Rumours

Fight

Wednesday 28 November 2023:
"Vani, have you seen Ariana?" I would recognise her voice anywhere and anytime — Olivia one of my friends from my form.
"No, but wait," I turned to Lexi, Ariana's bff, she and Jezelle were leaning on the bench, chatting right next to me. "Lexi, have you seen Ariana by any chance?"
"Oh my god, don't talk to Lexi about her!" Jezelle replied instead of Lexi.
"Umm...ok? Yeah, so anyway, I haven't seen Ariana." I said turning to Olivia. She walked away with other friends and I turned around to face Jezelle and Lexi.
"What happened? Why did you ask me not to talk to Lexi about Ariana?" Earning the angry-Jezelle look as she explained to me.
"So basically, Lexi and Ariana aren't friends anymore. Don't ask why though."
"Ok..." I'm really confused, but I know very well when not to talk about a topic that Jezelle doesn't want to explain.

We go back to chatting about whatever we were talking about before Olivia came. Now that I come to think about it, Lexi has been hanging out with us quite a lot compared to before, and the fact that she isn't really her usual energetic jolly self. But I guess she is probably having a bad week or something.

But I still feel, no matter how much I convince myself, that there's something off about Lexi, specially since Olivia came to ask about Ariana — she is even more quiet and gloomy. But oh well, I'm probably hallucinating stuff, I've been doing that a lot lately. But mainly I start to loose my brain whenever I see, or sense, my crush: Cayden.

I've known Cayden since year 6, and have been crushing on him since towards the end of the same year. When I first saw him, (on the first day in year 6) he had a mushroom cut, and god did he look ugly in it, but then around May, I started wondering how he must look without a mushroom cut; and BAM! The next thing I know, he doesn't have a mushroom cut but an almost classic boys' cut — he still kept his now-trimmed bangs though. That was the day when I realised I don't have a crush on Mark, my crush before Cayden, but have always had a crush on Cayden but didn't know until that particular day in May, when he was good-looking for probably the first time I'd ever seen him in almost a whole year.

I immediately started crushing on Cayden, instead of Mark, and realised how handsome he actually is. And his smile, oh god, it is to die for — the way his whole face lights up and he looks so cute that I want to kiss him right there and then; not caring who is looking at us; not caring about where we are; not caring about anything but him. When we all got our yearbooks on the last Monday ever in our primary, as a class, we all looked at everyone's photos. When we looked at Cayden's, almost everyone went:
"OMG, He's had a total glow up."
"He looks so much better now."
"I already forgot that he used to be a mushroom-head!"
"Look at how ugly he was back then!"
All that time I thought in my head: I knew it that he would look good if he got rid of his mushroom cut!

That very year — still in primary — some year 3 child messed with him for some reason that I dont know. And he banged him into this metal fence type of thing, you could hear the bang (and the child's cry) from quite some distance. No one dared snitch on Cayden that day, they knew what might happen to them and they knew that it would be better to stay quiet about that incident or else... Even that guy didn't tell the teachers what really happened and kept lying that he was "accidentally" pushed by some guy, whose face he wasn't able to see. It was the first time that I found out that Cayden: the guy who always stayed silent unless around his friends; the guy who threw tiny bits of paper or rubber to someone random; the guy who definitely didn't look as strong as he actually is, pushed a year 3 kid so hard, that he was just saved from spraining — and probably fracturing — his back. That day fell even harder for him (if that is possible)

The day when we got to know what high school we were going to, my heart was about to fall right out of me as I awaited for the time to come. I was afraid that Cayden would go to a different high school as he had EHS in 4th place out of 6 high schools, while I had EHS in the 1st place. I was also worried about my friends from primary, but half of the them had older siblings in EHS; so they had chances of going there and EHS was my first priority, so of course they were going to choose me as well.