“To boys sucking!” she said as we clinked our glasses together. It was our second to last night of vacation in Virginia and school was going to start in a week. Senior year. It was hard to imagine that we had come this far.

I had never been that girl. You know the one. The girl who lets a boy get inside her head, the girl who cried over boys. Growing up I was never that girl, nor did I ever want to be that girl. Instead of playing on the jungle gym with the rest of the girls in my class, I was the girl who played football with the boys at recess; I refused to wear a dress until middle school. The first boy I ever liked was on my football team, the only boy that ever blocked for me when I had the ball.

But here I was, toasting a drink to boys being butt-heads. About an hour before this she was on her computer, on the verge of tears. I was comforting her for a while, telling her that he was an idiot and that she was going to find much better. The typical shit. What she didn’t know was everything she was feeling: the angst, the betrayal, the misery, I felt it with her.
Typically, I put up a wall with that kind of crap, and only a select few get past it. It’s not that I didn’t want her to know, but I’d always been the girl who’d never get affected by all of drama of boys. I was always the person who comforted others, never the person who others had to comfort, and I had always liked that title for myself.
So I decided that we needed to dance it out. We had both seen enough TV shows to know that whenever a character had a problem, they would blast some music and dance around, and somehow the loud music would drown out their problems. So within the next fifteen minutes we were layering on the make up and picking out a dress that made our boobs look big; after all pictures were going to be taken and we had to look our best, what if those stupid boys saw them on Facebook or something?

We danced and sang for a while, and maybe it was the music or the comforting, but somewhere I just got lost in it all. I started to think about the entire year. If he still remembered it all. If he still cared about it. If he still thought about me. Why did I care? I wanted to shut the commentary in my head off. I wanted to turn the memories off. To pull a Harry Potter, when he removes the memories from his brain so he didn’t have to think about them. But really, I couldn’t. I was torn between reliving the happiness and love of the memories, which ironically brought resentment and tears, and wanting to remove them, forgetting the happiness that I ever felt.

Suddenly, something inside of me snapped. Maybe all the thoughts and feelings I had, the questions I asked, had built up and there was no more room left. A hot tear fell down my cheek, the wall I had built up was crumbling, and there was nothing I could about it. As the tear turned into tears, my sadness turned into anger. Why did I care? I told my self not to care, I demanded myself to not care, but for some reason I still did. I hated that I cared. I hated that he left and wasn’t around, I hated that he was right, I hated the way he still made me laugh, and I hated the way he still made me cry. But thing that I hated the most was how much I didn’t hate him, not even for a second.
It took her a minute to realize that I was crying. When she did though, I told her everything, all the sadness and even fear that I was feeling. All of these emotions that were attacking me, pulling me in different directions, and I didn’t know where to go.
But somehow, I was relieved. Nothing was fixed between us by talking to her, but because I told her, because I let her past my wall, I felt that I didn’t have to be the girl who wasn’t affected anymore.