Once upon a time there was a girl-next-door. She wore clothes she purchased at Old Navy and you understand how much of a trendsetter one can be when limited to that store alone.

If you asked her nice stay-at-home mother she would tell you her daughter was smart but not very assertive and (surprise surprise) she didn’t have enough friends. Her closest confidant was a closet gay boy who unrealistically never had troubles of his own.

And here’s the good part- she was in love with the hero of the story, whose name we know (Josh, if you care that much) a man who didn’t idolize his peers because when he had something to say he would say it.
Don’t get me wrong, Josh was a multi-dimensional person and I have no doubt he had a
lot of potential. He played the trumpet, he was a Madrigal singer at school, and he did sports- track, if that counts. He had a good GPA and his teachers and friends respect him.
His timid neighbor doesn’t know all that about him. But she’s been in love with him since they were best friends as young children (which was all in her imagination, he had many equally significant friends) and she’s a nice girl so why not fantasize inaccurately about a boy she believes she deserves.
Her small inner circle has heard all about it. They’re all on her side, which makes her a little smug. If she stood any chance she might have the sense to keep her mouth shut. If she stood any chance her mother and flamboyant best friend would be more wary of her strong will. It’s because she’s so weak and non-threatening that everyone who knows her just lets her be.

Let’s say something happened to Josh. Something he couldn’t explain to anyone else. Let’s say young Josh is beginning to feel old.

It happened the first time he went to see the school musical. After getting over the shock of not being able to recognize the majority of the people he saw running around on stage (yes, they all do go to this school) he noticed that these teenagers were doing all these stupid dance steps as if they were the greatest, most elegant, most inspiring movements they’d ever performed. And Josh felt something missing in his life. Not so much missing as stolen. He was seventeen years old and it wouldn’t be easy to blend in with these dancers if he got on that stage next year. It was likely the director would let him have a major role because he was on Mads and it would be his last year. But he would never feel the satisfaction of having pride in his performance. It was too late for that.

His neighbor, our girl-next-door, had been keeping a close watch on him. She’s noticed the decreasing frequency that Josh is surrounded by a phalanx of admirers. He’s alone more than usual. Maybe the two of them weren’t so different after all, she thought excitedly. Instead she uses her wits and observational skills and she learns to find him alone more often. She knew he had a habit of talking to whoever would listen when he was bored and if she could just once make herself that person, she was set. Truth was, Josh had nothing to say to anyone. He was silenced by the realization that he might be good at what he did, even though if he worked hard enough to convince those who mattered they might even call him great. But there was no amount of charisma that could be acquired by any ethical person that would make him the best. And it wasn’t a vague longing to be the “best” that bothered him the most; it was that there was nothing he could offer to the world that meant anything. His biggest accomplishment was the creation of himself as a character in someone else’s eyes. Soon he would be a very different character in a very different place and then there would be no character at all. But there would be no good work to leave behind.

He finds himself in the school library alone at four-thirty with a book he wishes he could believe he liked. There she is, his quiet neighbor, setting her heavier-than-average backpack on the ground and sitting a few feet away from him. She pulls out a notebook and a calculator and makes a show of concentrating very hard on some complicated math problem whilst looking at him out of the corner of her eye every minute and a half. He notices that he usually dismissed her as insignificant, weak, dependent. If she were to ask him for one piece of advice he might have told her to stop thinking about herself so much. But she was happy and he wasn’t. What right had someone who couldn’t make it work to reprimand someone who did? So he decided to leave her to her unremarkable present and possibly commendable future, judging from the rapid way she graphed a cosine function with a mechanical pencil. He wouldn’t ruin her the way he had possibly ruined himself.