The smart nerdy friend's boo

Fic. This is the character self-portrait of the outgoing friendly friend of the main character, for the Appointments & Disappointments series.   

My first memory is that of my great grandmother, her showering me with all the love, and telling me I was the greatest girl in the world. They tell me I couldn't have remembered that since I was so young, I know that's not right. I was three and a half.

I was six. My family had our first annual family gathering, two hundred of us at a friend's resort in the mountains. I got to know all my young cousins and their parents. I kept in touch with them, and later visited them all across the world. They tell me I'm outgoing and vivacious, all I'm doing is keeping in touch with people so I can go visit them when they settle down in all the amazing places in the world.

I apologized to him the next day, he said he'd never kiss a girl again because of me, I told him maybe he should kiss guys then. I didn't get in trouble. I punched him on the face, he bled from his nose. A boy kissed me on the cheeks, a classmate. I was nine.

At eleven we went on a four-month trip all over. We stayed with my cousins in the US, in the UK, in Australia, in Canada, in Hong Kong, in one of those remote islands where they don't have regular commercial flights so we had to take those small planes that will rupture your eardrums if you don't cover them with the cottonaballs they give you. I didn't want to go home. I cried and cried and cried when they told me we were returning. They said I'd be able to come back when I was older, and I could come stay there forever when I was old enough. Study hard, they told me, or else you can't come live here. From thereon all I wanted to do was move out of the country.

Something freed inside me, I felt like a flower that was blooming. We were playing one of those stupid truth and dares, it shouldn't have been a big deal. I kissed a boy on the lips and I liked it. I was thirteen.

I was fifteen. If I wanted to go to good schools abroad, they said, I'd need to go to good schools that'd make it easy. They made me take an entrance exam, it didn't go very well, and the interview went pretty bad. My dad offered to build them the auditorium they'd been trying to get built for a decade. I was in. This was the first time I'd be staying away from my parents, first time I'd be living by myself, the first time I'd be living solely with people my age group. I didn't know how to feel.

We kissed every night that week. We made out until our lips were blue, until the sun was out, on our hostel roof. Later, when everyone slept, we kissed. I told her she was like a goddess to me, the perfect statue of a powerful female deity, and I was embarrassed to talk to her. This girl with nice long hair, the most beautiful face I'd ever seen, and the baddest motherfucker I'd ever known, told me she wished she was my friend, she wanted to talk to me every day, all the time, and just being there on the roof drunk with me at one in the morning made her want to melt. After the teachers were asleep my friends and I got very drunk. I got my people outside to get us a crate of beers, the strong one. We won! There was a big dance competition which we practiced for four months. I was sixteen.

I was sixteen and half. I became really good friends with all of her friends. [Including the main character. Explain more here later]

I was seventeen. Someone told me I should talk about gay rights at this youth conference thing. I said I wasn't the right person, I was a straight girl who was in love with this one perfect human being, the most adorable, powerful caring person who just happened to be a woman.

I felt like dying. I didn't know what to do. I didn't eat for days. I didn't talk to anyone. The only thing I had going for me was my good relations with the teachers, but they said that counted for nothing when the grades were as poor as mine. I wasn't going to get any scholarships. I didn't have the grades, I didn't have the curriculars, I didn't have the angle. I was not ready to apply to colleges like everybody else was. I was eighteen.