I was last one out of our homeroom after the bell rang for lunch that Monday, and I hovered at the noticeboard, looking at his map—our map. All the effort, all that detail, all those hours of work. I really loved the little world we’d created. I reached out, and I only meant to touch it, but something vicious came over me. He’d ruined not just my first kiss but my favourite song. I pulled the map off the wall and tore it in two. It felt so good, I ripped it again.

I heard a noise behind me, and turned. Jesse was standing there watching me.

‘Brooke,’ he started to say, running his hands through his hair. ‘Listen.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Do not talk to me. Ever again.’

‘I—’

‘I said, don’t ever talk to me again.’ My voice was as cold and hard as I could make it. I needed him to get away from me, fast, in case I cried. Or in case I changed my mind, because underneath everything, I already missed being his friend, and that made me angrier. I was determined not to show an ounce of weakness. I scrunched his map into a ball, threw it at his feet, and walked out of the classroom. And it felt good, so good, amazingly good. Anger, it turned out, was more satisfying than sadness or humiliation.

I couldn’t resist looking back though. Just once, just quickly, just in case he was really upset. Our eyes met. He’d picked up the map from the ground and held the torn, scrunched pieces in his hands.

‘I don’t care about this. It was a shit story anyway,’ he yelled at me.

That was it. I turned and walked away.

The next year, at the year-nine social, I told Georgia Crowley not to kiss him because he was a bad kisser, which was the cruelest thing I could think to do, and she reported back to him that I said that (but she did not heed my advice because, by then, he was the boy everyone wanted to kiss). After that, it became a thing, a known, established thing, that we didn’t like each other. Keep them separated, I overheard a teacher say once, Brooke and Jesse don’t work well together.

That night at Gretel’s party didn’t ruin my life in any measurable sense. It didn’t leave me friendless and alone. I went on to have a boyfriend and a reasonable approximation of a social life. But it was one of those moments that lingered. It lodged inside me like a shard of glass, and if I moved the wrong way, I would feel it, a sharp unexpected jab.

Do I like Brooke? No. No. Fuck, no.

When I finished school, I thought, thank god I’ll never have to see Jesse again.

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