Breaking Boys 6 (reprise)

The Twin

"There was the boy who was five years older, who had a twin brother, who divided best friends. He was the one who loved making out on the floor of his living room and loved listening to me sing. He was the boy who went away to Arizona, the boy who called when he was lonely and the boy who wrote me only three letters. He was the boy that made me feel older and less naive. He was the boy I had to have. He was the boy I never told my parents about. "

I don’t have a photo of him, but my best friend does. I have no trinkets from the time our relationship took place except a black and white photograph of his sister and brother. It’s curious that I would take a picture of them and never even try for a picture of my own boyfriend. Yet, my best friend, she has trinkets, and photos and years of memories all from the boy I thought I had won.

I was only fifteen when we dated; he was nineteen, almost twenty. To date, that five-year difference is the biggest I have encountered, although it matters much less now than it did when I was fifteen and innocent.

I came to know him through my best friend. He was a twin, and besides his brother, he had a sister who took me under her wing and tried her best not to corrupt me, but just to inform me.
It started out friendly- me, my best friend and him, spending hours talking and eating and watching MTV during the summer between freshman and sophomore year. It soon turned to flirting and touching and an enormous amount of compliments. I was happy, ecstatic even, but there she was with an uneasiness in her eyes, trying to relay a message and me. And I casually ignored all the signs, because I suppose I didn’t want to see it- the affection she had for him- so I insisted I didn’t, even though, as a friend, I should have.

So came the secrets. My best friend would turn her head and we would kiss, she would leave, and we would make out on the floor until she returned. She noticed the difference in our actions, our looks, our touches and how we didn’t mind when she had to leave early, or when she couldn’t join us at all.

I became everything she wasn’t to him. I discovered what he wanted, needed even and morphed myself into his ideal girl. I began pretending and utilized my ability to fake emotions for the sake of obtaining a boy five years my senior.

The complexity of the situation grew and divided us, all three of us, we being stubborn adolescents. We all believed in our cause so strongly that the consequences didn’t matter. I lost a best friend, and eventually a boyfriend, which I can see was inevitable. I trampled over my best friend for a two month long relationship which ended when he went to college in Arizona. I put it all on the line for something that was forbidden to last. In the ultimate test of friendship, I allowed myself to fail.

Years later, he is still friends with her, as am I, but he and I have not found our way back to one another. Our relationship was founded on un-solid ground, with no real basis or friendship to pull us through. And a line in his letter that allowed me to think I had won, that I had created a relationship he would never recover from, now proves untrue: "you and I will make better friends then [she] and I ever did, so don’t you ever worry about that."