dear dimestore therapists,

thank you for all your comments last week. i couldn’t believe how many responses my letter got, but i was touched and humbled that people cared enough to make the effort.

today, i think i should tell you about aidan. he’s one of the biggest players in my story, so i can’t really talk about my life without involving him. our history is somewhat tangled and complex, but it begins innocently enough.

my mom and dad moved out of new york city to a connecticut suburb when i was six years old. for some reason, my dad thought a 6,000 square-foot house was perfect for a family of three; as for me, i always felt like a marble rattling around in a metal lunchbox. the only place i felt comfortable in that house was in my room, which didn’t change much from when we moved in until i moved out 10 years later, when i was sixteen.

the day we moved in, our next-door neighbors, the mcClellans*, brought over champagne and flowers. my mother instantly took to mrs. mcClellan, who insisted i call her jen. and my dad and mr. mcClellan (mark) talked about the yankees, which seemed to provide them with enough material to prevent them from ever having to talk about real life.

as for me, i met aidan. i’m sixteen days older than him, which made me feel ok bossing him around. on that first day, we were both shy and uncertain, but our mothers made it a point to keep bringing us together. after all, we were so close in age, and i suppose it gave them an excuse to hang out by the mcClellans’ pool and gossip while we splashed in the shallow end.

by the time first grade came around that fall, aidan and i were inseparable; we spent so much time together that our families became like surrogate family to each of us. aidan’s younger sisters, who were four and one at the time, thought of me as an older sister, and i eventually came to call aidan’s parents jen and mark, just as they’d asked me to on that first day.

elementary school was simple. there were no politics, no gender expectations, no stereotypes. aidan and i could spend as much time together as we wanted without incurring any adverse attention. but as soon as junior high rolled around, the hormones started to flow, and our friends all wanted to know what was going on between aidan and me. his friends asked if he was “tapping that,” which i found to be a repulsive question, and my friends asked if he’d ever tried to kiss me, which i found equally disgusting. he was like my brother.

then my dad left. i became a social pariah; no one knew how to talk to the abandoned girl, especially since everyone thought my mom went off the deep end. that was totally not true, by the way. yes, she didn’t leave the house very much, and yes, she tended to wear sweatshirts and paint-splattered jeans when she did get out. but the only reason that seemed strange to the people in my town was because they were all stepford robots who didn’t understand individuality. my mom was just expressing her feelings towards the loss of my father in her own unique way.

anyway, back to aidan: it didn’t help that he had grown into a full-blown legend-in-the-making at my school, and i was still same old olivia. he played varsity football and basketball starting in ninth grade, and only got better after he had a growth sport during the summer before sophomore year that put him at a little over 6’3″. i was privy to all the horndogginess that went on when girls talked about him in the restrooms and the locker rooms at school, and i didn’t appreciate it.

aidan’s sex-god status at my school only made things harder for me. he always wanted me at his side, but i felt increasingly uncomfortable hanging out with people who saw me as an afterthought. i knew aidan thought of me as his only real friend, and that was pretty much the one thing that kept me from defecting over to the band geeks, who would have been happy to have another outcast to swell their ranks.

now that i think back, maybe i should have left aidan’s circle and gone off on my own. goodness knows i didn’t fit in–my mom was barely making her part of the payments on our house and there wasn’t much money to be had, so i was very conspicuous in my hand-me-downs and used honda accord when i was surrounded by dior and gucci, audis and benzes.

and that night, of the party? i totally should have listened to Smart Olivia, the one who said, don’t go. stay home with mom and watch pride & prejudice. you know that party’s gonna suck, anyway. but i let aidan talk me into going, even though it was at jackie’s house. man, that girl was a bitch. funny how all these years later, my world has been turned upside down, shaken to the point of whiplash, and i still remember how much i hated her on that night.

yours,

olivia.

*last names have been changed.

— Alexis

Tagged as: olivia