My armpits were swamps as I stood there on the track that circled the football field, clutching my notebook to my chest and watching as Leo wrapped up practice with his team. Everything inside me screamed to turn around and bolt, but I fought against instinct.
My poor body was trying to save me, and I wouldn’t listen.
Instead, I stood as tall as I could, fingers trembling and heart racing. And when Leo was jogging past me with some of his teammates, I called out his name in a weak, cracking voice.
He slowed, head whipping in my direction, his damp, messy hair flowing like a slow motion commercial when he did. It stole my breath, seeing him that close after all the nights we’d spent together on the phone. His eyes were more golden than I’d ever realized, his jaw more defined, body glistening with sweat.
I waited for it, for the moment he looked into my eyes and just knew that it was me, that I was the girl he’d talked to every day and every night for most of the summer. I waited for his smile to spread, for him to run toward me and scoop me into his arms just like all the stupid movies had prepared me for.
Instead, he frowned, confusion etched in his brows as he slowed to a stop and walked a few hesitant steps toward me. “Yeah?”
I tried to ignore the way my heart sank, the way my nerves doubled when a few of his teammates stopped, too, looking at Leo, then me, then each other with this look that said oh, this ought to be good.
“H-hi,” I breathed, swallowing and reminding myself to force an exhale.
Leo still looked confused, but he offered a small smile of mercy. “Hi.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, I just…” Every word I’d planned to say flew out the window in my panic, but I knew I didn’t need words. He’d know who I was without me having to tell him.
Because I was going to show him.
“I drew you this,” I said, thrusting the sketchbook toward him.
My smile was confident, wide and gleaming, because I just knew he was going to get it. Who else would be drawing him something? Besides, he knew my voice. He knew me.
Leo looked back at his friends who were fighting off laughter, his brows still bent together when he turned to face me again. “Um… okay?”
He took the sketchbook from me, and a teammate behind him said, “Go on, what is it, Hernandez?”
Leo glanced at me before hesitantly opening the book to the first page. It was the simplest of the drawings I’d been curating for him since the night he asked me to, a fine-line sketch of things that made me think of summer — wildflowers, bumblebees, a rushing river.
When it didn’t hit him after seeing it, when he just screwed up his face and glanced at me before flipping the page, my heart sank.
His friends watched over his shoulder, and when the page was flipped, they started laughing and yelling and hitting each other before one of them ripped the notebook out of his hands.
“What the hell? Did this crooked-teeth freak draw you porn?”
My cheeks flushed with a furious heat, and I made a mental note to never smile again. “It’s not porn,” I argued.
One of the guys flipped the book around toward me, showcasing the curvy girl who I felt looked like me. She was in a hoodie and leggings, what I usually wore when I played, and a boy in a football jersey held her in his arms, wrapped around her as they looked up at the stars.
The boy was supposed to be Leo.
If you looked closely, in our hands, there was a single Xbox controller — one we held together.
But Leo didn’t look closely. In fact, he barely looked at all before he ripped the book away from his cackling friends and shoved it back into my chest.
“Look, I don’t know what the hell this is supposed to be, but I don’t want it.”
His eyes locked on mine.
And what I saw reflected in them tore me to shreds.
He knew.
He knew it was me. It was written in every feature — the pity in his eyes, his furrowed brows, his rigid stance and heaving chest. And right then and there, I recognized the truth.
He knew it was me, and he didn’t like what he saw.
“You have no idea what I look like.”
“So?”
How stupid I was for believing he meant that.
He couldn’t even hold eye contact for more than a moment before he looked down at the ground between us, the book still extended toward me.
My throat burned as I snatched it out of his hands, willing the tears flooding my eyes to stay put and not release down my cheeks. “You’re a liar, and a jerk, and I hope one day someone hurts you as bad as you just hurt me.”
His friends broke out into a chorus of laughter, and one of them said, “Ohhh, you hear that, Hernandez? This fat, pimple-faced freak called you a big bad jerk!”
The boy’s voice mimicked that of a little kid with those last few words, which made everyone crack up all over again.
And Leo didn’t say a word.
He didn’t stop them, didn’t tell them to shut up and leave me alone, didn’t defend me or even show an ounce of mercy. And when his friend threw an arm around him, leading him and the rest of the pack away from me, Leo looked back only once.
I thought I saw him mouth that he was sorry.
It only made me fume more.
A blink released the tears I’d been holding back, and they burned the memory into my brain forever as they seared down my cheeks.
I waited until I was home, until I was behind my bedroom door that I slammed vehemently. Then, I screamed and ripped at the pages of the notebook
“I hate you, Leo Hernandez,” I seethed, tearing page after page. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
Yanking the pages out of the notebook wasn’t enough. When they littered my floor, I picked them each up and shredded them into tiny morsels until my bedroom floor was covered in paper snow. My chest was heaving by the time I finished, and then I collapsed right there in the middle of the pile.
And I cried.
No, I sobbed, until my lungs gave out and there were no more tears left in my ducts. Mom hesitantly knocked on my door, but I told her to go away, and I told Dad the same when he got home from work. I didn’t join them for dinner. It felt like I’d never eat again, never sleep again, never be the same person I was before Leo destroyed me.
I tried to find reason, tried to remind myself that I was a high school girl and these emotions would pass. That’s what Mom always told me when I was being dramatic. But nothing could pull the hurt, the rage from my heart — not this time.
That day fundamentally changed who I was.
The weak cage I’d tried to live in to please my parents, to be what they and everyone else in my life wanted me to be, was completely obliterated. I clawed at the bars, bending and warping them until I could step through. And on the other side, I was untamed, unfazed, unstoppable.
I decided right then and there that nothing and no one would ever hurt me again.
That evening, when Leo logged on and tried to request for me to play with him, I unfriended him. He called me immediately after, and when I didn’t answer, he sent a text that I didn’t even bother reading.
I blocked him on everything.
I unplugged my Xbox and made a plan to take it and all my games to GameStop and exchange it for a PlayStation, instead.
I shut the world out.
I shut who I used to be out.
And that night, when sleep wouldn’t come, I didn’t know a lot of things.
I didn’t know how much worse things would get at school the next day. I didn’t know that it was possible for an already-fractured heart to break even further. I didn’t know that those asshole friends of Leo’s took a picture of my drawing when I was busy looking at Leo. I didn’t know they’d make copies and plaster it all over school with my hideous freshman school photo, that pimple-faced porn freak would become a nickname I’d never escape in all my high school years. I didn’t know that Leo would laugh with them, that he’d never so much as look my way again, that he’d pretend I didn’t even exist.
The biggest surprise of all?
I didn’t know that six years later, when I was no longer even a semblance of the girl I was that summer I turned fifteen — Leo Hernandez would be my neighbor.
And a year after that… my roommate.
