Playing With My Heartstrings

by Chloe Brewster

  "Joel," I gasped, breathlessly, reversing my head to catch a blinding glimpse of the light dazzling on Joel's fair complexion.

  "Hey." Joel grinned, talking in a relaxed tone as though we were the best of friends, not sworn enemies. "How're you doin' here?"

  I gulped, putting on a Hollywood-false smile in place of a wary frown. "Fine, fine," I remarked, nodding light-headedly.

  "I'm surprised that you're camping here so soon after the last time," Joel commented, taking a quick look around his heart-stopping surroundings, "though it doesn't seem to be so much of a wonder if you can visit places like this."

  I didn't bother to muster a half-hearted reply, instead focusing my energies on the flock of birds playing a unique rendition of an unknown tune and looking up at the darkening sky, which was rapidly progressing towards a stunning eclipse.

  "I know why I'm here, Sadie," Joel stated, flatly. "Although you didn't mention much in your text, I worked out the hidden message fairly quickly."

  My eyes darted to Joel, who was casually rolling back and forth on the tips of his denim blue Converse, a passive expression covered all over his face like a mask.

  There wasn't really a 'hidden message' as such, unlike what Joel initially presumed. I blankly confirmed that I wanted to see him in the forest where we first met and take it from there - I never made any mention of what I feared he was thinking, which assumedly was about my so-called love for him. Uh oh.

  "What do you mean?" I asked, plainly, donning a masked charade.

  A half-smile curled on Joel's once-kissable lips. "Don't you know?" he wondered, flashing his dazzling set of perfect white teeth. "You still love me, so that's why you wanted me to come here in the first place." He declared his words as a statement, without any traces of doubt or querying - oh God, what was I supposed to say in return?

  Unfortunately, biting the bullet and hoping for the best appeared to be the only reliable option left, though I still dreaded to use it.

  "Joel," I said, my voice noticeably wavering, "I never said anything like that in my text. Never."

  However, Joel buried his head in the sand and continued to babble on about us getting back together as though this dreadful blip of misery had never come to existence.

  "Look, you don't get it!" I snapped, a sharp, pointy knife cutting through the air, plunged in hostile tension.

  Joel glowered, a snarl succeeding his gleeful smile. "Just come out with it, Sadie," he said, with a world-load of boredom.

  I bit my tongue anxiously. This is it, I reminded myself, as butterflies began to flutter around my junk food-filled stomach. I straightened my body and willed myself to look in Joel's blank, dark eyes and admit the truth which had long been concealed. "I don't love you, Joel," I blurted out, a sob rising from my choked throat. "Not after I saw you kissing that girl in the park, who I suspect is your girlfriend."

  Panic flashing on his washed-out face, Joel stammered out a needless response. "I-I'm no l-l-l-onger with K-Kate!" he exclaimed, throwing his hands into the air. "I broke up with her two days ago when I realized that I love you!"

  I snorted loudly, disgust forming an unpleasant taste in my mouth. "So you've broken another girl's heart in order to get together with me?" I smirked darkly, no humour amusing me. All fears of breaking the hurtful, yet honest truth distinguished, replaced with a boiling fury. "What a surprise, isn't it? First you left me in a forest with absolutely no explanations or reasons, a few days ago you've dumped a girl who probably loved you as madly as I once did - and now you are begging me to become your girlfriend!"

  "Love is meant to be crazy and wild, which is what makes it so special," Joel affirmed, apparently taking no notice of my ferocious rant, which only fuelled the burning fire inside my speedily beating heart. Nothing - or no one - was going to even attempt to get in my way before all of the once-swallowed venom was spat out, though preferably not on the much-admired flowers I adored.

  "Hello, don't you mean yourself, the only who has taken a trip to Crazyland whilst stopping off in the wild, unleashing your untamed side?"

  "No, I just meant love was crazy and wil-"

  "I couldn't care less about your lazy, utterly pointless responses!" I shouted, a near-deafening echo of my heated yell shortly following. "You will never be truly aware of the amount of hurt, misery and excruciating pain you have caused me - your one-time lover - over the past few weeks! I've been through hell and back because of my obsession with you, yet you simply turned your back on me and looked the other way!" I coughed audibly, as my throat became raspy and painfully dry, like I'd just caught the annual sore throat doing the rounds throughout the country.

  "I'm sorry, Sadie," Joel said, his long-awaited apology finally reaching my ear waves.

  I sighed, sadly, and turned my head away from Joel, as I suddenly yearned to be lying on the sofa at home, complaining about the lack of interesting TV shows with a bored Cassie on a sleepy Saturday night. Some chance of my gaining a Charmed-inspired power to teleport myself into my messier-than-normal-for-a-lazy-teenager bedroom, to my disappointment.

  Luckily, breathing deeply and counting to ten relieved some of my anxiety and a little, teeny-weeny thrill rushed through me as it dawned upon me that I'd remembered to bear Mum's wise advice in mind, even during a moment of distemper.

  "Joel, if you honestly ever cared about me - and, judging by the way you've treated me since, like, forever, there has been a strong lack of it - why are you getting the wrong idea now?" I frowned, deeply, my back still turned away from Joel. "You haven't even considered taking my feelings into consideration, only caring about yours."

  "No, no, you've got it all wrong!" Joel protested, his silent-as-a-lamb spell eventually broken.

  "In whatever way have I misread your signals?"

  "I care about your feelings, too," he told me, "otherwise I wouldn't be displaying any compassion towards you."

  Ew, too OTT, I thought. At this rate, Joel would probably have picked up an acoustic guitar from the wild green bushes and started to croon a song by my mum's favourite boy band, Westlife, yowling like my cat, Tinker, whenever I'd accidentally trod on his fluffy, tabby-coloured tail. The embarrassing image made me turn scarlet - totally not in a cute way.

  "Joel, let's stop beating around the bush - I think that both of us are guilty of that," I said, diminishing all previous images of soppy, Valentine Day-appropriate songs. "Just tell me the truth which I've been longing to hear: were you going out with Kate when you and I went camping together that weekend?"

  Finally. The long-desired truth was about to come out. "N-no, not e-exactly," Joel admitted, anxiously tripping over his speech. "Kate and I-I had had a fight and we were giving each other a break to see if our relationship was worth saving." Joel sighed. "I was in a really bad place at the time; when I stomped into the cafe one afternoon, I was amazed to see you there and then an idea popped into my head. As my dad never developed an interest for it, I had never camped underneath the stars, feel a warm summer breeze touch my bare arms and sleep inside a tent, surrounded by nature in its spellbinding beauty. And you were the perfect person to hang out with," he added, with a hint of a half-smile.

  "Then what happened? One night we shared a magical kiss, then the following morning you were nowhere to be seen."

  A wary frown was inscribed on Joel's lips, darkening his majestic features (though it no longer attracted me like a swarm of bees to a pollen rich flower). "As you fell asleep, I started to panic about what I'd done," Joel replied. "Yes, I did feel twinge of something during the moment, but confusion began to set in and I worried about how Kate would feel if she knew what I had done."

  Just as my mind had regained a few ounces of serenity and I'd managed to keep my head fairly level, bitter annoyance flared through my pounding veins. "Perfectly understandable if you'd kissed a girl who didn't mind snogging a boy who was cheating on his girlfriend, but I'm not that sort of person," I hissed, as venomously as a poisonous snake. "You must have realised
that I wasn't aware of your relationship with Kate, surely?"

  Joel swallowed a nervous gulp, scared stiff by my vicious jeer. Good - I'd fully gained his attention, whether he was terrified to utter a single word or not. "Maybe, I don't know! Not a lot of people know Kate because she attends a different school."

  This piece of information grasped some interest. "Oh really? Is she older than you?" I inquired.

  "Same age."

  I placed my hands into my cropped jeans pockets, wrapping my chocolate finger-long fingers around a lip balm and compact mirror. "So, have you told Kate what happened between you and I?"

  "Not yet," Joel confessed, shrugging his broad shoulders, "but if I did, I wouldn't utter or give a hint to your identity."

  I burst out laughing. "You completely sure of that? She would've been blind to not witness my dramatic flee from the park a few days ago - Kate must've guessed something was up!"

  Joel shook his head. "No, she was focusing on me; don't worry, she didn't see you at all."

  As my back started to ache sorely after standing up for a prolonged period of time, I made a hasty decision to sit cross-legged on the soft grass, stretching my legs relaxingly. Ah, that felt miles better. "Instead my boyfriend yelled my name and summoned me to the cafe for an all-crucial talk," I said, sarcastically.

  A gasp, overwhelmed with utmost shock, escaped Joel's outstretched lips, surprise dawning in his eyes. "You've got a boyfriend?" he questioned, shaking his head in doubt.

  I rolled my eyes. "Oh what, I'm not entitled to one?"

  "Sure, sure, you are," Joel said, then crouched down onto the grass, opposite me. "I was almost certain that I saw a guy running after you - what's his name?"

  "Luke. Luke Clark." I came to knowledge his surname when Luke handed his I.D card over to me one time, exaggerating about the dull, depressing picture he had taken, but I wasn't listening - my eyes had darted over to his surname, which I instinctively liked. Luke Clark sounded like a hero out of a comic, with a dashing costume and a mega-watt smile to turn girls weak at the knees. Just as he always did for me.

  "Lucky him," Joel muttered, under his breath.

  "Yeah, he certainly is." Without warning, I suddenly wished to be back at the mini campfire, burning vanilla marshmallows until they turned an undelectable shade of smoky black, telling You've Been Framed-worthy tales to Luke and staring at the stars, trying to distinguish the real ones to flashing helicopters flying by. Our fight - or rather, a petty exchange of needless speech - needn't have happened; I sincerely hoped that Luke had realized that. I missed him already.

  "Anything else you wanted to talk about, Sadie? Strangely, walking several miles into a forest to speak to you for a few minutes -"

  "Actually, I think more time has passed than you choose to believe," I pointed out.

  "- well, my maths teacher never said I was brilliant with time, hence the reason why I haven't bought a Rolex lookalike." I shared a grin - one without hand-shaking nerves - alongside Joel, whose smile always reminded me of a tail-wagging dog, minus the roaring bark. "As I was saying before you chose to interrupt me, I'd like to spend more time here before I go back home."

  A butterfly zoomed past me, its soft, delicate wing barely touching the tips of my ear, and I was bedazzled by its charming beauty, gazing admiringly at its black and red pattern. "In the meadow?"

  "Yeah, why not?" Joel said, a happy smile lighting up his ecstatic face. "You and I are both alone, so it would be perfect!" Upon noticing my hesitation, Joel bit his lip, a stream of wine red blood flooding down his chin.

  I fished out a tissue inside one of my many jeans pockets and handed it over to Joel, who quickly cleaned up the mess, which sent a wave of revulsion through my body, a shiver slivering its way up my spine. Blood disgusted me entirely; even at the age of eleven, Mum would be obliged to give me a Freddie Frog chocolate bar to calm my erratically behaving nerves if I ever fell over and cut myself, usually resulting in deafening shrieks of agony. Four years on, my fear - it definitely qualified as one - of blood hadn't progressed towards a possible cure.

  "You OK?"

  Joel quietly replied with a half-hearted 'yeah', whilst staring at the blood-stained tissue. I couldn't tell whether he was fascinated by its gore or revolted. Sometimes, boys never gave the game away.

  "So," Joel said, once the bloody tissue had bored him, "do you like my idea or not? You don't seem awfully enthusiastic about it."

  Um, had Joel suddenly contracted myopia and had become short-sighted to what was clearly laid out in front of him? Sure, our discussion - which might or might not have finished just yet - may have been genial enough towards the end, but it totally didn't suggest that I wanted to set up camp with him - even in a glorious meadow like this - for a whole night. Despite airing my opinionated views and flatly pointing out his wrongs, Joel was still deluded like a brain-eating zombie, preferably one which starred as an extra in Shaun of the Dead.

  "Well," I began, fully aware of keeping Luke's closer-than-Joel-thought presence in the dark, "I intended to camp here by mys-" but I never managed to finish my sentence as an echoing yell trilled through the forest, his voice recognizable.

  Luke.

  "Who the hell is yelling?" Joel wondered, turning his head around to the gate, where the frantic shout appeared to be originating from. "I think he is saying - wait a moment, is that your boyfriend calling your name?"

  I recoiled in horror, cringing uneasily. Whilst relief washed through me like a cool glass of a milk, at the same time I didn't want Luke to meet Joel, as I'd pretended that I had been camping all by myself, therefore spawning more lies and hassle.

  Did anyone, apart from myself, listen to their gut instinct?

  Chapter 16

  His yells becoming less frequent, Luke bounded towards the gate, his heartfelt eyes resting on my lazily sitting on the grass, a scowl mocking his Nivea-soft lips. He quickly unfastened the lock on the gate, then strode into the meadow without bothering to shut the gate or look back behind him.

  "Sadie, who is this?" Luke asked me, his hands flying into a gesture pointed towards a taken by surprise Joel.

  Looking the other way from Joel's domineering glare, which was as sharp as a burning laser beam, I turned my attention to a red-faced Luke - with no relation to humiliating embarrassment, simply running as quickly as gone-in-a-blur Usain Bolt - and replied, "Joel," rather awkwardly.

  Breathing deeply, a frown - completely unnatural for his light-hearted, care-free features - still persisted on Luke's expression, which made me terror-stricken. Not only had I casually hidden the fact that my boyfriend was also spending the weekend camping with me to Joel, Luke probably had gathered some wacky ideas from witnessing Joel and I's amiable acquaintance. Really, if the thought had occurred to Joel to bring some scotch eggs and I made some mayo-free sandwiches alongside a couple of bottles of ginger beer (the only beer that my parents gave me the go-ahead to get, even though the bitter flavour exploded in my shocked-stiff taste buds and was alcohol-free), both of us could have enjoyed an evening picnic, avec slowly-appearing stars and canarying birds. What was my boyfriend - and so-called ex - supposed to believe?

  "Um, what have you two been doing?" Luke inquired, in an unusual stiff manner. "You seem pretty comfy on the grass over there."

  Luke couldn't have been further from the truth. As much as I attempted to ignore it, the daisies that I was sitting on - I had no other choice because the vividly bright flowers had covered the entire lot of grass, a spectacular display to lay my eyes upon - had created an unbearable itch which encouraged me to scratch my bare ankle with my spiky set of manicured nails, eventually turning the sensitive area of skin a sore shade of lobster red.

  Still, unlike a man who is begging for pity whenever he contracts a cold, a woman - or girl, in my case, as my shocking selection of turquoise eye shadows confirmed - must bit her tongue or Rimmel-glossy lips in urgent times. Or did it honestly matter?

  "Just sorting out our differenc
es," I stated, truthfully. "It has taken a while, but I think we're getting somewhere."

  Joel grimaced, his face expressing his hidden desires to return to the loud, hot park with hot-as-cherry-pie Kate, kissing her irresistible lips with absolutely no fears of a crazy, non-Converse wearing teenage girl gazing sadly behind an overgrown bush. Possibly.

  "Maybe we were getting somewhere before your boyfriend turned up out of the blue," Joel pointed out, scornfully. "Did you know he was here?"

  My ankle, which I couldn't bring myself to stop scratching roughly, wasn't going to forgive me for this until Cassie chucked me her reserved bottle of soothing aloe vera gel once I burst through the doors at home sweet home. Uh oh. "Yes, I did," I admitted, swallowing a lingering taste of lost pride, "as he came with me."

  Joel inhaled a breath, pondering intensely over my confession, whilst I awkwardly pulled myself up from the daisies, all of which sadly looked as squashed as a run-over squirrel. Or wrinkle-covered sofa after its sitter had endured a stomach-bloating Christmas dinner.