move onto my next encounter. When The Prick asked me out, i jumped at the chance. I should have known from that point what kind of boyfriend he would be - our first date was seeing the new Star Trek movie, which i hated, and he bought his friend with him, and the two boys sat there chatting and cracking jokes while i sat awkwardly beside them in silence. However, i was still young and still naive and i thought that he was the greatest. He started coming around for dinner, getting to know my parents and brother, and after two weeks of 'dating' he asked me to be his girlfriend. I was pretty rapt, because i was struck by how much i liked him even after knowing him for such a short time, and he was a local too which was much more appealing than the long-distance relationship. At least i would see this boyfriend on a regular basis.

To start with, The Prick appeared to be really nice. I remember contracting glandular fever shortly after the Deb Ball, and he would come around to visit every night, bringing me little things - like teddy bears or flowers he had picked from a nearby garden - to try and make me feel better. Then he would sit with me and keep me company on the couch even though i was sleeping most of the time, and fix me food when i was a bit hungry, and put cold face-washers on my forehead if i had a headache. He was quite the romantic, seducing me with little things to show me how much he cared. I remember a few times he would walk from his house to my house when he didn't have a car - which took him a good three hours - because he desperately wanted to see me and didn't care what kind of physical exertion he would have to go through to get what he wanted. I began to really care for him, and a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday, i lost my virginity to him - in my bedroom, watching a movie called "Down Periscope" (which i giggle at now because the title is kind of appropriate). On our first Christmas together, he took me to see the Christmas lights and then for a moonlit walk around the lake, where he held my hand and told me in many different ways how much he cared about me.