A love letter.

Once upon a time there was a boy and girl. Where? At a school. Because where the hell else would a boy and a girl just frequently meet? Not the bar, not the boardwalk, but a school. Because all the world's great stories of romance, adventure and drama inevitably start at school. Let's call the boy Danny and the girl Evelyn. Dan and Eve were childhood friends so to speak; they grew up as neighbors in the same ol' boring neighborhood for fucking years. Their families were neighbors, and like all good parents they booted their kids outside to play and romp together while the adults were doing adult things like filing taxes, writing the list of people getting this year's Christmas card, and fucking each other senselessly while on edge that the kids might walk in on them locked in the evocative passions of lust and boredom.

Dan and Eve were both very normal kids growing up. Dan was kind of tall and gangly and enjoyed sitting in his room playing video games whenever he wasn't forced outside, and thus was just a bit reclusive and snide. But he was incredibly smart and well-rehearsed despite how little he got out. Eve was a short and sweet girl with a penchant for writing and while buried in indifference most of the time let her emotions bleed into her writing. And her writing was fantastic because she expressed everything she felt in it. Except anger. Eve was a tiny girl with tiny amounts of patience, and thus was quick to lose her temper. She never understood why Dan played videogames so much. She saw them like every other ignorant judgmental bitch saw them; mindless entertainment and killing, and in her case deprived of artistic value and story. She would always come over to Dan's house in an attempt to drag him outside and do random teenager things like filing stories, writing the list of people she's inviting to her sweet 16, and fucking each other senselessly while on edge that their parents might walk in on them locked in the evocative passions of lust and boredom.

Or not. Dan and Eve never really saw each other in that way. Granted Dan was kind of scrawny and pale, he might've had women crooning for him if he left the god-damn house. And Eve was short and slightly underdeveloped for her age, but she could certainly get a date. Dan and Eve as they got older both grew apart and grew closer at the same time. Dan still played videogames but Eve managed to drag him out of the house a bit more to have fun. They would have random talks on the boardwalk as Eve stuffed her tiny cheeks with cotton candy.

"Sitting out here in the sunlight makes me feel like writing." she said while spitting cotton candy up on accident.
"Eh, the weather's pretty nice I guess."
"Days like these make me feel like writing poetry."
"Have you tried getting anything published yet?" Dan asked.
"Well... no, not yet. I've tried, but I keep getting rejection letters..." A hint of exasperation was heard in her voice.
"If you had people proofread your work, then you could probably tighten it up more when you submit it. Hell, I could do i--"
"NO!" she yelled.
"For someone who talks about how much they enjoy writing and how much they write, you sure seem adamant to let anybody see your work."
"I don't want YOU reading it!" Eve seemed flustered.
"What the hell am I going to do, laugh?"

And laugh he did. Dan wasn't particularly the romantic type. He was cynical, embittered and antisocial. He father left his family for being cheated on, his mother held down a job and was sleeping around, and his brother went with his father. He was alone, in a broken family, and jaded by it. Eve wrote a lot of touchy-feely love stories and love poems and they often went over the head of Dan. Throughout this time period she kept bringing up her poem, the big one that would get her published. Dan never saw it. She worked feverishly on it by her lonesome. But she always brought it up, which baited Dan's curiosity, which never did much good anyway because would never see it. She wanted to write a memoir about love, but the short, angry girl with glasses was unexperienced in that topic. She was a hopeless romantic.

"I'll write a memoir about love eventually, just you watch." she always told him.
"You're too damn picky, you'll never find somebody anyway." Dan sardonically muttered. Eve's tiny cheeks turned red as her glasses became crooked.
"Well EXCUSE ME for having standards, you clod!" Eve was getting angry. "My perfect man is out there somewhere, and I'll find him eventually!"
"There's no such thing as a perfect person. You're wasting your time." he said.
"OH SHUT UP!" she then proceeded to grab her diary and beat Dan with it until he left. This repeated throughout their friendship ad-nausem, but like Alzheimer patients Dan and Eve still got together usually at that same boardwalk, still discussed the topic, and it still ended with some threat on Dan's stupid oblivious life that he didn't much care about at this point. Maybe that's why he found the threats so hollow.

As they got into High School, neither Dan or Eve dated each other nor did they date other people. Dan was cold and bitter and bored with the concept, and was a tall gangly pale giant to be intimidated by. Eve was such a hopeless romantic that she never saw that perfect boy to go out with. And if she did, she never said a damn thing. Remember that outside of the anger, Eve was a fairly antisocial, shy and indifferent person. And she stayed tiny throughout High School. She never got taller than 4'11", her breasts never got larger than an A cup and she never weighed more than 100 pounds. As she got older she felt just a bit more inadequate with herself and Dan was still a bastard. And this made things worse between them since Eve's happy family was beginning to frown. Her parents were getting divorced and this meant that they would eventually lose the house. At the end of her senior year Eve would have to move.

"So not much time left, huh?" Dan asked one evening they were walking home from the boardwalk.
"...Yeah."
"I'm never going to see that poem, am I?"
"Hell no you aren't." she coldly replied. Dan sighed.
"Why not?"
"Because."
"Bullshit, give me a reason."
"No." Dan's patience was wearing thin.
"You're such a pain in the ass to deal with sometimes, you know that?" his voice was raising.
"Says YOU! You're always so damn cynical, I'm surprised I put up with you this long!"
"Good Christ, is this what I get for taking an interest in what you're writing. Stop being such a bitch and you might actually be with somebody." That was cold. Dan was stupid for saying that, and Eve let him know it. She started crying and slapped him across the face.
"You're a monster..." she could hardly speak. "You want to read it? Fine!" She tore out a page of her notebook and threw it in his face. She ran off in tears as Dan stood on the boardwalk. He opened the crumbled paper and read it.

I don't love you anymore.
I would hate myself if I ever said
I care about you and cherish you.
That would be naive.
I couldn't bring myself to love you.
I would never say
that I need you.
And I will always feel inside my aching heart
You need to be forgotten.
I will be lying to you if I said
I love you.
Because that's the way it needs to be.
So I must tell the truth...

Dan didn't like what he read. He thought it was beautifully written, but it twisted his stomach. He didn't like what he felt when he read it. It made him uneasy. But he sat on it. He couldn't talk to her about it. He didn't much like the prospect.

Dan and Eve didn't talk to each other after that. Weeks passed without them saying a word to each other. Senior year closed to an end quickly. Dan went back to never leaving his house, and Eve sat in her house furiously writing while taking those occasional walks to the boardwalk, this time by herself. But when Dan was at school the other day, he overheard that Eve did in fact get that poem published. It appeared in the local newspaper.

"It's not much, but I guess it's a start." he thought to himself. His house got the paper, but his mother never bothered to read it in the morning since she was still sleeping during the day. She worked the nightshift. It was still out on the yard, in a pile next to the rest of them. Dan wondered why his mother wasted money ordering them if she never read them, but didn't question it this time since it seemed to benefit him. He opened the paper to the section for short stories, poems and other various bugger for published works. And there was Eve's poem. Dan still felt a twist in his gut when he read it, until he got to the end. It was a single line added. He sighed, muttered to himself and closed the paper.

As he expected, there Eve was, writing on the boardwalk's edge like she always did. She felt a tap on the back of her small head that made her look behind her.

"So you finally got published."
"Yeah, so? What of it?" her tone was hostile.
"You're just as short-tempered as always, I see." he muttered.
"What do you want?" she sharply asked.
"Am I not allowed to talk to you anymore?"
"Why don't you just leave me the hell alone?" her voice was beginning to crack.
"Well fine, I guess I'll just leave if that's all you have to say to me." But as he began to walk away, he heard her mutter.

"I love you." she choked out.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"I SAID I LOVE YOU, YOU FUCKING IDIOT! YOU'RE ONE OF THE MOST HEARTLESS PEOPLE I'VE EVER MET BUT I DON'T CARE! I KNOW THAT I'M IN THE BACK CORNER OF RELEVANCE IN YOUR MIND, AND THAT THERE'S PROBABLY SOMEBODY BETTER TO CONSIDER! AND EVEN IF I WANTED IT TO GO SOMEWHERE, I KNOW WE DON'T HAVE A GHOST'S CHANCE IN HELL IN MAKING IT WORK!" She was breathing heavily. She began to start tearing up.

"...I-I-I know the answer will be no." Her composure was crumbling.

"I know that. So the only thing I can do is to make you hate me, and to make you forget about me. To make myself irrelevant. That's the only way I can know for sure. And it would mean something. At least I would see something from you. I don't care what it is at this point anymore. If I can see something and then just let it die, then that's all I could ask for. Now hurry up and reject me so I can get some closure and move on with my life."

Dan sighed and sat down next to her. She was weeping uncontrollably. Her outburst drew a lot of attention from people passing by, but one glare from that crazy bastard Dan thinned out whatever crowd managed to gather.

"You're such an idiot, you know that?" he said.
"SHUT UP, YOU IDIOT!" she screamed. "I HATE YOU FOR DOING THIS TO ME YOU BASTARD! JUST GO ROT IN HELL AND LEAVE ME ALO-" Dan silenced her with his mouth and she began to calm down. As they parted, she was still crying and hiccuping.
"Pull yourself together, it's done now." He smirked as he pulled her to her feet and they began the walk home. Eve never left that senior year. Despite being a deadbeat mother who slept around, Eve decided to move in with Dan at the end of the year as they went to college together. She did end up writing that memoir about love, but she wrote it in third person to dissociate herself with that silly trifle.

That last line she added to the poem was "Read this upwards."