Nothing could be more idyllic than growing up in a small Oklahoman town. That was as true for me as for everyone else in my neighbourhood until I began the third grade. Then things changed and not for the better. But perhaps the worst of all that happened to me was the end of my friendship with the girl three doors down from my home, a relationship I had imagined, even in that prepubescence age, would last forever.
But the warm sunshine of that effervescent childhood was over—dead. As dead as any future that consisted of more than some two-bit job leading nowhere and promising nothing but death shortly after retirement. I was one of those: the losers, the socially-inept, the last to be chosen, a bottom-feeder, the slow-witted, the never to succeed. Forever to be stuck in this town, never to escape, with zero prospects of having anything else but a lonely and stunted life, being an outsider, a nobody, inside a community where everyone knew everyone else.
It was hard enough to accept, let alone endure. But standing alone by my bedroom window and peering out far too many countless times and catching sight of Rachel Magnussen outside her house, my situation grew to become untenable: Rachel of beauty, of athleticism, of intelligence, full of social grace and verve. She was leading a charmed life. I was cursed. As she triumphantly ascended into her mid-teenage years, I was on a never-ending, swirling descent into the gutter, simply struggling for existence. She had everything. I had nothing.
The girl of my dreams was just that, and I had to suppress what I felt for her. I couldn't let her know and have myself crushed beyond what I already was. And it was impossible to believe she might share any of the feelings I held tightly inside myself for her, not with a nerdy, stupid, pimply-faced, ninety pound weakling named Ryan Nielsen.
Then the unexpected happened. Someone came into my life, someone who asked me: "Is this all you want?" If ever there was a rhetorical question—that was the one. Yes, yes, yes, YES! I wanted more. I wanted better. I wanted Rachel. And the funny thing was: I discovered my feelings for the girl down the street were not the last of what was suppressed within me.
The improbable, the impossible, came to be. I had both almost within my grasp: a brand new future, one I could never have anticipated, and Rachel.
And then I was betrayed.
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