If it wasn't for Oskar Goldschmidt, DLC would be the worst city ever.
Of course, the city is not called DLC. It's what Oskar calls it.
Oskar is the first person who caught my eye at Trinity High School. He was looking at me and Susan trying hard not to be noticed, but we noticed him. He was looking at us like we were actually cool, and not like we were crazy or something.
Susan and I sat at his table. We share these moments where it's like our minds are connected. We're very close.
I soon started looking at the cute boy with wavy auburn hair. For some reason, he was oddly familiar.
"My name is Oskar," he introduced himself. "You're the Parker twins, aren't you?"
"My name is Susan," Susan took the opportunity to introduce herself. "And their name," she gestured towards me, "is Connie."
I nodded. I didn't know if I was ready to let my new acquaintance know I was gender fluid. I usually don't like to attract attention to myself, and declaring that you use neutral pronouns in a small, backwards town is one sure way to do it. Oskar looked completely cool with it, which is something I didn't expect.
"So, where did you live before?"
"Somewhere better than this," I joked.
He laughed. "You're going to get used to it," he said, which accidentally sounded like a threat.
Though he told us 'welcome back', I didn't deny nor confirm that Susan and I had already lived here, for a short period of time, and that, even though I barely remember what had happened the first time, DLC didn't seem like something that would grow on you. More like a poisonous plant that would sink its roots in you and take you under the ground.
Today, in class, the History teacher started off by dividing us in couples for a project. She had selected ten historical figures, and the students would have to divide in groups and choose who they were working on. Oskar seemed strangely excited, and that's when he confided that in a dull school like Trinity High School, even group projects were a nice distraction from the 'ennui' of it all. At least, that's how he called it.
Susan and I wanted to be grouped together, not because we didn't want to interact with the others, but because we work well in a pair. We knew we could get a good grade. But the teacher declined the idea.
"Well, then," I suddenly declared, taken by a brilliant inspiration. "Anyone who groups with me has to work on Alexander the Great, and we will also include his general Hephaestion."
Most of the students of the school seemed either heterosexual or closeted. I wanted to work on those two figures and write in my essay that they were lovers. It was important to me, as I'd always been sexually and romantically interested in all genders.
I've never met anyone who's non binary like me, but when it comes to binary genders, I have a different taste in boys and girls.
I don't do it on purpose, but I seem to click with the girls who are tough, maybe too much, and could look kind of scary at first glance because they have a bad temper. I know it's not kind to say, because maybe they don't have a temper at all. Maybe I just happen to annoy them.
When it comes to boys, though, nothing can stop me from falling in love with the Superman type. You know, kind of like the ones you would say are too much for anybody and so they're always alone. Even in a crowd, they stand out.
They are just basically too good to be true. They're all too good for me.
Here, I said it. See, I'm not so confident. Or, as I always say, I'm pretty confident about myself. I'm sure that I suck as a human being, but at least I pull it off pretty well.
It usually doesn't bother me at all to think that way, but it bothers me in love. I don't date. I never did.
I don't know what it's about. Most of the time, I don't feel connected with people that way. I probably don't care about my crushes enough to date them.
And I just don't feel special at all. Even though I know I'm weird and I embrace it, sometimes I feel like I'm a mess. A walking disaster.
Speaking of, when I met my former boyfriend, Erik, I literally stumbled into him and fell. Seeing how it turned out, I'm glad I didn't make any corny jokes like 'Did you see me falling? I fell for you'. Instead, I told him, 'Hi, I'm Connie. I promise I don't always fall when I'm walking.'
He had laughed then, and he was so handsome, with jet black hair and light brown skin, that I broke my 'no-dating' rule to date him for a couple of months. But looking back now, it was obvious that Erik was no exception and no one could ever be.
I noticed someone nudging me on the shoulder. It was Oskar.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked.
"I was just reminiscing about my former boyfriend," I replied truthfully.
"Well, I hope this won't distract you too much during class."
"Why?" I asked, annoyed.
Oskar blushed. "Because you didn't even notice I was grouped with you. For the essay."
Ah. Well, it made sense, Oskar was a loner and I was his only friend. It's not that I didn't care about who the teacher would assign to me, just that my ADHD makes me space out a lot during classes.
During lunch, Susan and I sat again at Oskar's table. Even though I'd met some friendly people at the party — a cute girl called Iseul, the handsome and dark Will and an intense girl who wore tight pants and a leopard coat instead of being dressed as a superhero called Layla, Oskar remained my best friend so far.
"I'm writing a diary," Oskar blurted out all of a sudden. "Not one of those secret diaries you write as a child. Well, I guess it is the same kind of thing, but this one is a serious thing. It will be something to work on as I figure out my first novel. I could base it on it — after all, the reader will never know what is fictional and what is not. I got the idea from reading Jack Kerouac's published diaries."
Susan laughed. "Only you could think of something like that. I feel as if I know you so well, Oskar. I hope you don't mind me saying that this was so predictable of you."
"Actually, there are still so many things I don't know about you," Oskar specified. "And I'm pretty sure you don't know a lot of things about me either."
"Why do you have to be so dense?" I asked. "We're only joking around."
"Because I just had an idea," he replied, smiling with a crooked grin.
"Somehow, I know I won't like it," I teased.
"We should write a diary," he said. "Each one of us. Make it personal, as if no one will ever find out what's on it. And then, we should exchange them at the end of the year and read them."
"Okay," I accepted.
"Okay?" Susan looked concerned. "Are you out of your mind?"
I shrugged. I don't know why I accepted to be a part of this. I don't keep secrets. And even if I had a secret and I wrote it in the diary, it wouldn't be a secret for long.
Still, I guessed it is because I like challenges. And hanging out with someone like Oskar meant that, if you were on his good side, he would challenge you all the time. And if you got on his bad side, he would mostly just ignore you, and I didn't want that to happen.
I tapped on the table, an idea forming in my mind. "I want to make it harder, though," I suggested. "If we befriend someone else during the year, we'll ask them to be a part of this project."
"Well, that probably means that they won't be our friends for long," Susan replied.
Oskar looked at me as if to say 'I don't do friends' but I knew it was just a facade because we'd met a couple of weeks before and it already felt like being best friends. Sometimes I wondered if he was more friendly than even he himself knew. He'd brought us to Will's party, and it was easy to see he would have liked to become a friend of Will and Iseul.
"Alright," Oskar replied finally. "I guess I can give you that. After all, I might not be the one who's making friends. And if you want to run out of acquaintances, it's on you."
"Great." I didn't know why it seemed like such a good idea, but, let's face it, if I had to accept the reality of my friends reading my diary, then at least we should make it fun and involve more people in the project. Compare how open we can all be when we know our words will be laid bare and judged by others.
At first, when Oskar had mentioned the idea of the diaries, I had dismissed it as pretentious and joined only for fun. I didn't think anyone like me had anything interesting to say. I'm not a published poet and author.
But I for one am starting to have my doubts about it. I'm not saying we're poets. But who's to say our story doesn't deserve to be heard? Even though this is just a diary, writing about my life makes it somewhat special.
I might not be special, but maybe that's not the point.
Maybe the point is that all of us have something to say.
A few days later, when Oskar asked me how the process of writing in my diary was going, I was starting to regret it. I hadn't started yet.
"I love writing down my thoughts," Oskar told me. "That might be because I think too much, to escape reality. When I read them again, though, it's almost as if they're not relatable anymore. Maybe because I already shared the burden. But the worst thing is that it seems to me as if those thoughts were written by somebody else. As if I would have never used those words, were I to really describe how I'm feeling."
And he added, "I was thinking of writing a letter to a girl I liked, full of all the ridiculous things I don't want to tell her, so when I meet her I have already got those things off my chest and I won't say them out loud."
I was about to snap at him, when the History teacher passed us a notebook and some printed material.
"You can work on your Alexander and Hephaestion essay starting with this material I've gathered," she said. "It comes from this History book I've always liked, but it's out of print now."
It might seem ridiculous, but studying at Trinity High School I'd already noticed teachers would often say something like that. As if not only they weren't aware of how backwards the town already was compared to how 2018 was in the rest of the world, but they also missed the times long gone.
And it was absolutely needless to say that those printed pages about Alexander and Hephaestion often mentioned the two of them as 'friends'.
"I'm guessing they will say there's not enough historical proof to say the two were lovers," I mumbled. "But you know..."
"Then let's find them," Oskar proposed. "On the internet, or in the library. Of course it's all speculation, but..."
"Yes, I know," I replied.
For some reason, it was weird talking about those things out loud with Oskar. He didn't seem interested in anyone, not really, even though he sometimes mentioned that he liked a girl, for some reason it didn't feel serious. And I was openly queer, just by stating my pronouns to anyone who asked them. Still, talking about the ancient king and his general with Oskar was making me upset in some way.
Which wasn't for the best, considering that the teacher wanted the essay to be a special one, long and articulated, and she'd declared that the students would have to work on it for the whole year.
"So," Oskar smiled, crooked and a little wicked. "Let's meet next week for the first time to work on this in the library. There's only one in DLC — you can google the address."