I'll be Under Your Stars Forever

All summer, Billy’d pined over her. Her ruby lips wrapped around a cigarette, her golden eyes sparkling like stars in the sterility of a classroom, the locks of her lava-red hair falling over her shoulders like a waterfall. She shouldn’t have been as popular as she was since she was weird like Billy, but unlike him she knew how to talk to people and climb the social ladder. The fact that she was weird and popular made her even more of a threat, which meant she was possibly the coolest girl in the entire school. He was on the other end of the spectrum of weirdness entirely, falling into the “sits with Special Ed kids at lunch” category.

Still, he couldn’t help but wish she was his – even after he saw on the first day that she’d cut her Jessica Rabbit hair and it had grown back to her natural color of light brown. In fact, he thought she was even more beautiful now, having traded in her fishnets and leather skirts for boy sweaters and loafers. He wasn’t as fixated on her as he was when she’d first started at his school, but he still obsessed over befriending her and getting to know her. She was just so stunning, so radiant and bubbling over with charm and wit; and she even seemed to like all the same bands as him – he just felt a connection to her, like it was wrong that the two of them weren’t friends. He just wondered sometimes if he was projecting his vision of perfection onto her or if she was actually as flawless as she seemed, and he wanted more than anything to find out.

It was a Tuesday at the beginning of the school year, just before lunch, and Billy was trying to prepare himself for what he’d been wanting to do for months. He was we wearing a Bauhaus shirt that he’d bought months prior, before his growth spurt. Consequently, it was quite tight, stretching across his now broad chest and distorting the band’s logo. He thought she might like them, considering she liked The Cure and David Bowie, so he’d worn it to impress her. But now he just felt stupid, since as he tried to take deep breaths to steady his nerves he could barely inhale from the size of the shirt.

Before he could chicken out, Billy shook his head as though it would make the pessimistic thoughts fall out, approaching the lunchroom with as much fake confidence as he could muster. But of course, as soon as he opened the door to the room with the high ceiling and fluorescent lights even brighter than those of the rest of the school, that confidence died. He saw her immediately, sitting with her group of friends at one of the twenty or so circular lunch tables; the one in the corner nearest to the windows.

His steps slowed just the same as his heart beat as he approached the tribe of mismatched teenagers. He knew the names of all of them, but there was only one that he was interested in, and she was sitting so that she faced him; Sky Scarlett, with a light pink ribbon in her hair on this day in particular. She stared at him shamelessly as if she knew that his destination was her. Of course, this didn’t help Billy in any way, and he did everything he could to avoid her gaze.

He stood about an awkward foot away from the table and they all went silent, looking at him expectantly. He went against all of the instincts that were telling him to turn around and run away, and he actually spoke.

“H-hey…,” he said, sounding breathy, “I’m Billy.”

Everyone kept silent for a moment until Sky erupted into sadistic laughter.

“Bauhaus? Really? What, do you think you’re a goth or something?” she continued to laugh at him, the rest of her friends joining in.

His cheeks went immediately red, and his stomach sour. He didn’t know how to react. He felt so shocked with disappointment and humiliation that he couldn’t move a muscle, not even when the tears that had filled his eyes to the brim overflowed. The bell rang and the kids’ laughter gradually faded into sick, uneasy grins as they all filed out of the cafeteria.

--

Billy somehow made it through the rest of the day, after skipping 4th period to cry in the bathroom for an hour. He just couldn’t believe that she’d been so awful; moreover, he couldn’t believe he’d let himself fall so deeply for someone that he didn’t even know well enough to be aware of the fact that she was a raging, evil bitch. He’d never been so humiliated in his life. Not because what she’d said was all that awful, but because it’d come from someone that he’d thought of as an angel.

By the end of the day he was drained of any energy or emotion and just wanted to hurry up and get home, but as he opened his locker, a sheet of paper tumbled out. He sighed in frustration, assuming that it was just another annoyance to add to his already shitty day; until he noticed that it was on a pink piece of paper. He didn’t use pink paper and neither did any of his teachers. The paper was neatly folded twice into a little square, with a shiny lady bug sticker holding it closed. He tore it open curiously, reading the words that were scrawled in beautiful cursive with purple ink.

Bauhaus are my favorite band.
~ Your secret admirer.

His heart dropped and a stupid smile spread across his face. What the fuck? He glanced around the hall to see if anyone had been watching, but the only people around were a janitor, a kid name Larry that he’d been friends with in first grade, and a group of girls. None of them had been in the cafeteria that day. That’s when he realized, it was a joke. It had to have been, and it was probably perpetrated by the very girl he thought he was in love with.