My High School Boyfriend Refused to Admit He Was Dating Me Because I Was Emo
I look up from my desk and see the cutest guy in my junior Algebra class staring at me. We make eye contact, he smiles at me, and I quickly look down at my desk, because no one can know about us. No one can know that we text every night and talk for hours on the phone, because he's the all-star basketball player and I'm the weird emo chick.
Even though we're crazy about each other, we're as opposite as two people can be. He sinks the winning shot at every game and is known by everyone as the prankster who makes all the girls melt; on and off the court, he's always the center of attention. I wear black eyeshadow and shop at Hot Topic, and I spend most nights sitting in detention reading my Harry Potter book for the fifth time. I don't talk, or dress, or act like all the other girls. And he's ashamed of that.
Until we started talking my junior year, he only dated Instagram-perfect blondes. The flawless valedictorian, the Taylor Swift-lookalike who started on the varsity volleyball team her freshman year – the girls that the super-star athlete should want. But he didn't want them. He wanted me. He just didn't want to tell his friends about it.
We dated off and on in secret for a year. When we'd hang out he'd make me drive out to the country late at night so no one would see us. When we'd talk on the phone every night he'd make me promise not to tell my friends the things he'd say. He took his perfect ex to our junior prom and looked over her shoulder at me while they danced.
Because of him, I learned to master the art of not being where I said I was. I learned to not look too long at him in public and to tilt my phone so no one could see who I was texting. I had to hold a smile back from my friends when he'd send sweet things to my phone.
I wanted to bring our relationship out into the open, because what were we hiding from anyway? So one day I got the courage to ask if I could wear his jersey to the basketball game that night. It wasn't a big deal, after all – at our school all the girls wore team jerseys and it rarely meant they were dating the guy. He agreed, then asked if I wanted to come over after the game. I, of course, said yes, feeling my stomach flip. Maybe things would finally change.
An hour before tip off, his best friend somehow got wind of our plans to hang out. He instantly called to cancel and told me it wasn't "a good idea" for me to wear his jersey. So I went to the game and cheered him on as he played, trying to ignore the fact that I was the only girl in the audience without numbers on her back. I cried over him for hours that night, but for some reason I let myself keep falling for a guy who looked in the other direction every time he saw me in the halls.
As our senior year was coming to a close, he asked me to go to college with him – the big school where he'd study criminal justice. "This time will be different," he told me for the hundredth time. He said we could be together there, just he and I, and even though he didn't admit it, I knew it was because we'd be far away from the high school friends he cared about more than me.
For the first time, I told him no. I turned down the school visit he'd set up for me and when he started talking about marrying me after college, I had to face the fact that he was saying anything he could to string me along – and I wasn't falling for it anymore. I'd already decided on the school I'd attend and I wasn't going to base the biggest decision of my life on his insecurities. So I left for school and so did he.
We both started dating other people in college, but we stayed close friends. We'd give each other relationship advice and talk in between classes. But the busier I got, taking on internship after internship and diving into my fashion classes, the farther away I felt from my old life — and the more I started to realize I didn't need him in my new one. I deleted his number from my phone and blocked him on social media, but I couldn't get past the insecurity he'd instilled in me.
The year of secrecy had convinced me that no one could ever be proud to date me. Even though I stopped caking on black eyeliner and got rid of my neon green tutu — at college in a new city, my style was naturally evolving — part of me still felt like the outcast he thought I was.
He made me believe that no one could ever want me for more than a late-night hookup, that I'd never be the girl a guy shows off to his friends. So I focused on building a glamorous career. Even though I wanted success for myself, proving him wrong was always in the back of my mind.
And I did prove him wrong. I'm famous in our small town now, known as the girl who moved to New York to work for a fashion magazine. After three years of silence, he started liking my Instagram pictures and added me on Snapchat. To him, I'm finally the cool girl he thought he deserved. Thankfully, I realized he didn't deserve me at all.
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