Melody's eyes were once filled with utter disdain and hatred and disgust, but now they looked so innocent and pure. A girl who had never received attention before who finally had gotten someone's approval. She waited a moment before speaking, but I could see something new in her eyes. Resolve.
"Christy," she spoke my name first. "I have spent so many night crying to myself and feeling so ugly and unloved. I thought that men were disgusting and shallow, and I thought that women were vicious and backstabbing. I still remember that in sixth grade, there was this one kid, his name was Lance. He was always so nice to me. He opened doors for me and lent me his pencils, just small stuff, really. But he was the first boy I ever had a crush on.
"Valentine's Day rolled around and I poured out my feelings to him in a card. I made it myself, I drew a picture of us in class in colored pencils. I told him that... my heart was his, and that I loved him. I left it in his locker for him to find after first period, and I remember sweating bullets all throughout the morning to see how he'd react. When he finally opened the message, he opened it, and the first thing he did was laugh. Then he showed it to all his friends and they laughed. Calling me stupid and airheaded. Then the girls found it and they all laughed too. My friends stopped talking to me because they didn't want to be laughed at either. Two days later, I found the letter had been stuffed back into my locker, my drawing had been ripped, marked over with permanent marker, and in a red pen, multiple people had written "SLUT."
"I cried so hard, and I refused to go back to school. My parents found the letter, and they took me out, sending me to the Catholic school instead, and I never left. I never saw Lance again, and I never wrote anyone a letter ever again.
"The only person I had left was Monica. I couldn't wait to come back home to listen to what she had to say. She was always talking to people, even boys, and making friends and having after school clubs, and getting invited to places. She was an angel. But after she graduated and moved to college, I didn't get to see her anymore. I was alone again. I couldn't talk to my parents obviously, so I had to deal with my own problems again.
"So when I finally got the chance to spend some quality time with her, and you just show up and ruin it, I just couldn't handle it. And when you told me about Melody, that purity and perfection I had built up in my head came crashing down. Truthfully, it didn't matter if you were the one who slept with her. In fact, deep down I knew that she had been experimenting with guys and being a normal teenager. But I didn't want to face it. I couldn't.
"But that illusion is broken now, and I'm back to having to face me again. And I never liked seeing that. But here you are. First you aggravate me, then you lie to me, and then you tell me I'm beautiful. I've never been kissed, I've never held hands, I've never even wanted those things really. They were all just necessary distractions.
"But I believe you're telling me the truth. I don't know what it's like to feel beautiful. But I want you to show me."
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