Girl Hearts Girl

by Lucy Sutcliffe

  Sophie had made friends with another group of girls, and at the end of that year, she moved to France with her family. Kristine had also left to go to a different school, which left just Becci and me. Over the last year, the two of us had quickly become brilliant friends. She was extremely supportive and fiercely loyal. When it came to talking to her about my problems or wanting advice, I knew I could trust her with anything.

  We’d recently befriended two girls named Emily and Kat, who were in our English class. The four of us got along like a house on fire. Emily lived just down the road from me and we had started hanging out a lot.

  I secretly wanted to be just like Emily. She was pretty in that effortless sort of way, with big, curly eyelashes, huge blue eyes and a wardrobe full of clothes to die for. She also had a giant make-up collection, which I envied from afar. I had always been fascinated with make-up; the little glass bottles and vials in my mother’s beauty cabinet reminded me of a potions class at Hogwarts.

  One lunchtime, Emily offered to do my makeup for me. She lined my eyes with a fancy-looking brush and winged it out into a cat flick to look just like hers, then coloured in my lips with a bright red lip pencil. When I looked in the mirror, I was amazed. Was that really me?!

  That evening, I rushed home and rifled through the little box of cosmetics I kept on my windowsill. Most of the things in there were little eye-shadow freebies from magazines, or bits and pieces my mum had given me that she never used. I sighed. The bright pink tubes of bubblegum-flavoured lip gloss and pots of gloopy, floral-scented body glitter were no longer right for a fifteen-year-old. I needed to take a more ‘grown up’ approach, so after taking a peek into my mum’s makeup bag and snaffling a few select items, I began experimenting.

  One afternoon after school, my mum caught sight of me as she walked through the front door. “Sweetheart,” she said, trying to keep a straight face. “What is that orange stain across your forehead?”

  I rubbed at it nervously. “Foundation! Why?”

  “Oh, darling, I … I don’t think it’s quite your shade!”

  I ran to the nearest mirror and peered at my reflection. A bright orange streak spanned across the length of my forehead. “Oh … oh, wow… !”

  My mum burst out laughing. I tried to act offended, but her laugh was so infectious that soon enough, I was cackling, too.

  “Did I really go to school like this?!” I said breathlessly between fits of giggles. “I look like a stripy Oompa Loompa!”

  We sat down with cups of tea and chatted about make-up. At fifteen, my mum told me, the way I looked was not something I should be worrying about.

  “I want people to think I’m pretty, though.”

  “Sweetheart, you’re beautiful just the way you are. You don’t need to wear make-up at all. Makeup is for older people like me. But if you really want to wear it, you need to wear it because you want to – not because someone else has told you to.”

  “OK then. How about I just wear some mascara?”

  She paused. “Fine, if it makes you happy. But let me show you how to use it first!”

  The next day, I walked into school with my freshly curled, mascara-d eyelashes.

  Kat saw my face and grinned. “Aw, you look really pretty today!” I grinned. Kat was always able to put a huge smile on my face.

  Emily nodded. “You really do! Trying to catch the attention of some boys, perhaps?!” she joked.

  I laughed. Emily and Kat had a lot of guy friends, and I couldn’t help envying the attention they got. On the one hand, I wanted nothing to do with boys, but at the same time, they made it all seem so cool and exciting. They were always deciphering texts from guys together and talking about their crushes in hushed whispers. It seemed sort of exhilarating. All at once, I was jealous, and found myself wanting to be a part of the action.

  Now that I have a new look, maybe I can finally capture the hearts of some boys?! I thought to myself, optimistic as ever.

  Sadly, my newfound confidence was short-lived. That afternoon, as I was getting off the school bus, Lewis Price, who was in the year above, came sauntering up to me. He wore a look of pure disgust. He stopped, and looked me up and down.

  “What happened to you?”

  I stared at him, confused, but didn’t say anything. I tried to step around him but he stopped right in front of me.

  “You look like you live in a bin.”

  All of his friends started to laugh. His brother William chipped in. “It’s true. I’m pretty sure you get uglier and uglier every single day.”

  I swallowed and kept on walking, trying to hold back tears. I could hear them jeering at me as I rounded the corner.

  I went home and stared in the mirror. What was wrong with the way I looked? My eyes were a bit big and my mouth was a bit small, but it was nothing too horrendous. I frowned. I suppose my teeth were a bit crooked. Should I get that looked at?

  I poked and prodded at my face for hours that evening, picking apart every last detail. Emily and Kat had said I looked really pretty, but Lewis and William had said the complete opposite. So who was right? Which of them should I believe?

  I wish I’d known back then that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You can look like a supermodel and still not everyone is going to think you’re beautiful. It took me a long time to realize that what is on the inside – my kindness, my loyalty, my ability to make people laugh, my passions, my dreams – is what truly counts. My mum was right: when you get ready in the morning it should be for no one else but yourself. If you’re happy, nothing else should matter.

  I was starting to really worry about why I still wasn’t having any crushes on boys. There were guys in my year who made girls practically fall over themselves with excitement whenever they slouched by, hitching up their low-rise jeans, flicking their shaggy hair out of their eyes, guitars slung meaningfully over their shoulders. I tried to convince myself that I was just being super picky.

  One evening, out of pure frustration, I tore down the posters of Emma Watson that I had plastered all over my wardrobe door and replaced them with some pictures of Zac Efron that I’d ripped out from my magazines. I gazed at them hopefully. “Wow, he’s so hot,” I said aloud, with a half-hearted attempt at a love-struck sigh. I felt nothing. I looked ruefully at the pile of Emma posters on the floor. What was this going to take?

  Exasperated, and becoming increasingly desperate, I began scouting around for someone to have a crush on. What boys did I know? Who could I fancy?

  One afternoon during English class, I spotted the perfect candidate.

  Harry had green eyes, curly hair, and seemed a little arrogant – but arrogance was, according to the magazines I’d been reading, an indicator of secret insecurity. “So adorable,” I thought to myself. “We can totally be insecure together.”

  Halfway through the lesson, Harry turned to me and asked if he could borrow a pen. I handed him the one I’d been using without a second thought, then realized I didn’t have a spare. Once he’d turned back around, I asked Kat if I could borrow hers.

  She began to chuckle as she reached into her pencil case. “You’ve gone so red!” she whispered. “Why on earth did you give him your pen?!”

  “Boys make me do stupid things, I guess,” I said with a nonchalant sigh.

  “You’re not alone there,” Emily whispered. “He asked me what my name was the other day and I temporarily forgot it!”

  We fell about laughing.

  “Girls! Be quiet,” Mrs Fitzgerald shouted from across the room. Harry turned around and waggled his finger at us.

  “I think I fancy him,” I whispered.

  “Me too!” Emily squeaked.

  I felt as light as air as I walked home that evening. “This isn’t too difficult,” I thought to myself as I ambled up the garden path. “I’ll fancy him in no time!”

  I had convinced myself: I liked Harry.

  I drew his initials in heart shapes on the front of my planner, my English textbooks, and
my diary. I gossiped about him with my friends, and came up with long, complex ways of getting him to fall head-over-heels in love with me. Becci, Emily, Kat and I played endless games of M.A.S.H., trying to figure out the names of our future children (Brian, Robert and Amelia) what our house was going to be like (a caravan – not my first choice, but I knew we could make it work), and what car we would drive (a VW Beetle – my favourite – it was destiny).

  But it was becoming increasingly clear that Emily had a big crush on Harry, too. I hadn’t expected him to become such an integral part of our lives, and it was starting to worry me. We would spend hours talking about Harry at break times, analysing his every word, trying to decide if he had a crush on either of us. What would happen if he did? Would it ruin our friendship with each other?

  Harry was loving it. He sat at our table in English and basked in the attention, our coy remarks going back and forth like a ping-pong game as we got steadily more flirtatious.

  One day, Harry reached for my hand underneath the table and held it for the rest of the lesson. This is it, I thought. He’s totally in love with me. But I didn’t get that surge of butterflies like all the magazines had told me to expect. At the end of class, he stared at me from underneath his floppy fringe and I just looked at the floor.

  So now what? I’d been so caught up in trying to like him, and getting him to like me, that I hadn’t considered what would happen next. Should I ask him out?

  I couldn’t sleep that night. My thoughts were whirling around and around in my head. What had I done? What had I started? It had never been in my nature to compete for anything, let alone a person. I felt horrendous. I’d planned out our whole lives together in my head, but now it had actually come down to it, I didn’t know what to do. Did I really like him as much as I thought? Did I actually want to go ahead and date him?

  Deep down, I knew the answer was no. Guilt washed over me in waves. What would Emily think? She genuinely liked him, and I felt sick at the thought that I might have taken him away from her.

  Over the next few weeks, Harry seemed more subdued than usual. He didn’t sit at our table in English, and he didn’t speak to either Emily or me. Emily seemed like her normal self, talking and gossiping like nothing was wrong – but I could feel the tension mounting between the three of us. I just wanted it all to fade away. Why had my feelings changed so abruptly? What was wrong with me? I felt so guilty. This was all my fault.

  My saving grace came at the end of the week in the form of a geography field trip to Swansea. I wasn’t going, but Harry, Emily and Kat were. I wondered what was going to happen while they were away. I secretly hoped that Emily had magically guessed that I wasn’t into Harry any more. I didn’t want to have to tell her. I didn’t want to look like a liar.

  When they came back five days later, rumours began to fly that Emily and Harry were now an item. Kat confirmed the news to me during break time. She spoke gently and quietly, as if she thought I was going to cry at any minute.

  “It’s cool,” I said, and I meant it. “I don’t mind. They’re better suited to each other.”

  It wasn’t long before Emily came to speak to me, too. One look at her worried face made me feel guilty all over again.

  “You’re one of my closest friends now,” she said, “and … I just want to make sure you aren’t mad at me or anything.”

  “Of course not! I promise it’s OK.”

  “Pinkie swear?”

  “Pinkie swear!”

  We both laughed.

  As much as I’d felt like my crush on Harry had been real, I also knew deep down that when I’d told Emily and Kat that I didn’t mind, I was telling the truth. I didn’t care that Harry had chosen her – and it terrified me.

  Sport had never been my strong point, and PE lessons were just as drab at secondary school as they had been at primary school. Now, though, it was a chance to hang out and catch up with friends that we didn’t share other classes with. As long as we at least pretended to exercise, none of our teachers seemed to care that we spent most of the lesson gossiping.

  Half an hour into one particularly gruelling cross-country running lesson, I was ambling along by myself, stopping every so often to smell the flowers, when I spotted my friend Clare walking ahead of me with Nathan, who I knew from maths class, and another girl that I didn’t recognize.

  I jogged up to them and tapped Clare on the shoulder.

  She turned around, smiling. “Oh, hello! This is Bel, by the way.”

  Bel smiled at me nervously. “Hi!”

  I smiled back. “I like how all four of us have just given up on running.”

  The three of them laughed. “I’m so glad I found people who hate PE as much as I do,” Bel said, grinning.

  “Oh God, tell me about it,” Nathan said. “I dread these lessons.”

  I did an impression of our PE teacher Miss Bernard, running on the spot looking constipated. I wasn’t looking where I was going, and got my foot stuck in a large dollop of cow poo. I slipped over spectacularly, and landed on the floor in a heap.

  “Clare,” I said, looking up at her, trying to keep a straight face. “Could you clean up after yourself next time?”

  We were in stiches, guffawing all the way up the lane.

  “Oh dear,” said Bel, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “I’m always going to remember this. Meeting you for the first time, resulting in you stepping into poo.”

  That set us off again. I had a feeling Bel and I were going to be best friends.

  Once again, it struck me how lucky I was to have such a brilliant circle of friends. We had become a really tight-knit group. The six of us – Emily, Becci, Kat, Bel, Clare and I – hung out after school and at the weekends, getting together to eat pizza, listen to music and gossip. It felt good to have a group of people in my life that I had so much in common with and could really trust. I thought back to how lonely and friendless I’d felt when I was eleven. If only I’d known how much happiness was to come.

  Still, though, there was something missing. Something important.

  I was almost sixteen. I had wonderful friends. I had a loving family. But there was one thing I would never have: love.

  That was the conclusion I had come to. If I couldn’t fall in love with boys like Harry or Zac Efron, then I quite clearly wasn’t going to fall in love with anyone. My destiny, it seemed, was to remain “neutral”; I would live in a secluded log cabin on a farm somewhere, breed dogs maybe, and grow my own food in a tiny vegetable patch. I would star-gaze and learn new languages and watch the flowers grow. I would live life to its fullest – but I would absolutely not fall in love.

  Just writing about this time makes my heart ache. I was so utterly wrapped up in a twisted game of doubt and self-loathing that I willingly accepted a life devoid of love if it meant that I could keep my worrying lack of feelings for boys hidden for ever.

  What made things worse was that I couldn’t tell anyone. They say a problem shared is a problem halved, but I had to carry my burden alone. I desperately wanted to tell my parents, or one of my friends – deep down, I knew they’d all love me no matter what – but something was keeping me silent. What if they got angry at me for lying to them? Would they be disappointed, or worse, embarrassed, by me? If I told one person, would everyone eventually find out? Would it become the talk of the town? The last thing I wanted was to be defined by this one “part” of my character – especially when I was still trying to figure out what that “part” was. And what if news broke out before I was ready? I couldn’t risk that…

  I knew my worries were irrational, but the isolation I’d put myself in only heightened my anxiety, and gradually, I sank deeper and deeper into a whirlwind of confusion and misery. While days spent with my friends were full of fun and laughter, as soon as I was on my own, my mind became a tightly wound spiral of panic. I obsessively analysed every passing thought, searching for an answer, desperate for a clue, scouring for anything that might help curb the swelling
terror inside my head. I felt anxious and sick every single day. Sometimes my chest felt so tight that I was certain I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but my own thoughts.

  I couldn’t sleep. Night after night I cried into my pillow as the small hours ticked by, kept awake by the chaotic thoughts in my brain. Was it just a phase? Was I gay or something? It was the first time I had used this label, even tentatively. How would I ever really know? What was going to happen if I told somebody?

  I cried so much that my face felt sore from all the salt in my tears. To soothe my aching skin, I’d stand at my window with it thrust wide open, lights off, staring up into the starry night sky. They’d always be there, sparkling away, a distant twinkle high up above the dark village horizon – my silent beacons of hope. The nagging voice in my head would be drowned out by the wind as it whistled through my room, rustling my curtains, rattling the posters on my walls, tousling my hair. “There, there,” it would whisper, softly. At last I would feel at peace, somehow soothed by the way nature never stops, refusing to slow down for anyone, or anything.

  I was at my most calm just before dawn. As the sun would rise in the east, the sky would turn a soft magenta, and the rooftops, once shrouded in darkness, became navy silhouettes against the fiery glow. At this point, I would collapse into bed, exhausted. In those rare, blissful moments, I dared to think ahead, about my future, my prospects, and my goals. Sometimes I saw myself, aged 25, happy and successful, maybe married with kids, living with someone I loved. A man? A woman? The scene was too vague for me to know. These moments in which I allowed my mind to wander were the ones that pushed me forwards through my darkest days. Those few minutes of peace became what I lived for.

  Despite everything, my dreams of living a loveless life alone in the mountains were short-lived. That’s the thing about love: you never know when it’s about to hit you smack bang in the face.

  When I say love, I of course use the term loosely. I was sixteen and I had a crush. But, boy, did I have a crush with all my might.