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 ^{(it's beta!)}

--novel-verse ^^, - If I get comments on it I'll post the sequel...--

It was about a year ago when he first asked her out. Well, when I first saw him ask her out. Maybe a little bit longer ago, I don’t know, really. It seemed pretty insignificant at the time. I mean, we were sitting outside eating lunch, and he walked up, just some unknown jock, and asked my best friend if she wanted to go out for a movie in front of a whole courtyard of Riverview students. I grinned, because it was actually really funny at the time. A jock, asking out my best friend, who I play video games with, read comic books with, and engage in all manner of nerdish things alongside. I don’t really have a problem with the nerd label. Another thing, just to clarify; I am in no way attracted to my best friend. Other than the obvious physical aspects, I don’t ever really see Lynx as a girl. She’s like my sister, so that whole bad teenage melodrama isn’t happening here. It’s what comes later that makes it weird. Well, what happens after that makes life even weirder, but I’m not getting into that right now either…

“Hey Lynx, do you wanna go see a movie tonight?” – The question shook me momentarily out of my pizza-imposed reverie, and I glanced over to Lynx, amused. She’d been asked out before and refused every time. It was usually something we laughed about later while stuffing our faces with Hawaiian pizza and whatever else Lynx decided would taste good that night.

This time was different. She looked surprised and amused at first, but then her eyes started flickering around; over Ryan, who I now know as the jock doing the asking, over the other people in the courtyard who were watching out of the corners of their eyes.

“Sure,” she said eventually, smiling sweetly, but I could tell it was forced. When it was happening I had no idea what she was doing. It seemed a little surreal, actually. I mean, it was Lynx. Lynx who I’d known since kindergarten, Lynx who was my only friend because when we were little she didn’t want to play with the other girls and I didn’t want to play with the other boys, Lynx who obsessed over comic books heroes and heroines with me, Lynx who I never even imagined dating anybody… ‘Sure.’ Surreal.

“Cool,” he said, like it was the beginning of something. I guess it was, in a way. And then Ryan walked off back into the school, probably to the cafeteria where he usually ate with his jock friends and the cheerleading squad.

I glanced over at Lynx. She was pretty quiet, this grin on her face. It was the strangest I’d ever seen her acting… and with Lynx’s impressions fixation, things could get pretty strange.

“So I guess now I’ll get to see what it’s like,” she said in half of a prep voice, and that was when it first started to sink in that something was wrong. The bell rang immediately afterwards and Lynx ran inside, as per usual, and despite our long history of eating in the courtyard, on Monday morning she was at the jock’s cafeteria table, Ryan’s muscled arm flung around her shoulders. I wasn’t really angry… well, a little miffed that some guy had come up and turned my only friend into… someone’s girlfriend, to sit at the table with him, and not come over after school (which I found out later), and to be flaunted around like a possession.

That week was probably the most boring week of my life… boring and worrying… it was as if someone had hopped into my best friend’s body and possessed her… like something out of a comic book where the bad guy possesses the good guy, except this wasn’t evil, just… weird.

The next weekend I went to Lynx’s house, and her mom was actually there. She told me Lynx was going to a movie with Ryan that night, and that was that for the rest of the weekend. I think my teachers were all wondering what was wrong with me the next week because I turned in all of my homework assignments the very next day and practically lived in the classrooms at lunch and before school. I guess that’s when I learned that Lynx and I are really one of a kind at Riverview… or two, really. And Lynx that week? I went over to her house every day after school, but if she was home she never answered the door. I felt horrible. It felt like she just gave up our friendship for some guy that she randomly decided she liked one day.

The next Tuesday… or maybe Wednesday… I ran into Lynx in the hallway, and by this point I was feeling completely terrible because it felt like I had literally lost my best friend.

“Lynx, where have you been?” I asked her, panting from the exertion as I finally managed to catch up to her. The sad thing was that this was the first time I was actually able to catch her since this whole ordeal had started. Lynx who was the least graceful person I knew at the time.

She didn’t answer me, but she got this trapped look on her face, and her eyes started flitting around like the first day, but more nervously. By this point I was almost beyond noticing Lynx being nervous, I just wanted her to snap to her senses and realize what she was doing, or at least tell me.

“Lynx, we’re known each other for thirteen years, I haven’t seen you in two and a half weeks, what’s going on? Why are you suddenly going out with this guy and not even returning my calls?” – her eyes got wider there- “What happened to you?” I finished weakly, and she opened her mouth to reply before the bell rang and we both ran off. Pretty sad, and what was even sadder was that I was glad she was still jumping at the sound of the bell- that was something that wasn’t different. I didn’t run into Lynx again that week, but I kept knocking on her door after school- some days right away, and some days after I’d finished my homework. The response would be identical any time of day I tried it, even in the mornings.

And then, the Friday, when I knocked on her door, Lynx flung it open and practically jumped on me. She cheerfully announced that she’d broken up with Ryan and then dragged me into the house. I was so overcome I couldn’t even speak, and I think the reason she was looking at me funny all night was because I had tears in my eyes. All I could think was that Lynx had finally lost it, but she looked like she was back to her old self, so I decided to let the night lie and ask her about her complete and utter possession the next day. In one moment seeing her acting normally again my growing resentment over not really her being absent at school but resisting all of my attempts to contact her faded into relief.

We played smash bros, and had our usual debate over who the best character was- though it was a little weaker on my side because of the reasons mentioned above- and ate pizza, and drank Rootbeer, and everything seemed to be going great. Well, for the first while everything seemed to be going great. After what had to be the fifteenth round of smash bros, Lynx got kind of quiet, sunk in like. I didn’t really notice at first until I started beating her too badly for Lynx to be acting normally. When I looked over she was curled up into a ball, head sunk down on her slouched shoulders and looking like she wanted to disappear into herself. I started, and immediately paused the game. Lynx looked over, and we just stared at each other for a while.

“Are you going to tell me what’s been going on?” I asked, really concerned. I hadn’t seen Lynx looking that bad since she had the stomach flu in the seventh grade, though the hallway the other day certainly came close. She nodded.

“I’m so sorry Wes,” she mumbled, then flung her arms around me, trembling. I was shocked into silence by this point, but that’s when it all come spilling out. “These girls… in my gym class… they’ve been harassing me in the locker room and it kept on… getting worse…” she drew away at this point to tell her story, but she was still shaking. “A few weeks ago I noticed they… they harass other people too, but… there was this girl, and she started dating this jock and she stopped getting bothered…”- she wrapped arms around her knees, and I sat there in silence. “R-…Ryan’s been asking me out for a long time… he’s been in our classes since grade five… I just wanted to see if I could do it… I just wanted it to end,” her voice dropped a few notches and she took a deep shuddering breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your calls,” she murmured. “As soon as I went to the movie I… I realized that pretending to be happy dating him was… it was so hard to keep it up… I knew if I saw you it would all come falling down… I’m so sorry I didn’t see you!” her face was buried in her hands at this point, and by now I was guessing something more was going on, but I certainly didn’t want to bother Lynx about it after she’d just been spilling her guts out… which actually was a pretty rare thing for her to do. We were usually open about everything, so there was no need for this sort of thing… like when Lynx got her first period she bounded up and told me straight up- that kind of open.

I scooted over and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She leaned into the contact, taking deep shaky breaths again. “Lynx, you need to go talk to the counselor about your gym class,” –she looked up, startled and amazed expression on her face. “If it was bad enough to make you do something you really didn’t want to do just to escape it, then someone’s got to know so they can put a stop to it,” –a strange look of… relief? flitted across her face, and she nodded, wriggling back into my side. Only Lynx could do that without it being awkward. We’d just known each other too damn long. She asked me if I wanted to stay over then, and I nodded, but we didn’t move from that position for a long while. Well, until Lynx decided with a sniff that she was hungry and went off to make a sandwich that would gas out any person with normal intestines. She was cheerful from that point on for the rest of the night, and I was still feeling a little weird about the whole thing, but for the most part just happy to have my best friend back.

We talked for hours that night- ‘girly talk’, as Lynx calls it… well, it certainly doesn’t help that I usually start doing a girl impression around that point- but that night was different. Our conversation ranged from video games to real life, from childhood to semi-adulthood, and I can’t even remember who brought up sex, but as soon as it was out there Lynx got more subdued again. I changed the subject.

The next week Lynx and I were back to eating in the courtyard, and Ryan would come by every once in a while and shoot her a dirty look. Apparently his reputation got shot from getting dumped by Lynx… which makes sense in an odd high school hierarchy sort of way. He still made her really uncomfortable for that first little while though. Some way through the middle of the week when I was at Lynx’s house she told me Ryan had been harassing her too while they were dating- stuff about what she should be doing, like making out with him, and even sex at some point. I was pretty horrified, and she told me the last was what pushed her over the edge and made her drop her charade. I asked her if he’d ever hit her and she said only after she’d broken up with him. But I could tell it must’ve been more than once because of her shoddy make-up job with cosmetics that probably belonged to her mother. After the first couple of days of us both experimenting the bruise on her face and wrist looked like her natural skin colour. Lynx told me her mom had left after the first weekend, so no one else had noticed.

She only told me after another couple of weeks or so that he’d been threatening to take her pills too. As long as I’d known Lynx, she’d had these headaches, mild to ‘painful beyond all reason’ depending on what year or month it was, and the only thing that could get rid of them was these pills she had. Threatening to take them probably seemed a lot worse than physical violence to her- at least it did to me where Lynx was concerned.

It was a pretty heavy blow for her to take, but she got over it eventually, even though Ryan was still harassing her in the hallways. She did tell the counselor about her gym class though, and being one of the rare adults in the school who didn’t have a grudge against any living student, he transferred her to another block where the teacher actually paid attention to her students. Lynx had Mrs. Devon the year after too. I don’t think I’ve ever gone so long without seeing Lynx since those few weeks, and we’ve been more than open with each other again since that point, except for a few extreme cases which defy description… Actually, Lynx has been a bit too open as per usual, but I’m pretty used to it by now. She also hasn’t gone out with any guys since then, which seems to be going fine for her. We usually joke about being too immature for dating because I haven’t dated anyone since or really before then either. But that’s off topic again. I’ll just leave off with that Lynx is fine and well, and that Ryan is dating a ninth grader, skulking around the halls because he still hasn’t won a rugby game, and generally being an all around jerk.

So thus concludes my narrative on interesting events in my life which I decided to write rather than the full autobiography for English class, and by the time I turn it in it probably won’t look anything like this. Maybe I’ll give it to Lynx; she’d probably get a kick out of it.

-Wesley Heath