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.
We became close. We sat on the same bus, so sometimes she would just “miss” her bus stop and come to my house. It was fun, because the second major thing I learned about her was that she was smart. She soaked information up like a sponge. Soon I didn’t have to help her with homework. It got to be a competition. To see who could finish first. Our classes were the same, so our homework was the same. And whenever there was a partners project where we could choose who to work with, we were always the first to partner up. Then she would leave once homework was finished.
In high school, we continued on that routine. Homework buddies. Class buddies. BFFL’s. BFFLAD’s. One day, at my insistence, Mom finally trusted me enough to go on a two-day business trip to Austin, Texas; the same week my dad went to Cairo, Egypt. When she came home to find the house intact and virtually the same as she left it, she decided it would be okay to do it again. I told my BFFL that, and we both celebrated. She found a box of brownie mix in the kitchen pantry, and we made triple fudge brownies, which were devoured. By the morning there were only three pieces left: one for her mom, one for my mom, and one for my dad. We had a sleepover too. That night neither of us got much sleep (brownies have a very high sugar content). But it was fun, and it was a picture-perfect, TV-worthy besties moment.
That summed up most of the first two years of high school. Until about… the March of sophomore year. The trouble started right after I took my SAT’s.
He was just the perfect boyfriend. He brought her flowers, dropped off really sweet notes in her locker, and took her to really nice restaurants for dates. But I knew from the start. He was trouble.
It should have rung a bell the moment he talked to her. It should have struck a gong. He was the world’s biggest player. Rumor had it that he took the virginity of twenty-five girls. In two months. And those were just the girls that hadn’t already given up their innocence. But when I told her that, she shrugged it off, saying that he wasn’t the world’s biggest player, and that the virginity rumor was just a rumor, and that she would be careful and I shouldn’t worry. She was already his. She was his the moment he started being nice to her.
In the halls, he would say hi to her, and if she dropped her books, he would help her pick them up. I would hear about it after school, how he was so sweet and kind and he respected her space. But I knew what was going on. He had played his cards just right. She immediately fell in love with the first boy who was nice to her and didn’t reach to squeeze her ass right after the favor.
Of course I tried to warn her. I told her that his gaze would always wander to her boobs, and that when he put his hand around her waist it was really a lot lower that typically proper. She told me I was being overdramatic and obsessing and that if I was afraid she’d stop helping me with homework (like I need her help. Pshht…), I should stop worrying because that was never going to happen. In the beginning, I would warn her a lot, but after a few weeks I just stopped, because the bickering really never got us anywhere and I feared that the disagreements were pushing us apart. I couldn’t let that happen. I really needed at least one friend. Just to make sure I wasn’t a complete social failure. (Wait… gee, that came out wrong. It’s true, but we were actual friends.)
By then it was the middle of junior year. She had been his longest girlfriend, a fact that she wore proudly, like a badge of achievement. She claimed this was proof that he loved her. I thought it was proof that he loved her body, and that he was a cunning and patient devil. But of course I didn’t tell her that. I would just change the subject and ask her if she wanted to peer edit an essay for school or correct my homework.
We continued to share the same bus, and she continued to visit my house on occasion. She won all the homework contests now. She was more motivated. Her motivation was usually right outside my driveway, arriving about ten minutes after we would get to my house. I would never let him in, and she continued to come to my house on the bus because her mom didn’t trust her boyfriend enough to let him bring her home. We would sit by the kitchen table with a snack and some water, and I would watch her sprint out the doorway, with her homework finished a full three problems ahead of me. I felt sort of used, but… no obsessing, right?
Then, around May of that year, I came home late. I had been nominated to be a judge for the elementary school’s science fair (a vinegar and baking soda volcano had won, because the explosion was massive and the accompanying report was extremely well written for a seven-year-old). Mom was in Vancouver for the week and Dad was in Shanghai. I had told my long standing besty that we would be busy, and that she should go directly home that day.
Imagine my horror when I heard thumps and creaks and hysterical (but somewhat muted) laughter when I got home. The first thought that popped into my head was that someone on the bus probably overheard my conversation with her and had decided to make fun of me by trashing my house while I was gone. The second thought that crossed my mind was that they were going to pay for this, and they would learn NEVER to toy with me. I grabbed a hammer from my garage and tiptoed upstairs, ninja style.
I was so surprised when I kicked open the door and found her there. Naturally, I relaxed my posture when I saw her. But the moment I noticed that he was also in the room, and that he was shirtless, and that she was in nothing but a scanty little pink lace thong, my hand immediately swung up again and I was about to launch my missile at his head when she screamed and begged me to stop.
I stood outside the doorway and averted my eyes as they scrambled to cover themselves. Well, she scrambled. He took his time, making sure he got in a few more kisses between her breasts and eyed her ass for a few more seconds before putting on his shirt and making his way out the door. But I was mad. No one takes advantage of my friend and gets away with it. Blocking the path out, I stood in front of him and crossed my arms. His eyebrows went up, and he smirked, and said one word. “Move.”
“No.”
“Bitch.”
“Bastard.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck YOU.” And then I kneed him in the groin. After screaming a few more profanities, he stumbled out the door.
She and I got into a huge fight that night. She screamed at me that I was worse than her mother, and got in the way of all of her relationships. I yelled at her that she never had a relationship. Bawling, she said she would have had more if I hadn’t turned everyone off with my shitty nerd attitude. I shouted at her to not blame me for everything, and that I was tired of her leaving me to do all the projects while she pranced around in fancy clubs waving fake ID’s in the air while dirty dancing with her boyfriend, and that he was bad for her anyway. She screeched that it wasn’t her fault that I had no life and was too bitchy for any boy to like me. I screamed right back, telling her that no one was interested in her and that the only thing any boy ever liked about her was her body and her huge ass.
At that, she stormed out. I felt so bad for blowing up like that as I watched her walk home, with nothing but a very revealing cardigan to protect her from the abnormally cool night.
The next day was… awkward. To stay away from her I went to the library during lunch, but I heard her screaming across the campus. Later I heard that she entered the cafeteria to find some blonde bitch sitting on her boyfriend’s lap. The girl I got the story from gave me the entire run-down, scarring my mind with pictures of some big-boobed whore touching him all over the place and nibbling at his ear while he spent his time planting hickeys all over her chest. Apparently the girlfriend he just (almost) had sex with yesterday came to lunch late – talking to a teacher about an assignment or something – and barged in to find him cheating on her. It started with her screaming at her boyfriend, but then the whore stepped in and the argument dissolved into a bitch fight.
That afternoon, on my way to the bus, I saw her confront that cheating player she used to love. She started it with a punch in the gut. Then the screaming came. She shouted that he was a lying, manipulative bastard, and he screamed back, calling her a shitty whore. When she raved that she was not a whore and he was using her for her body, he started making snide comments. Stuff like “what a waste of a damned nice body” and “she’s still a virgin” (as if that were a bad thing) and “why else would I waste my time on you?” and the like. She stormed onto the bus with tears streaming down her face and ignored me. I stared out the window, as if I hadn’t seen (and heard) the entire thing, and watched him and his crew climb into his fancy sports car and drive away, laughing their heads off.
School was just awful after that. We wouldn’t talk on the bus, and when the teacher told us to partner up, she would say yes to any perverted freak that asked her, and I would let the teacher match me up with whoever was left. During lunchtime I would grab a slice of pizza and rush off to the library to work on the project that my partner would never contribute on. She would get off at her regular bus stop. It’s not like she never did before, but usually she came over to my house at least once a week. She never did those last months of school.
The beginning of the summer passed uneventfully. I continued to tutor and volunteer at the local SAT prep organization. We pretty much avoided each other. Around five weeks in, I got a call from her mom. She was hysterical. Through all the blubbering and crying and sobbing, I could make out only a few words.
Her baby doll… pills… slumped in bathroom…too late…
The next time I saw her, she was sleeping. The last thing I said to her was an apology. The next time I talk to her, we’ll be in heaven.
Hi! So... this is just an idea that I've been tossing around in my head for a while. It's going to be a collection of short stories. I've always been really intrigued with a character's background story - things that have happened in their life that shaped them. The people around me (parents, friends, the like) really helped shape me, so I based the stories on people. But its also true that you never really know what you got till its gone, so I based them on the people that are gone (thus, the title). The stories will be pretty much the same plot - the narrarator loses someone, and reflects. By 'loss', I mean the people no longer communicate. This one happened to include a death. Not all of them will. And though most of them will be merely realistic fiction, I think I might throw in some fantasy and historical fiction too. maybe even a SciFi. I don't know.
Anyhoo... thanks for reading so far. You know what? If you did, I am giving you a cyber high-five. Thats right. Cyberhighfive! 'Cause you're awesome. (andddd... if you comment and/or vote, you'll be even awesomer! haha. but seriously, that would be amazing. much obliged.)