I loved Richard John Kaya. It was true love. Okay fine, it wasn’t love; it was a momentary lapse of brain activity...madness if you will. I spent every waking moment day-dreaming about him; his brown eyes, his smile...oh how perfectly perfect he was to me! Our conversations were always pretty basic and impersonal but that’s not how I remembered it whenever I thought of him.

I kept a diary, where I recounted all the moments of my day with him; the moments when he walked by me, the moments when he would ask to borrow my book, the moments when our eyes would meet (not that he looked at me intentionally. I would steal so many glances at him so sometimes as he looked around, for a brief moment, his eyes would meet mine)...but that’s not how I remembered it at the end of the day. 

I believed that Richard would return my love soon enough. That was until one fateful day when Sandra came to our school. I guess you can say she was all in all beautiful but to this day, I refuse to remember it that way. Sandra took our class by storm; every boy wanted to be with her and even though most of the girls pretended to despise her, they all wanted to be her. 

Even my Richard was completely taken with her. Every time I stole a glance at him, he would be out rightly staring at her. If I was insignificant before, now I was completely invisible to him. My soul died a little.

I resigned to writing terrible things about Sandra. And then my dear friend Rachel who had been desperately trying to get into Sandra’s close circle showed her my diary.

I walked into the classroom and Sandra started reading out loud, excerpts from my diary that I had written about Richard. Everyone was laughing. I looked around for Richard and there he was, laughing louder than everyone, laughing so hard his laughter was deafening. Okay fine, I am exaggerating. But you have to know that just seeing his teeth out at that moment embarrassed me so terribly that even if he was only smiling, that’s not how I remember it.