About a week after we started secondary school, I noticed a change. Not just in everything surrounding us, but in me and Joe too. We joined a massive school from our very tiny one, and the difference was immense. I found it really hard to come to grips with. Our classes had gone from twelve students to over thirty, which was incredibly daunting. I felt claustrophobic, like I couldn’t breathe as easily anymore. Every day went from being fun and manageable, to a real challenge. It got to the point where even walking through those doors in the morning was overwhelming.
But not for Joe.
Joe relished our new life, he embraced it with open arms, and it didn’t take me long to work out why.
The selection of new students brought along with it a whole heap of girls. Girls who hadn’t grown up alongside Joe, and seen him go through his awkward stage. He was new to them, exciting. The girls we’d grown up alongside didn’t even dare look at him because they knew I had some sort of claim over him—of course, it wasn’t really in the romantic sense, but that didn’t matter—but these new girls didn’t know about that.
They saw what I did, plus a whole lot more too. They didn’t just grasp that he was kind, loyal, and very sweet. They also saw potential in the messy hair, a spark in those piercing blue eyes, and something to swoon about in the dimples that popped up when he smiled.
Diana was the first one—his first girlfriend. She was tall and slim with long, flowing blonde hair. I couldn’t help but be jealous of her because she was everything teenage me wanted to be. She already wore a bra, she never seemed to have any spots, and she also didn’t ever appear to be plagued with the insecurities that all but swamped me.
Of course, she had Joe too. I hated that with every inch of my being.
Luckily for me, Joe continued on with our friendship in mostly the same way as before. Especially when we were at home. I got the impression Diana wanted him to stop speaking to me, but he never did. Maybe they argued over it, or maybe he was completely oblivious to her feelings—he never told me, and I didn’t ask.
She didn’t last too long though, which was a massive relief for me. That was until Heidi came along. Heidi was even more beautiful than Diana, and she was older too, which made me feel even more crazy and possessive. I used to sit in my bedroom, screaming into my pillow, just imagining them together. Most of the time, I felt like I was going insane with it all, which was made worse by the fact I couldn’t talk to my best friend about it. This time, my confidant was the problem, and that was really difficult to come to terms with.
Back then, I thought it was only his friendship that I missed. I thought my insane jealousy was purely because I didn’t like someone else sharing his focus. I preferred the days when his warmth was only directed at me.
It was more—that became obvious later—but I couldn’t see that at the time.
Heidi became an increasing problem as time went on. She didn’t just invade our time together at school; she started to encroach on our home life together too. She would come round for dinner, and charm the pants off our parents. The fierce passion I hated her with was incredible. I’d never felt so strongly about anything before, and that was tearing me up from the inside out. Every time I saw her I felt muddy and raw, which meant that I didn’t even give her a chance.
Then again, she must have hated me just as much, because rumours quickly started flying around school that they kept fighting because of me, and when they finally broke up, I found myself under the intense scrutiny of the entire school—a place I didn’t feel comfortable at all.
Suddenly people wanted to talk to me, to get to know me, and every whisper in the hallway was about my involvement. I quietly tried to reassure people that I was only friends with Joe, but that wasn’t what people wanted to hear. They wanted juicy gossip, so they started to make things up.
If I hadn’t wanted to leave Joe with those vultures, I probably would have quit school just to get away from it all.
All of that came to an abrupt end when Joe moved on with someone else. Then another girl, and another. After Heidi, no one seemed to last that long, as if they didn’t quite make the cut for him. This helped my confidence grow—those girls would come and go, but me and Joe were forever—and that was the way I liked it.
Well…that was until the school camping trip.
Everything started to disintegrate then…
It was really starting to trouble me that I’d never experienced that sort of mental jealousy for Danny, the man who was supposed to be the love of my life. Why had I never felt like I would die without him? Why did I not despise every girl that was even in the same room as him? It was confusing. I’d never really thought about it before, I was confident our relationship was happy, but now it was all I could think about.
I was comparing what I had with Danny to what I once had with Joe, which wasn’t fair on anyone because the situations could not have been more different.
So why couldn’t I stop…?