Young Writers Society

I have to say, even if he doesn’t think it’s true: we were perfect for each other.
Everyone said it, too. In that month of September, 2010, the amount of break-ups were equivalent to the rates of fly deaths. People all around the school left and right were suddenly seen without their sweetheart by their side. My recently single friends would watch me text mine in longing. “You’re so lucky.” “Maybe it’s because you go to different schools.” “He’s such a sweetheart.” “You are guys are perfect for each other.”
And for a while, we were. Every morning we’d wake up and try to text the other good morning first--it was a sort of game. He always won, as his school started hours before mine. We saw each other every weekend, and we’d walk and hold hands, laughing. He let things go at my pace, not his, and always waited for me. He vowed to hurt anyone who hurt me and he’d spend hours on the phone talking about nothing with me. On our one month, he made me a bracelet that read ‘I LOVE YOU’. He told me there was nothing about me he’d change. When we watched movies, he held my hand. When I was injured, he’d genuinely care and come over to make sure I was okay. He was honestly interested in things I was and would always ask how my day went. It seemed like, as my friends had fabled, it was perfect.
For a year now, I’ve made myself think of him as a horrible person with no sense of love and absent of heart and soul, but he really wasn’t. As far as first boyfriends, he was everything I could ask for. He set the standard high.
There was another thing that made me feel the way I did about him, something he couldn’t control. He had fallen first. Imagine that! He had found my Facebook after our short-winded meeting, had asked for my number, had asked me out. He cared that much about me when I had hardly remembered his name. Something about that was admirable, and it made me care, really, truly care about him, to the point where I thought that perhaps, one day, we’d together learn what “true love” was….
No guy had ever shown a real interest in me before him. It was something of an eye opening experience, something I treasured and I would take thoughts and knowledge from for the rest of my life. He taught me things, even things that didn’t matter such as how to speak clearer amidst laughing. I must admit… he was something special.
And then it happened. I don’t know how it did, or really when it began. He started getting disinterested. I relay it back to our ‘first kiss’--a few-second peck on the lips, in which I got embarrassed and pulled away too quickly. But he had shrugged it off. He had smiled, said we’d try again the next time we saw each other, and I walked him to his car as we held hands. He said goodbye and told me not to look so downcast, and after a long hug, he kissed me on the cheek and dashed off.
I will never forget watching his figure fade, my mind happily sighing, What did I ever do to deserve someone so understanding like that? I would have never guessed that the very next time we saw each other, he’d give me the cold shoulder.
One of my best friends was having a birthday party, held at pavilion four in the park next to the beach. My boyfriend called me to ask directions, and although he knew I was horrid at giving them, he noted my effort to make them as simple as possible--“It’s pavilion four, not on the beach, but in the park. Instead making the first turn, which will lead you to the boardwalk out to the beach, take the second, which will lead you into the park. When we’re done with cake, we’ll all walk to the beach together.” I thought they were simple enough. Obviously, he didn’t.
I received a call from him twenty minutes later. I answered the phone with a concerned tone and asked him where he was. He gruffly returned my question.
“Where are you?” I repeated, abandoning my friends and walking off so I could hear him clearer.
“Pavilion four.”
I looked around for him, but saw no indication of anyone. “In the park, right?”
He groaned and rose his voice. “I’m at the beach!”
“I told you it was at the park,” I said, laughing it off to avoid an argument. We had never had one, and a friend’s party wasn’t the time or place in my opinion.
“No, you didn’t.” His speech showed no hint of humor. “I’m going to have to walk all the way over there. It’ll take a half an hour!”
My smile faded immediately. “I’m sorry. I--”
It was all I had chance to say before he hung up on me.
I stood there, at the phone, dejected. The boy who had always asked me to hang up, saying ‘I could never hang up on you, you hang up first!’ had just left without even a trace of a goodbye. I went to my group of friends and expressed my fears, but they all told me he was probably just in a bit of a mood and that he’d feel better when he saw me.
It was around ten minutes later when my group finished cake eating and celebrating and decided to go to the beach. There was still no sign of my boyfriend, so I called him. He answered, but didn’t say ‘hello’.
“We’re heading back to the beach now. We’ll see you there, okay?”
“Whatever.” He hung up again. Casting my eyes downwards, I too hung up and followed behind the group, hoping perhaps he’d make an attempt to speak to me once we got there.
We spotted him on the beach as my friends and I were making up our towels. He came barreling over to the birthday girl and gave her a huge, friendly hug, wishing her a happy one. He greeted the girl who stood on the other side of me, and then turned back to the birthday girl.
“Nobody else is here?” he asked, his eyes quickly scanning the group.
“Nope. But twenty people showed up, I thought that was good,” she responded cheerfully.
“This,” he looked distastefully and gesticulated directly at me, “is it?”
She nodded slowly, realizing the tension and how he had pointed to me. With a glare, he bounded away, and I stood there in awe, looking at him with tears I could not push away already forming in my eyes. I saw a conversation about to pop from the birthday girl’s mouth and I dashed away to the guy I considered to be, at that time, my best friend, standing pointedly alone by the ocean’s waves.
We had a quick conversation about how I was always bothering him when he pulled himself away from the crowd, until suddenly he realized something.
“What?” I questioned when he voiced this.
“Shouldn’t you be with your boyfriend?”
I can’t remember if I ever responded to this, which leads me to believe I didn’t. Perhaps I dived into the waves at this point, or it’s likely I changed the subject, or maybe I even looked at him sheepishly and wandered away. All I remember is that an hour later, after I had circulated among all of my friends at the party and my boyfriend was still making a point to ignore me and walk very quickly away whenever I showed up, his best friend (who later started dating the birthday girl, one of my best friends--funny how these things work) asked him to apologize to me, because he was the slightly more classy of the two. He did apologize to me, but continued to act rudely towards me, such as not walking over when I asked him to but doing so when the others girls did, refusing to dance in the rain with me (we had once talked about how we had to create our own ‘Notebook’ scene) but dancing with every other girl in the rain, and telling me every other line I spoke to ‘shut up,’ or ‘just stop, you’ve ruined it’. I wasn’t sure what I ruined, but it seemed like to me he was the one who had ruined everything.
Less than a month later, three days before our two month, the aforementioned birthday girl called me to tell me that my boyfriend had been trying to make moves on her and many of my other close friends. It took me a day to gather up the courage, but I called him the next day and questioned as to whether or not he was cheating on me--I didn’t accuse, I questioned. He rose his voice and was furious with me for thinking such a thing. He verged on cursing at me but caught himself. He told me that he was mad enough to think of ending it. Rather than standing up to him I, like a coward, begged him to reconsider. He told me he’d tell me his answer the next day. Looking back, my mind finds the simile, ‘like he was the dictator of me’.
I walked into school November 11th, 2010, crying. I calmed down slightly for lunch until my friend, noticing my mood, told me there was one thing she hadn’t mentioned. “He’s told all of his friends, and us, too,” she said, looking at the other girls around her. “He’s been thinking about breaking up with you for weeks now. Two or three.” Noticing my face, she apologized.
I went home that day and called him. I climbed the treehouse in my backyard to talk to him, to get it over with. I remembered, once seeing my mom in an argument on the phone, seeking relief in that same treehouse, shrinking against the bark and crying from the turmoil going on beneath. I did the same thing that day, so many years later, listening to my world being broken by those simple words.
“I think we should just be friends.”
How could I? He had basically said, “Yeah, I attempted to cheat on you, ruined your life, made you trust me, made you fall for me, took your entire world from you and threw it into the boiling, rumbling furnace… but do you still want to hang this Saturday?”
I asked him for months and months after what I had done wrong to end the relationship, telling him I “don’t want to get back into it, I just what to know what I did wrong, so I can avoid this in the future”. He never told me. After we cleared things up completely, he deleted my number and defriended me on Facebook.
Every now and again, I think about him. He started the chain of bad, bad experiences with boys in my life. No longer were they pulling my braids and calling me ugly; now they were calling me beautiful and pulling my leg.
Unfortunately, I am a hopeless romantic. Though I realize the end of the story will never be Cinderella, I dare to believe it will be, to follow blindly even though I’ll end up in a trap. Prince Charming does exist, and I know this for a fact--but he’s not coming in to town for me. In all the happiness, all the great endings, nobody’s ever wondered what happened to the stepsisters after Cinderella left with the love of her life. Oh, that’s right. The ended up becoming servants of the castle, got old, and died, never finding love, right? Nobody reads that far into it.
I’ll never forget him, as much as I want to. Every now and again I wear the sunglasses he left at my house, put on the bracelet he made me, wear the shirt he told me he loved. And I know he hasn’t forgotten me, because despite it all, every now and again I get a phone call and just barely make out his voice before he hangs up.
And, so, I suppose… I have to say it, even if I don’t think it’s true: we weren’t perfect for each other.

well i just looved this story you did i really got into what you where talking about and what was happening. but i would like to know more about what the main person looks like at the mim.

I automatically think of Taylor Swift when i read the title Your story is quite interesting with no definite ending. Well, every story cannot just end, right? Overall, it is a normal story and you manage to describe the emotion when you broke up with someone you love. I enjoy reading it.