A Life of Love

Chapter 1: Darren

“Maggie, meet Darren. He’s in my fourth grade math class with me, do you want to play video games with us?” Allen said. “I’m okay, I’ll just play in the backyard on the swings.” That was the first time Darren and I met. We were friends since elementary school, even though I was in a private school and he was in a public school. My next-door neighbor’s name was Allen and we were very close as young children, he was the one to introduce Darren into my life around the age of ten. Allen was a year younger than me, as was Darren and his twin brother Clayton. Darren and Allen would always stay inside Allen’s house and play the game cube together while me and Clayton played outside on the swing set, climb trees and even find animals, alive and dead, in the woods between our two houses. I had always found Clayton easier to talk to than Darren simply because we shared more in common than Darren and I. That was, until, the day Darren and I went to the fair together. That day changed both our lives for the next six years.

I was in my last couple of months of freshman year at St. Damian’s high school. My best friend Vannessa wanted to go to the local YMCA Memorial Day weekend fair. We were originally going to go with Allen and a friend of his that wanted to date me. I had gone my entire freshman year liking one of my best friends that didn’t feel the same way for me. So I said why not try it out, maybe I’ll have some fun. A couple of hours before the fair I was speaking to Allen’s friend and apparently he had shown his friends pictures of me and they called me a “fat emo chic.” Well of course seeing as these were his friends he didn’t want to speak out against their opinions, which to me seemed worse considering he wanted to date me. I called him up and said don’t come to the fair I don’t even want to hang out with you anymore. Allen then decided to invite Darren instead.


I was feeling kind of nauseous all day and Darren didn’t have much money for the over priced fair rides. We pretty much held everybody’s stuff and wondered about as they went on rides. It gave us the perfect opportunity to really get to know each other. We talked for hours, learned a lot about each other and even exchanged numbers. Darren and I talked constantly over the next few weeks, hinting that we both felt something deeper than just friendship.

The summer of 2011 came, by the Fourth of July Darren had finally asked me out after almost 2 months of non stop flirting. The funniest part about this though was that my best friend Vannessa had been flirting with his twin brother Clayton. They both asked us out on the same day and at the time we thought dating twins would be so cool, not mention it being very easy to always see each other even when we are with our boyfriends. It also forced the boys to become semi friends; at this point Darren and Clayton were brothers but never really talked to one another unless forced to by their mother.

Darren was always playing video games and the only time I would ever get to spend one on one time with him is if I played video games with him in his basement. Video games were fun and all but I was going into my sophomore year of high school and I didn’t want to just sit next to my boyfriend and play video games all day. I wanted to be physical with him, but I could tell he was feeling nervous about that aspect of our relationship. After a month of being together the farthest we got was hand holding, we hadn’t even had our first kiss. Clayton had more courage than his twin; he kissed Vannessa after the first couple of weeks. After a month patiently waiting for him to make a move he finally tried something. As he left Allen’s house one night he brought me outside right before his dad was about to pick him up. Darren was nervous, I could feel him trembling as he held my hand guiding me in the dark to the side of Allen’s house. We stopped right next to a huge hedge that blocked us from anyone looking out the main back window. He leaned in ready to kiss me but at the last second he hesitated and instead of kissing me on the lips he kissed the very corner of my mouth. His dad showed up right as he did this and nervously said “Ha ha… bye.” Just like that he ran off into his dad’s car.

I stood there in the dark extremely confused about what just happened. The only thing that made sense was if he got nervous when leaning in and changed his mind to kiss my cheek but instead he caught in-between my lips and my cheek. It took Darren another month and a half to even think about trying again. Three months in and I still had yet to kiss my boyfriend. That’s long enough to make any person frustrated. I wanted it and Darren knew too. He finally kissed me and that was still not enough for me. I was ready to make out and put out but he was still making the transition from hand holding to lip locking. It got to the point where I would ask him to make out and he would say okay but would still shake out of nervousness. At the very start of August Darren tried a little more to be more of a boyfriend rather than just a friend. He took me out for a mid-day movie, one I hoped we could call a date. Unfortunately he invited a friend from school to tag along as the third wheel. Kenny was a very goofy, fun loving guy that could break the tension in any room with just a smile. Darren brought him along to make sure things wouldn’t feel sexually energized, as most dates do. Kenny became like a brother to me in the coming weeks. He became an ally in my corner when it came to matters of my relationship with Darren. After August though, things started to go in a direction I never would have expected.

School started and we saw less and less of one another as my schedule became packed with after school activities, work, and friends. I had tennis, the local halloween haunted house where I was an actress, and friends that I would hang out with after school until my parents picked me up. I had entered a class almost completely full of freshmen due to my first year biology science schedule. I wound up in earth science, seated all the way in the back of the classroom with no partner the very first day. At first I thought this would be a good thing,, until the very end of class when the teacher, Mr. Kneet, assigned us a lab report due the next day and paired everyone up with the person next to them except me for he couldn’t allow more than two in a group. I was mildly annoyed that I’d be doing everything alone all year but the lab reports weren’t that hard so I knew I could manage doing it alone. The next day, to my surprise, I noticed a boy sitting in the seat next to mine. Confused, I walked up to him asking his name and he said “Mariano.” He then explained that he missed yesterdays class because an upper class-men said to take a locker that wasn’t assigned to him saying it was alright, however the dean of students didn’t think it was. He got called into his office and it took the entire class period to get it straightened out. I laughed and shook my head, “that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” We laughed every day in class, so much that Mr. Kneet kept giving us stern words like “pay attention” or “stop talking” but that just made whatever joke we were laughing about even funnier.

Come October, I had a fully packed schedule almost everyday. School, obviously, then drama club, then tennis practice, then to my new job at a Halloween theme park in the main haunted house as an actress set to scare people. Personally, the draining part of every day was attempting to talk with Darren. I felt like it was impossible to get in contact with him, my own boyfriend, even just for one conversation a week. I did manage to see him during the day time on the weekends and although I didn’t know it yet, Darren was avoiding me for a reason.

While I was working I had noticed some of Darren’s friends getting into particular substances that I did not want him around let alone partaking in it. I asked him to promise me that he would never smoke pot while we were a couple, making sure that there would never be a possible addiction or an entryway into more serious drugs. Now, he didn’t know it at the time but I take promises very seriously, to break a promise with me is to end whatever relationship we may have. To this very day, I must explain this thoroughly to every boyfriend I have, Darren is the reason why I implement it so strongly.

While I was busy with school, drama club, tennis, work, and friends from my own school there was little time to be with Darren. He, however, had all the free time in the world and he spent it getting high with his friends or even worse, alone. I noticed something was off whenever I went in for a hug; his natural scent was slowly fading away and turning into pure deodorant and cologne as if he was trying to cover up and even stronger scent. Kenny was his best friend and an advocate for Darren smoking marijuana. While I liked Kenny and was becoming good friends with him, he also knew about Darren’s promise to me. October brought to light the truth of it all. Kenny, out of guilt, told me about them smoking together. I then pulled Darren aside and talked with him about how upsetting this was to me but that I wasn’t ready to end our relationship. He swore to keep it to a minimum, only when he feels extremely stressed out. I was not happy about it but so long as it didn’t interfere with our time together I dealt with it.

Everything was going just fine for the next couple weeks until Thanksgiving and I had become very close with one of my math classmates, Wilmer. We were becoming more acquainted since the summer and I happened to find out he had a crush on me right after Darren asked me out. I couldn’t break up with Darren just to try things out with Wilmer when I didn’t even know if I actually liked him as anything more than a friend. When I found out about Darren’s broken promise, Wilmer had seen this as a chance to get closer to me. I leaned on him for support when I felt like I was being taken for granted by Darren. Funny how men seem to prey on women when they are most vulnerable. At this point in time, I also was being pursued by another close guy friend, Mariano. Although I was completely oblivious to it at the time, I did notice slight hints of jealousy towards both Darren and Wilmer whenever I would talk to Mariano about them. He would always call Darren a “weenie” and would roll his eyes at the sight of Wilmer. Never the less, I stubbornly held on to my feelings for Darren.

The New Years Eve of 2012 came; Darren’s parents were throwing a party and had invited a bunch of the boy’s friends, including Vannessa and me. Darren had other plans yet decided not to tell me until I arrived at his house. There was another party going on, one with all of the “cool kids” who wanted to bring in the New Year by smoking pot. Without any warning, I was left at his own house party, on New Years Eve, with his parents and their friends and Vanessa and her boyfriend’s friends. Who was left to comfort me, you ask? Mark, a guy Darren was “kind of” friends with before he got into smoking marijuana. The rest of the night he spent consoling me and saying things like “just dump him and go out with me instead.” I just kept thinking to myself “how could he have left me here all alone?! Just to smoke weed!?” By 11:59pm I managed to slip away from the party and cry alone outside his house as the New Years Eve ball in New York City dropped, bringing in the new year of 2013.

After that night I had wanted to break things off, I would not become second to a plant. I had stopped trying to be physical with him from that point on as well. I started drifting away from him but I didn’t want to leave him because after that night he had given me his word to cut back and eventually stop. While this was happening with Darren, I turned to Wilmer for support. As I fell out of love with Darren, I fell more in love with Wilmer. After a month I wasn’t seeing any effort given by Darren in his effort to stop smoking and I was already falling for Wilmer enough to want to go out with him. Valentines Day was around the corner and I was done with being worth less than a good high for the last time.

I ended things two days before the heart shaped holiday; I just couldn’t be with someone who chose a substance over me. Darren sat in his house, silent and un-phased by the conversation of ending our relationship. I said everything I felt and I waited for a response for 5 minutes. After the long silent pause, he said “okay, I understand” and I hugged him before leaving his house. A few minutes later his brother came outside to go into the town area with me for lunch. He told me he’d never seen Darren cry before but that he was when I left. That broke my heart, I never wanted to see him unhappy and that’s one of the reasons I knew I needed to leave him. He couldn’t be himself or do what he wanted while going out with me, it wasn’t fair to either of us. I took a breath and found myself in a new relationship with Wilmer before the month was up. I didn’t see Darren again until the summer, but by that time Wilmer was my boyfriend and Darren found himself in a new relationship with Viviana.

End Chapter 1: Darren