D A I S Y
I had been trying to do homework for hours, trying and failing, failing and trying. I couldn't focus for more than a few minutes without having to stop to scroll through my phone. Eventually, I would start feeling so guilty, I would throw it across the room, and promise myself not to touch it again until I finished everything I had to do for school, but a few minutes later, the inevitable would happen. I would get up and begin my endless scrolling yet again.
I wouldn't really care about this moronic back and forth if it wasn't for Jason coming into my room every time he got bored of shooting up pretend zombies with his pretend gun. Sometimes he barged in, jumped on top of my bed, and started going on and on about something I never cared enough to listen to, leaving when he finally ran out of things to say, which most times took a while. Other times, he just opened the door, gave me the side eye for being on my phone instead of doing my homework, and then left again without closing the door again behind him.
He was on my bed when the bell rang, reading the last page of the book he had found on my bedside table just to get to me, and failing because, surprise, surprise, I had read the book already, and knew exactly how it ended. He stopped when the bell rang again.
"Who is it?" he asked.
I put my phone down, "Zoey."
He got up at the same time as me, "I'll get it."
"No, you won't," I said, pushing him back on the bed and making it for the door. He grabbed my arm and yanked me back so hard I almost fell down. Then he rushed out of the room, slamming the door shut on his way out. "What's wrong with you?!"
I heard him laugh in the hallway, "Everything!"
I ran after him, considered pushing him down the stairs, and decided against it only for the sake of my parents savings, already stretched thin to cover the medical expenses of his broken leg. Instead, I just rushed down the steps, two, three, four at a time, cutting in front of him at the very bottom, and reaching for the door with my heart in my throat.
"Finally!!" I said when I saw Zoey waiting on the other side of it, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, a scarf around her neck even though winter was almost over, and her home baked smile on her lips. I wrapped my arms around her, "If I have to do any more homework, I will kill myself. Why do I need pre-calculus?! I don't wanna work a nine to five at some corner office for some corporate pig. I wanna go around looking for berries and nuts like I'm fucking supposed to."
Behind me, Jason snickered, "You haven't even done any homework yet."
Zoey looked at him over my shoulder, "That's not very helpful, Jason."
"I'm not trying to be helpful," he said.
I let go of Zoey to drag her with me back to my bedroom, and showed Jason my middle finger, "Just go shoot some more zombies with your incel friends."
He laughed, following us up the stairs, "Joke's on you. I'm playing The Sims."
Zoey and I both stopped to look at him and he offered us a smug smile, his special.
"You're lying," we said at the same time.
"I'm not." He shrugged. "I'm really good at it."
"You made so much fun of me for playing it and â"
"Get over it," he said. "People change."
"Yeah, into cockroaches."
"What?"
Zoey shook her head next to me, "It's from a book."
He threw his head back to laugh, "You're such a fucking nerd. It's embarrassing."
I turned my back at him and made way for my bedroom, dragging Zoey with me, who closed the door behind her as soon as we walked in, and then leaned back on it to take a deep breath and smile like a girl in a romcom.
"I have something to tell you," she said.
"Did you get accepted â"
"No," she said, shaking her head and taking off her scarf. "No answers yet."
I fell back on my desk chair, "What is it then?"
She opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, I saw the hickey on her neck.
"Oh!" I said, pointing right at it.
She covered it with her hand, her cheeks as red as her sweater, and smiled some more.
"Tristan?" I asked, and her hands moved to cover her whole face instead. The last time I had heard of him, he had done what no man had ever dared to do in the history of mankind. He had listened to her.
I got up and moved to my bed, and she pushed away from the door and came to lie down next to me, "He took me out for dinner at a pizza place in town, and while we were waiting to pay, he put his arms around me, and when I was putting my jacket on outside, he pulled my hair from under it, and before we got in the car, he kissed me, and it was like going back to reread a scene again, and again, and again, because it's just so good, you can't help yourself, and I justâ I feel like... He's..."
She didn't finish and I didn't think she had to. I knew what she meant. I had read enough books with tall angsty boys to understand the appeal.
Zoey rolled over in bed, and I did the same thing, and said, "I can't even find one person to find me attractive, and here you are, going on dates with the school's bad boy â"
She looked at me, and said the obvious, "Daisy, you have a boyfriend."
I took a deep breath, "That's what makes it so depressing."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
I didn't mean to change the conversation to myself, but it was too late. She was already invested, looking at me with concern all over her face, even though I was probably just being dramatic, complaining about my perfectly healthy boyfriend when hers had only a few months left to live, maybe days. I was the worst person in the world.
I said, "I have been desexualized, Zoey. I know this makes me a really bad feminist. We've spent years fighting not be treated like sex objects, and here I am, complaining that I'm not being treated like one, but at this point, I don't care. This relationship has castrated me, Zoey. I've been sterilized like a dog."
"It sounds like you should talk to him about it."
"The thought of having to ask my high school boyfriend if he's sexually attracted to me makes me want to kill myself, Zoey." I took another deep breath. "We're teenagers. We're supposed to be sexually attracted to everything. What does it say about me that â"
"It doesn't say anything," she stopped me. "I think this is more about him than it is about you."
"Really?" I asked. "You don't think I'm a nymphomaniac?"
She smiled like I was an idiot, "Of course not. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get more physical with your boyfriend, Daisy."
"And you don't think I'm a loser?"
"Why would you be a loser?"
I hid my face with a pillow, "Cause I can't even get my boyfriend to kiss me?"
She grabbed the pillow and threw it across the bed, and then climbed on top of me to grab my face with both hands, "You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. Call yourself a loser again and I'll fucking kill you."
I laughed, "You're crazy!"
She rolled back to her side of the bed, and said, "Crazy for you."
I breathed in, then out, and finally I said, "Maybe we would be better off as friends."
A few days later, I told Luke the same thing. We were doing homework on the floor of my room, sitting across from each other, and the words just came out.
He looked up from his notebook, confused, "What?"
I just felt relieved, "I've been thinking about this for a while."
He shook his head, "I don't understand."
"Isn't that what we are already?" I asked. "Friends?"
"Well, yeah, of course we're friends â"
"Sometimes I feel that that's all we are. I mean â"
"Are you breaking up with me?" he asked, smiling in disbelief, the way he did when he figured out a plot twist before it even happened on screen. Outside, the light of the day faded away, and in his face so did his smile.
"We almost never kiss. We don't even touch â"
"We kissed when I got here."
"No," I said. "You gave me the same kiss on the cheek you gave my mom. She thinks you're gay â"
"Wow."
"I'm not saying you are, I justâ I don't know how to say this without sounding like a bitch, but I just..."
"You don't wanna be with me anymore."
"You're one of my best friends. Nothing's gonna change that."
"You don't wanna be with me anymore," he said again, more to himself this time.
I swallowed hard, "I just think we would be better off as friends."
"Because I'm not a horned-up hormone monster?"
"No, I don't know, maybe." I was the worst fucking person in the world. "It just feels like you're not attracted to me â"
"Of course I'm attracted to you!" he said. "Look at you!"
I smiled, looking down at the open books on the carpet next to us, so as to not look at him sitting in front of me, closed shut. "Well, it doesn't feel like you are. You don't â"
"I'm not having this conversation with you," he stopped me, getting up and shoving all of his things into his backpack. I got up too, a tug of war in my throat, and the suspicion that I really was the villain in this story, the horned-up hormone monster he thought I wanted him to be, resenting him for failing at it.
"I don't want us to fight" He didn't look at me. He just went on struggling to put his shoes on, his bag ready next to him. "Don't I have the right to want to be with someone that actually â"
"Please just stop talking," he said, throwing his bag on his shoulders, and grabbing his jacket, his voice a tug of war too.
"Are you okay?"
He showed me a sarcastic smile, "Yeah, I feel great."
"Please don't be mad at me."
He opened the door, said, "I'm not."
"You are."
"Well, you just broke up with me," he said, ready to leave. "I'm sorry if I'm not making jokes about it just yet. At least give me a few days."
"If that's what you want me to do," I said. I tried smiling too, but it just came out as sad and pathetic, and all I got back from him was a shrug.
"I'll see you at school."
"Text me when you get home."
He didn't.