Neighbour Diaries: Eliminating Becky

Yeah, Becky came back the very next day. I had thought about the whole situation very well, and even at work, I couldn’t manage to come up with an answer that I liked. Just before leaving my apartment, she had literally asked me to choose between her and her cousin Jojo, who happened to be my girlfriend. And she gave me exactly twenty four hours to make that decision. I liked her, but Jojo was my girlfriend! So, in the end, when she knocked at my door, I decided to take the lesser evil. I told her I was staying with Jojo. She went quiet for a while, and in the end, she said, “ok”, in a small voice. Then it became hard to talk to her after that, because before that, it had been just friendship, now there was something emotional about the whole thing. And the fact that I had just turned her down certainly made everything much more complex. She suggested we watch a movie, but am sure she wasn’t concentrating on the movie, just like I wasn’t. I was thinking of how else it could have gone; like, if I had ditched Jojo for her! But, that wouldn’t have worked. Halfway the movie, Jojo walked in. She looked at Becky, greeted her and came and sat next to me. Her efforts to start a conversation didn’t work well, and soon after, Becky left. Then Jojo asked what was going on, and I had no way of telling her. But in my silence, she figured out something wasn’t right. And she made me talk to her. In the end, I told her everything, and she listened without interruption till I finished the story about me and Becky. I thought she would be mad at me for keeping this from her. But she wasn’t, she was actually very calm about it. She asked me if I liked Becky, and sensing a trap, I said I liked her as a friend. She said, alright, and that was the end of the discussion. Probably that’s when she made the decision. Things seemed to go back to normal, although Becky was still not happy with me. I was ready to adjust, after all, it was a small price to pay to keep the peace between her and her crazy cousin Jojo. At the end of that week, Becky and her mum moved out of the apartment next door. Becky came to say bye, and I couldn’t understand why they were moving. But she couldn’t talk about it, and she didn’t stay long. I was already missing her before she left. I didn’t even have an idea that they were moving because of me and Becky. I found out about three days later; Jojo had asked them to move. No, actually, she had told them to move out of her apartment, to some other place. Jojo apparently owned that flat as well. The place they moved to was nice, but Becky had liked the previous apartment better. She pretended not to mind, but Jojo’s point was to take Becky away from me. It is interesting things women will do to protect their interests. She probably figured that with Becky gone, I would not be so willing to get “cheating tendencies”. But, she didn’t account for one thing: boredom. Boredom, the mother of all evil! With Becky not there to go back home to every evening, I quickly got bored, and started staying out late after work. That’s when I ran into Melissa. Melissa worked in a bank, and she had the most interesting stories I have ever heard. Better still, Melissa was almost as pretty as Jojo, and she was equally as cunning and mischievous. The first time we met, she talked me into getting drunk, and I told her every little thing about Jojo. I think she actually got more interested in Jojo than in me. shemmugisha@gmail.com