Love Me: The Manoir

School Dances and Pay As You Go Texting

I told my mum to leave me at the gates of my new school on my first day, completely and utterly afraid of ruining my first chance by some middle-aged woman cramping my style despite the fact that I had my skirt down to my knees, was wearing Velcro shoes and a low ponytail. It was my first taste of what felt like freedom, walking into the unknown and hoping that when the fog rose I would find my true life.

I had always been a dreamer, someone with a hyperactive imagination they couldn't shake. On the walks home from school I would lag behind my brother and dad and talk nonsense to myself about how I would be a record-selling artist by thirteen, or maybe I would discover a fairy, or oddly sometimes I would imagine finding Madeleine McCann. And so secondary school was like one big adventure into fulfilling every dream I ever had.

I made friends on my first day - one who would be one of my best friends for the next seven years - and I lived in a state of bliss for a while as I basked in the newness of making friends. Telling people the stories that you knew would sit well with them, laughing at their jokes, and making friends with the 'cool kids'. I have and will always be someone who doesn't care about the social hierarchy of school, but I know my place was always somewhere in the middle.

It was in secondary school that making a fool of myself for other people's entertainment became a recurring personality trait. I was the butt of every joke, and for those first two years I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the fact that people gave me enough thought to even construct one of the most mundane and cliché jokes they could. Something about me being weird. Something about my glasses or hair, or the way I wore my skirt, or the way I talked.

It was in year seven that I also grew obsessed with boys. Being surrounded by girls all the time just made the very idea of a male all the more tantalizing, and as the dance with the boy's school drew nearer I remember thinking that this was my chance. I wore a pair a shorts with moustaches on them (this was 2012), a lacy top with a collar and a pair of heeled boots despite the fact that I was taller than most of the pre-pubescent boys there.

That evening was nothing more than a game to get phone numbers. To pick them up and brag about your count before going in for the prey again. I would receive the numbers of boys that night who barely even looked in my face, instead going straight to the phone screen of my Samsung Qwerty and typing in their number. I felt like I was peaking, that this was what I had been waiting for.

The following weekend was spent anxiously and furiously texting about what subjects I liked, what music I listened to, and how much I had enjoyed the dance to boys who were probably also texting a hoard of women. There would be snarky fights at school about which girl a boy liked best - me and best friend fighting over the same white-haired boy that probably sent us one word responses.

But there was one boy who I whittled it down to and decided that he was going to be my boyfriend. This was even after he had sent a picture of him semi-topless to most of the year. I would use up all my 500 texts in my Pay As You Go phone talking about how much we hated homework, me asking all about his hockey training which he took so seriously, and sending a multitude of kisses and hearts. We threw the word love around like it was a shuttlecock, flinging it back and forth with the care of a baby throwing a toy out of the pram. It was four letters that I thought the vague pangs of happiness he brought into my life - breaking up the mundaneness - summarised.

I broke up with him a number of times for reasons I don't remember, and I recall the strange, sadistic satisfaction from learning that he had told people that he was upset by the whole thing. It meant I still existed within the realms of his mind, something I was never sure - still am never sure - that I did. It meant he liked me enough for me to stay around in his head, despite the fact that he had barely met me.

He was my first 'boyfriend', and I would hold onto the experience with him until I was 16 as my only true encounter with the idea of relationships. At eleven, my whirlwind text romance was impressive to my friends. As we got older, it became less so, to the point where it would become a passing joke.

This stage of my life is always fuzzy, and the chronology is messed up but there were other boys who would come and go. I distinctly remember being twelve and snapping at my friends - one of a handful of times I have ever shouted at anyone - because they told me I talked about boys too much. I was defensive, not because they were wrong but because this was a threat to the very thing that was making me feel good about myself.

I began speaking to another boy in year eight, this time on Instagram which was much less costly on my phone bill. At this point I loved Instagram, but I was also less careful with it than I would later become. I remember posting over 50 pictures on the first day I got it because it was so exciting to know that across the city my friends and acquaintances could see whatever stupid thing I had put up. By twelve, I was posting a series of edgy and oversaturated photos taken on Retrica that would usually need at least 20 attempts.

Andrew was from the local boy's school, and we both used an excessive amount of laughing emojis I seemed to remember. I've named him only because he will be important later, another person who hindsight has proven to be one of the most vital in my life. But at twelve you don't know that the boy you're texting about how you dislike maths and about how close you live (a 40 minute walk I would become accustomed to later) will one day be someone who shapes who you are almost entirely in the future.

Like any online flirtation I had ever had, this one too fizzled out with unsatisfactory results. As a group of friends we would often gossip and bitch about the men in our lives who didn't love us back, didn't text us back, and as a collective we would shun any boy who so much as send one insult to our friend's way (a regular insult being the act of not replying for a few hours).

At this point of school, I had my group of friends. Like in primary school, I was still a Peacemaker of sorts. Friends bickered and argued, would occasionally fight over me which would make me feel not only honoured but also relieved that people liked me enough to put up a fight about how long they got to spend with me at lunchtime. But this was also a point where I became a pawn of sorts.

My friends - and I love them to pieces - were always strong characters. And I am only a strong character in my head. Only a strong character in the fights I act out in the mirror which is the only thing except for my mum maybe who knows truly how I feel about everyone who has come through my life. So I would bite my tongue, try and navigate round sticky situations, and hope I didn't anger anyone when I wasn't even the source of tension.

Over the next six years I would learn to despise this role with every inch and source of my being.

***

It was at twelve that you start to become acutely aware of the way you look. It's a phase we all go through yet never acknowledge. I was not the biggest looker as a teenager, and the world let me know that pretty quickly. I decided a block fringe would be a brilliant look for me, and so one poor hair choice later would begin the slippery road into utter trollification for me. Acne seemed to come in around twelve as well, not helped by the caked foundation I would lather on my face for no reason and then never wash off. Soon I became the oily greasy teenagers that your brain instinctively goes towards when you want to shudder at puberty.

What didn't help was the fact that everyone around me seemed to bypass this stage slightly. While my hips grew wider, my period flowed monthly, my skin hated me, and my hair became greasy and unbearable, my friends always appeared heads and shoulders more beautiful than me. It would be a defining characteristic of the next years of my teenager life. While some of my friends said they loved the DUFF film (Designated Ugly Fat Friend - a movie to be eaten with Nutella), I always felt it hit a little too close to home.

At twelve, my body had developed into a size 8-10 while they remained at 4-6. It was at this point that it began to be cemented in me that I was not desirable in that way. I was not conventionally attractive, nor was I attractive in an off-brand, alternative kind of way. It didn't help that everyone else seemed to have noticed this too and yet no one had thought to tell me 'hey, you're actually just very plain looking'.

Sometimes I would take off my glasses and look at the blurry reflection in the mirror, and wish that I looked like that. Every flaw was blurred out by short-sightedness, and the edges of my being were hazy and undefined. I already wished I could restart my life over, be a different person, and most of all find someone who looked at me long enough to want any part of me.