*Prologue (Maria)
Who knew that five seconds would change everything?
One minute it was light…..
It was Brett’s birthday party and he’d pulled out all the stops. A cheesy disco ball was spewing out dancing dots of light over the dancing crowd. Pink and blue lights were flashing, momentarily illuminating the corners of the room which were full of kids doing things that should only be reserved for dark dingy corners.
In the far corner Emmy was getting man handled. That was surly the only way to describe the movement of his clumsy hand under her shirt as he did something to her breast that actually looked like he was milking a cow. I cringed. Oh well, she seemd to be enjoying it.
In the other corner, the ones that wear far too much black eye liner on their perpetually sad and unnaturally pale faces where smoking pot and looking totally disinterested in what was going on around them. (Did they practice that disinterested look at home in the mirror, I wondered?) They were probably discussing vampires, the mysterious dark arts or some strange Nordic band that made music using chainsaws as instruments.
The corner closest to me was no exception. Except the nefarious deeds going on there were a little different from the rest. But no less wicked. My sister was there in all her Pepto-Bismol-pink glory, looking every bit the perfect blonde cheerleader, with her equally blonde, perky looking friends. Tiny cut-off jeans, large bouncy boobs squeezed into strapless tops that sent rather unsubtle signals to all the males in the general vicinity. Pouting lips flushed with gloss that shimmered under the colored lights. iPhones out, statuses being updated, hashtags being created and photos being uploaded. Faces pushed together and seductive poses struck as the seventh selfie was taken. The were giggling like a bunch of witches around a cauldron. Probably dissing the fat girl or talking about which guy looked the cutest. Walking clichés. Blondes with big smiles and bitchy dispositions that did backflips.
How were we even related? How the hell were we twins?
My eyes moved from my sister to the dance floor and…there he was.
He was just standing there in-between the dancing, swaying bodies and an odd chick trying to twerk.
He was laughing. He has the best smile; it brings out the dimples in his cheeks. He threw his head back and ran his hands through his sandy blond hair. I love his hair. I prefer it this length to when it was shorter and he was going through his excessive wet-look gel phase. His black shirt clings just enough for me to see he’s been hitting the gym a lot- which I know. He puts his hands in his pockets, which causes his jeans to slip down a bit, and for a split second, I see a tiny flash of his stomach.
Okay, so I know I’m perving like a total freak right now. I know that if anyone could read my thoughts they’d laugh and tell me that I was the last girl on the planet that Mike Matthews would ever go out with. And they’d be right. Mike went for girls like my sister. Not like me.
I’d cut my long blonde hair short about three years ago out of sheer rebellion and defiance. Unbeknownst to my mother, this was my anarchy. My mother wanted Stepford-daughter, so I gave her tomboy. She had a long list of unreasonable expectations, I decided to live up to none of them. I’d refused to do cheerleading or join in any group activity that required war cries and choreographed movements—let alone fluffy pom-poms. Instead I’d chosen soccer, much to my mother’s horror; apparently I was bound to get “muscular, manly thighs.” I was flat chested; my sister must have seeped all that genetic material in utero, like the demon soul sucker she is in real life. Sorry, that wasn’t nice. She’s not so bad, when you don’t get to know her. I’m lanky, lacking the curves that the other girls seem to have in such abundance and don’t know a mani from a pedi, and nor do I want to.
But of course all this doesn’t stop me from being totally, madly, utterly, heart-stopping-ly, breath-stealing-ly in love with Mike Matthews. Sigh. In love with him for the last ten years, since the very first day he moved in next-door to me and we built our first tree house together, terrorized our first neighbor with ding-dong-ditch and spent our first night sneaking into each other’s bedrooms and playing video games until the sun came up.
If there was a scale from one to “that’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire effing life” this would be right up there. Being in love with my best friend for more than half my life and never saying a word about it. To him. To anyone.
So that’s my sad sob story. The pathetic story of Maria Glover, the girl silently, painfully drowning in the agony of daily unrequited love. Unrequited love… it has to the cruelest form of torture around. It’s always there. It never leaves. Always lurking in the back of your mind, taking up so much space and energy that sometimes you wish it could just be surgically removed.
Suddenly I’m feeling nervous again. Even though I know him so well, probably better than anyone in the world, he still makes me as nervous as hell sometimes. I instinctively raise my finger to my mouth and I’m just about to bite down on my cuticle (a bad habit I have) when my mother’s face comes flying into my mind.
“Stop! It’s unladylike to bite your nails. Here, take this, and every time you want to bite, chew one.”
So typical of my mother and her constant need to be “helpful” as she calls it. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the unopened pack of gum. I basically rip off the wrapping before nervously shoving it into
