The Story of Us

The first time I met Brody Harrison, I was three-and-a-half years old, two-and-a-half feet tall, and clutched onto my mother’s pant leg as she filled out paperwork at the front counter of ABC-Daycare. My thumb was in my mouth, red and slobbery from constant hours of sucking--a habit my parents had desperately tried to break before my first day, yet obviously failed to do.

For the occasion, my mother had tied my buttery blonde hair into pigtails. I absolutely hated them, and had tried ripping them out numerous times. You see, I had always been stubborn, even when I was a toddler. After a small temper tantrum, I finally agreed to keep the pigtails in place. But only after convincing my mother to give Bianca, my one year old sister, a matching ponytail on the crown of her head.

I tugged on my mother’s pant leg again, the fabric tight in my small fist. I looked up at her with my wide, blue eyes, and pulled my thumb out of my mouth long enough to say, “Can we go home now, mommy?”

Apparently, the comment was funny, because both my mother and the lady at the front desk laughed. I felt my mother’s hand pat my head softly, her voice an echo above me. “You’re staying here today, Rowan,” she said quietly, “You will have a lot of fun, I promise.”

That small promise should have been easy to keep, considering I was only three and a half, a happy age for most children. Yet any form of happiness at ABC-Daycare was ruined the instant the bell above the door chimed and Malina Harrison walked in, my worst nightmare in tow.

He was a few inches taller than me, and only a few months older, with a mass of dark hair that fell across his forehead. His eyes were a dull mix between green and brown, and there was a large, pinkish mark in the shape of a pawprint between his left ear and eye.

I had always found Brody’s birthmark fascinating; an ugly flaw on the face of a boy who embraced his difference. Of course, I hadn’t known what the Hell it was, at first.

I remember, only minutes after he and his mother walked in, asking my own mother why Brody’s mommy didn’t scrub the dirt off of his face, and I especially remember how she had slapped her hand over my mouth and whispered between clenched teeth, “Do not make fun of people who look different, Rowan Elaine.”

Malina Harrison had heard what I had said, yet instead of scolding me for pointing out her young son’s imperfection, she simply smiled, and then explained what a birthmark was. The whole time she talked, Brody stared at me. His eyes were narrowed, a smirk was plastered on his face, and beyond my knowledge, the torture had already begun.

Bianca was placed in a different area of the day care center due to her age and the fact that she still wore diapers, so I was pretty much forced to encounter my first day alongside Brody Harrison, a boy whom I barely knew.

As I looked at him more, I could recall that I had seen him before. Yet I knew very few things about him. I knew that he lived a few streets over on Pike Avenue. I knew that he had an older brother who was already in school. I knew that he could already ride a bike without training wheels, because I had witnessed him doing so when driving by his house one day. I knew that he really liked candy bars, because I had watched him throw a fit in the grocery store when his mother wouldn’t buy him a Hershey’s. And I also knew, although I probably wasn’t supposed to, that my mother and Malina Harrison absolutely hated one another.

Even before the first day of ABCD, I had heard her name. I constantly overheard conversations and comments about how Malina Harrison was nothing but an arrogant witch with a bad perm and ugly pantsuits. I do not know how the hatred initially began; all I knew, is that it did not end. They faked smiles in front of Brody and I, but they didn’t speak a word. Malina occasionally cast smirks in our direction as she scaled my mother’s frame, taking in the jeans and “Mommy of the Year” t-shirt that she wore. While my mother did the same, secretly questioning why Ms. Harrison never left the house without makeup on.

Although I always claim otherwise, I believe that this hatred is what fueled my very own hatred for Malina Harrison’s youngest son. Either that, or the fact that, at three-and-a-half years old, Brody Harrison single-handedly ruined my life.

On that very first day at ABC-Daycare, Brody followed me wherever I went. And as soon as the daycare instructor turned her head, he reached up, yanked out my pigtails, and ran away grinning. It was that day that my hatred for Brody Harrison began.

But it didn’t stop there.

Whether it was ripping all of the pages out of my favorite My Little Pony coloring book, stealing the toys that I played with every day, or eating my animal crackers when I wasn’t looking, Brody was behind it all. He made it his goal to pick on me, laughing the entire time.

I would come home from ABCD sobbing, telling my mother about all of the horrible things that Brody did to me. And all she did was laugh.

She would constantly try to convince me that the reason that Brody picked on me was because he had a crush on me. “That’s just how boys are,” she would say, yet the thought of Brody Harrison having a crush on me was absolutely disgusting in every possible way.

Maybe it was because I was young, and at that point in time, I had it in my head that boys had cooties and that they were only on Earth to make messes. But even years later, I couldn’t seem to grasp the idea.

We lived in a pretty big town, yet there was only one elementary school. That being said, Brody and I were forced to attend Cedar Elementary… you guessed it: together. I immediately asked my mother if we could move to a different town, which she laughed about once again. And Brody found it absolutely hilarious, as I cried on our first day of Kindergarten and begged the teacher to let me go home.

The torture continued for the next eight years.

On our first day of junior high school--there were two of those in town, but we had somehow ended up at the same one--Brody purposely placed his locker beside mine. I knew it was on purpose, too, because as soon as I neatly arranged my notebooks and binders on the shelf, Brody came up from behind me and knocked them to the floor. “Howdy, neighbor!” he said with a smile, and I instantly realized the Hell that the next three years would consist of.

Even though, during the summer between fifth and sixth, Brody’s mouth had been taken over by clunky metal braces, he somehow managed to get people to laugh at me. He was the one with a metal-mouth. He was the one who had a lisp when he talked. Yet I was the one who received all of the negative feedback.

Okay, so maybe I wasn’t the most attractive girl in the junior high. My teeth were straight, but my hair was long and incredibly frizzy. My eyes were a pretty shade of ice blue, but my eyebrows were large and outrageous and my mom wouldn’t let me get them waxed until I was in high school. I was skinny, too, but I had absolutely zero curves. My body was thin and narrow and had no shape. I wasn’t necessarily ugly, but I was a leech in the world of junior high.

While my best friends, Andie and Kayla, received attention from the boys, I received attention from the math teacher for excelling on my quizzes. While they were asked to dances and on mother-chaperoned movie dates, I sat at home and watched Disney movies with my little sister. While they had their first kiss and claimed to “fall in love,” I was being chased by a boy of my own. The only problem was that I wanted nothing to do with him.
I did my best to avoid Brody at all costs during junior high. Andie and Kayla thought I was crazy for running away from someone who looked the way he did, but they just didn’t understand.

When I found out that Brody and I shared a physical education class, I went to the counselor and transferred into Health. When Brody sat a table away from me in the cafeteria, I moved clear to the other side of the room. When my friends began talking about the cute boy who kept following me around, I told them every gross and false statement that I could think of in order to make them think differently about his appearance.

Birthmark and all, I couldn’t lie, though. Brody Harrison was, in fact, blessed in the appearance department. His mother was pretty, and although I had never seen his father, I wasn’t at all surprised to witness Brody grow up, hit puberty, and turn into a hunk.

He was taller than most of the other boys in our grade, with lean and sinewy limbs. His skin was a natural caramel color, as if he had spent his entire life baking in the sun. His eyes were still that murky green-brown, and his dark hair fell across his forehead in almost the exact way as it had when we were three-and-a-half. And when he had his braces taken off during Christmas break of our eighth grade year, it was nearly impossible to find him alone.

Eighth grade dragged on and on, so when it finally ended, I was more than happy. I was even happier when, a week into the summer, the Harrison’s disappeared. We drove by their house one day to find it isolated; not a toy left in the yard, nor a vehicle in the driveway, and it was truly the most amazing sight I had ever seen.

Not only did Brody leave for the summer, but I finally hit puberty. Although that may seem like too much information, it was the one thing I had been waiting for. Andie and Kayla and pretty much every girl in my grade had blossomed long before me, so I had been desperately, patiently waiting for my own breakout into womanhood. Bless the heavens, it happened right in time.

The change was sudden and completely unexpected; a change that my parents had been dreading for a very long time. And, lucky them, little Bianca’s transition happened right along with my own.

Only we changed in very different ways.

I embraced my new and improved body in every way imaginable. I wore clothes that barely covered anything--at least when my parents weren’t around--and I pranced around town alongside my equally-clad friends as if my stuff just did not stink. Because, well, that’s what we thought.

Andie was shorter and curvier, with strawberry-blonde hair that she had dyed cherry red. Kayla was taller than Andie and I, rail thin, and blessed with the most gorgeous chocolate brown features. And then there was me, Rowan, the girl that had, very quickly, transformed from the leech of junior high to the blonde-bombshell of high school.

We instantly became the talk of the town, and we liked it that way.

And then, just across the hall, was Bianca.

After giving birth to me, my mother and father had split up, and in a heat-of-the-moment hookup with an old college friend, Bianca had been conceived. Just as quickly as it had begun, my mother’s relationship with the old college friend had ended, and my father had taken her back, agreeing to raise Bianca like his own.

In saying this, Bianca and I grew up looking nothing alike. I was blonde and blue-eyed, while she was brunette and hazel-eyed, with a tiny, button nose that she must have inherited from her incognito father. Not only did we look different, but we also acted different.

When we were younger, we were inseparable, mostly because we didn’t have anyone else. After all, I spent my weekends watching Disney movies with her. We had to be close. But that summer, the summer that many things were altered, was also the summer that ruined any sort of relationship I had once had with my sister.

While I ran the streets with my too-good-for-anything friends, Bianca studied. She was beautiful, yes. She had grown into her curves and out of her baby face. But we just didn’t see eye-to-eye anymore.

She had hopes to join the junior high cheerleading squad when the new school year began. She had hopes of maintaining a 4.0 up until her senior year, where she had hopes of being valedictorian. She had hopes of attending an Ivy League school and becoming a doctor and a mother with hopes of her children being just as successful.

Bianca had so many hopes and ambitions that I knew she would fulfill, and all I had was a bad attitude.

Freshman year came faster than we had expected. Everyone was excited; nervous and anxious for the years to come. They were, after all, supposed to be the best years of a person’s life. Andie, Kayla, and I definitely did not want to be the exception.

The summer had been the start of a new beginning for me. And it was the first summer that I had spent without running into Brody. After a whole three months without so much as seeing his face, not to mention the time I spent embracing my transformation, I slowly began to forget about him.

I was ready to take on high school; and I was also ready to attend my very first year without caring what Brody Harrison planned to do next. I was different, so I began seeing the situation differently. I decided not to spend time hating him, and instead, to ignore him completely.

On the first day of freshman year, Andie’s older sister, Amber, picked us all up in her Camaro and drove us across town to the high school that we had all dreamt of attending one day. We looked at one another and smiled as the Camaro drove past Carver Middle School, the wretched place that Bianca was still stuck at. We smiled even wider when Amber parked her car in the lot of Calton High.

I was determined to march through the doors with my head held high. I knew that my classmates would be confused, though. I had left junior high as the nervous little wallflower with the frizzy hair and too-skinny body. Yet I was entering high school with a C-cup, perfectly flat-ironed locks, shapely eyebrows, and three layers of Maybeline mascara on my eyelashes.

I had a plan. I was set and ready to find Brody Harrison and tell him that I was absolutely done with his antics. I scanned the sea of faces, ducking between upperclassmen until I found the freshmen hallway. I found my own locker, placing my things inside as Andie and Kayla instantly began talking about how awesome the year was going to be.

I peered over my classmates heads until I found Preston Andrews, the boy Brody had always been with if, of course, he wasn’t alone. Yet Preston was talking wildly with a sophomore boy in a soccer jersey, no sign of Brody Harrison anywhere.

You see, I would have followed through with my plan. I would have told Brody that I didn’t care what he tried doing to me anymore… only he never showed up. Not on the first day, not on the second day, not ever.

For the first few weeks, I made it my goal to figure out where he went. I listened in on conversations just in case someone said anything. I asked teachers if they knew what happened to him. Finally, I asked Preston, who told me that Brody and his mother had moved to Oklahoma to live with their sick grandmother.

Instead of pondering on the idea, I just ran with it. Because a few days after finding out where the Hell Brody Harrison was, I caught the eye of none other than Kyle Samsel.

Everyone knew who Kyle Samsel was. Well, I hadn’t really known, but that’s just because I was a freshman and I didn’t have any older siblings. But as Andie, Kayla, and I--plus a few other girls who had decided to join our group--sat in the cafeteria one day, I quickly found out.

Andie was patting her jeans pocket, always craving a cigarette yet unable to pull one out during school hours. Kayla was gossiping with a sophomore girl named Julia about the out-of-town guy she was talking to. I was picking at my cafeteria food, laughing between bites as Wesley, the new-kid who just so happened to be homosexual and absolutely hilarious, impersonated one of the stuck-up cheerleaders that we strayed away from. He batted his eyelashes swiftly, placing his hand under his chin in a perfect Emma Hemsworth fashion. I only laughed, shaking my head at him.

That was when Andie suddenly snapped back to reality, slapped me on the arm, and said, “Oh my god, Kyle Samsel is totally checking you out.”

And that comment right there was the start of my infamous, dysfunctional relationship with the junior boy.

As I began hanging out with Kyle Samel, the bad boy of the school, and his friends began taking interest in my own, any thoughts of Brody Harrison completely left my mind.

The next year, Kyle dropped out, and I continued dating him despite my parents’ disapproval. Sophomore year was also the year that Brody came back to school.

He acted as if nothing had changed. He joined the soccer team and went straight into his normal routine. He was still best friends with Preston Andrews. He still had dark hair, he just had it cut very close to his head instead of long and over his eyes. He still gave me those sly smiles that meant mischief. The only thing that changed about Brody Harrison was the fact that his birthmark was gone, replaced with a tiny removal scar. And that only made him more attractive.

But at that point in time, I was already lost in my own world. I snuck out of the house and skipped class just because I could get away with it. I defied my parents and spent most of my time with Kyle. I didn’t get my driver’s license when I turned sixteen, because I didn’t think I needed to. My grades dropped and my alcohol tolerance raised. I was turning into the type of person that my parents used to warn me about, but I didn’t want it any other way.

Pretty soon, I forgot that Brody and I even went to the same school. He had taken the hint and started doing his own thing. He was the starting forward on the soccer team, and I only knew that because of Bianca, who had joined the soccer cheerleading squad her freshmen year. I was sure he was doing just fine in the girlfriend department, but I really didn’t care either way.

I didn’t care about anything, to be quite honest. I was caught up in a dangerous life of failure and Jack Daniels whiskey. I found the demons within myself and used them to my advantage. I put people down and laughed. I smoked cigarettes and killed my lungs just because it was expected of me. I jumped on the back of Kyle’s motorcycle without a helmet, knowing how upset my parents would be if they saw. I gave myself up to the first boy I had ever even kissed and didn’t think twice about it.

I never went to any of the soccer games to watch my sister cheer because I was too busy throwing my life away. I let Kyle hit me when he was angry because I knew he would apologize the next morning and everything would be okay. I laughed as Andie went through another trip on another drug because I didn’t care about the consequences. I encouraged Kayla to sleep with any guy that wanted to because she was pretty and she could.

I was becoming something that I never imagined myself being. I was transforming yet again, only this time, my transformation was slowly killing me inside.
Furthermore, the whole time I was turning into a monster, without my knowledge, Brody Harrison was fighting one of his own. And it wasn’t until he saved my life that I realized it was too late to save his.