Sometimes you’re not the dumb girl because you fell for someone’s misleading mind games. Sometimes you’re not the victim. It’s not always the case that your heart is broken by another. There may be a time where you do it all on your own. Sometimes you’re the dumb girl because you had a perfectly good guy and you decided he wasn’t good enough for you, so instead of letting him go, you led him on and basically wasted both of your times. Your broken heart led you to cause the broken heart of another, because God forbid you should be inconvenienced on your own. Sometimes you’re the perpetrator. I can confidently say I confess to my crime, and this is how I murdered my heart, and his.

April 11^th, 2005.

One of my close high school friends decided to post a picture of me from my sixteenth birthday on her ‘Friendspages’ website. Before the more interactive version we know as Facebook, Friendspages allowed users to produce a website with information about the creator, decorate it with imaginative designs, allowed users to add photos, and visitors were able to leave comments by selecting the ‘comments’ tab which would direct them to a different page. Bit like a business site, but it was just about the individual.
In this photo, I was wearing a black strapless dress with three shades of pink frilly bits to mimic a skirt, attached to the bottom of the black section. I didn’t wear much make up. Just a bit of powder which I thought would hide my blemishes. I had no clue about make up back then, so my rosy cheeks were on show. I stood behind a table that had my favourite chocolate mud birthday cake on display, the number sixteen candles lit up and I smiled for the camera. On this day, the photo caught the attention of one of my girlfriend’s male mates.
‘Hey, my friend wants to know if he can add you on MSN. He saw your picture and thought you were cute,’ she told me via SMS.
‘Are you serious?’ I replied, failing to believe that someone would be interested in me. I was never a kid that cared for boy’s attention, nor did I think anybody would be interested in me in that way at all. To me, sixteen is still a kid and I just want to have fun with my friends. Boys were a distraction. I wasn’t very confident in my appearance either. I had just started wearing make up, and I only began to start having some sense of fashion (for the early 00’s, anyway). But, I was never an introvert. I guess my bubbly and outgoing nature always shined through, even in an image.
Eventually, after much thought and with a bit of embarrassment, I continued the text with, ‘yeah, whatever.’

April 12^th, 2005.

He added me on MSN. We did a bit of small talk and then spoke about my sixteenth birthday party. He mentioned that I looked ‘cute’ in the picture my friend posted.
‘Your cheeks are so rosy,’ he said. I hated that. I never found it flattering when people thought they were complimenting my big round cheeks. I had this thing where my left cheek would become redder than the right because of a serious accident I had when I was eight. A lot of skin was scraped off the left side of my face, and though fully healed, that part of my face that was injured still showed up when I got red. And I go red no matter what; doesn’t have to be just hot weather. It’s just my skin. It’s not cute. It’s not adorable. It’s just my body and how it reacts.
I played it cool, given I didn’t know a thing about talking to boys in a flirting way. I tried very hard to give the ‘one of the boys’ sort of vibe. I was good at that. Like I said, I didn’t do this whole flirting thing. It was out of my skill set at this point of my life.
I asked him for a photo of him so I could put a face to the name. He had Will Smith as his display picture at the time. I highly doubted I was speaking to the Fresh Prince.
‘Nah, you won’t want to see what I look like.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m ugly.’
‘I am too, but you’ve seem me.’
‘You’re not ugly. Trust me. And you’ll stop talking to me if you saw what I looked like.’ At this point I thought I might possibly be talking to a troll that lived under a bridge with pimples and crazy hair, the way he was explaining himself.
I really pushed him to the point where he gave in. He sent a picture, but it was of three people. I guess he would have thought that this was his best. There was a very pretty girl in the middle, and two guys on either side of her. I wasn’t attracted to either guy, but if I had to choose, I’d say the one on the right who was tall with Johnny Bravo spiked up hair, broad shouldered and baby faced was definitely the more attractive one.
‘I’m the one on the left.’
I went silent and wasn’t typing back for a little bit. I was so disappointed. Of course, a non-attractive guy was into me. God forbid I pull in a stunner. And then you wonder why I don’t do boys. There he was; chubby, and a bit of acne to go with the long nose. He too had a bit of spike through his hair but not as volumed or noticeable as the other guy in the picture. His smile revealed crooked teeth that braces should have been able to fix, and his lips were way too thin for thick lips like mine to ever kiss.
I decided to reply, ‘hey, you’re not bad,’ which I would soon regret, because in turn, I got, ‘you’re just being nice. I know I would never get a girl like you.’
I really couldn’t be bothered with the sob story, but I couldn’t tell him the truth either, that I wasn’t attracted to him.
‘I’m sure you will. I honestly don’t think I’m that good looking. There’s definitely a lot better than me.’
‘Nah, you’re pretty up there. You’ll find someone and I’ll be alone.’
It kept going on until I somehow got us off the topic about how low his self-esteem was and started chatting about other things.

September 16^th, 2005.

My best Greek friend at the time told me she had someone for me; a tall, blue eyed, blonde Greek guy who had asked about me after seeing my face on her MSN display picture. This was becoming a bit of a trend, I saw.
She sent a picture of him to me and I really liked what I saw. He was really good looking and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity. With his blonde hair and blue eyes, were his broad shoulders, a tough jawline and a manly physique from what I could see in an image that cut right under his chest area. I didn’t think I was crash hot at all, so to have someone quite attractive be interested in me, I was a giggly school girl after all, who fell for it.
My friend arranged a meeting with her boyfriend and this guy the next Saturday. Turned out her boyfriend and this guy were good friends from their high school. We’d go to the movies.

September 17^th, 2005.

My friend and I walked to the cinema which wasn’t far from home at all. Our parents knew we’d be going movies, but not who we were going with. Ethnic parents don’t really approve of teenage girls going out with strange males.
I only started wearing jeans the year or two prior. I had my good pair on. I was on a date, of course, I was going to wear my good pair. They were light blue and flared. Flared jeans were very in. I also wore a yellow singlet, but stayed covered with my cream coloured, velour, J-Lo branded, thin jacket. I’ve never tried to look good for anybody, but I did this time. That was my best.
My friend and I walked up the stairs to the cinema lobby and there he was. I was so happy. He was just as attractive in person. His eyes were as blue as the most clearest day, from up close. At sixteen, he seemed to be able to grow a bit of facial hair, and it was then I decided that I loved that ragged look. It seemed as thought he liked what he saw also, because he would take me by the hand and walk me into the cinema. He was being gentleman.
Though my friend and her boyfriend were going into the same movie, we decided that we would separate into different ends of cinema 10. Don’t ask me what movie we watched. I can’t remember. To be honest, I don’t think we even watched it. We kissed and spoke the entire time. He was my first kiss, but I can’t say if that would actually be considered my first kiss. Well, you see, he refused any tongue. He said, ‘I don’t like it. It’s sloppy.’ It was his only fault from what I knew so far. I couldn’t judge anyway. I was completely ignorant to the craft of kissing. He asked me to be his girlfriend and so we made it official on our first meeting.
We both went back to our representative homes and changed our MSN names to ‘he loves she’ and ‘she loves he,’ because you know, apparently I knew what love was; so dumb.

September 18^th, 2005.

He saw my MSN name had changed and made the enquiry.
‘So, you got a boyfriend?’
As bad as I felt for him, I was kind of relieved. Maybe he would back off now and we could actually be just friends.
He asked for his picture, and so I sent it to him. I thought maybe it was because he wanted to see what he was competing with. We all know by now his confidence wasn’t great in his appearance. He was confident in everything else, including being a supportive friend. He wished me all the best, but I could tell he wasn’t happy at all. He didn’t speak much to me after that.

October 5^th, 2005.

It was our last week of our mid-semester school holidays. My boyfriend told me he wanted to watch a movie with his friend; a female friend. He’d go to her house and they would kick back there. I told him it was okay, completely oblivious to the possibility that this is a no trust zone.
My girlfriend called and asked what I was doing and what he was up to. I mentioned to her that he was catching up with that particular female friend. See this friend of mine was associated with a lot of her boyfriend’s friends because of her own relationship. She knew them all well, therefore knowing the gossip that would circle around their school and the year 11’s there. Her own relationship was so far spanning over a year, if not more. Her relationship skills were a lot stronger than mine and she would never hold back on giving advice. As soon as I told her he was going to hang out with this female friend, her alarm bells rang.
‘Umm, you don’t want him to hang out with her. She’s literally known as the school slut because she is. I don’t think they’ve actually ever hooked up, and you can trust him, but I wouldn’t trust her. I definitely wouldn’t trust her with my man.’
As soon as she told me that, she asked me to go over to her house on the main street, only a few minutes walk from my house, so that we could call him together. Well, so I could call him and she’d have my back. She was such a good friend.
I made my way to her house and we made the plan of attack. I’d call him on my Nokia phone, and have him on loudspeaker so that it was easier for her to give me appropriate responses to give him. So, I called and nervously asked him to not go to that girl’s house because I wasn’t comfortable. I had explained to him what I had heard about her. He completely lost it. He didn’t like the idea of me not trusting him, though I reassured him that it wasn’t him I didn’t trust. He would continuously explain how he had known this girl for years. I still didn’t want him to go. He wasn’t happy with my request. My friend, jotting things down on paper to show me or miming things to me, was telling me all logical things to explain to him, but I felt so bad being in control of his life like that. This was the first time I had ever been in this situation, and rightly so. It was my first boyfriend and my first fight with my boyfriend. I didn’t know what I was doing and it didn’t feel right being that jealous crazy girlfriend that my friend wanted me to be.
He eventually would say he was sorry and we ended the conversation there. Little did I know what chain of events and ideas he would come up with soon after.

to be continued…