The Boy Who Chose Me First

Jared was my first boyfriend, though he didn’t arrive with butterflies, giggles, or secrets. He came quieter than that, like an undercurrent beneath the ribs, something steady humming beneath all the noise of being fourteen.

He was the first boy who let me try on a version of myself I hadn’t lived in yet, someone normal, someone unbroken, someone not defined by disease.

We used one another as shields, two kids pretending we knew how to be the people everyone else expected us to be. He needed the safety of saying he had a girlfriend; I needed the box checked that I could achieve all the regular teenage-girl milestones. He wasn’t the love of my life, but he was my first test run at being a girl who could be chosen. And that mattered more than any crush ever could.

Jared became the steel in my life, an unwavering presence I could rely on, the quiet strength that held me together when everything else threatened to collapse. Not a lover, but a best friend. Permanent. Unshakable. A tether to a world I was still learning to navigate.

Weeks after the evening at the skating rink, Jared called me daily while walking home from the bus, or while waiting for it, his voice always arriving like an anchor. We talked about school, friends, video games, and the Renaissance fairs he hosted at his school with his equally nerdy friends.

Jared was brilliant and gentle, a boy raised with courtesy baked into his bones. He told everyone he knew—including his mom—that I was his girlfriend. After a few weeks of texts and calls, the joke among my friends was that Jared was my boyfriend, and unlike with Bradley, I didn’t argue. I let it be true because it felt like a step toward belonging in a life I was still trying to inhabit.

Bradley had vanished anyway. He’d dissolved back into the orbit of his on-and-off girlfriend, and I, the only girl who’d ever really seen him soft, became irrelevant. I wondered about him, and still do sometimes. I wonder where he ended up, whether he stayed gentle like freshly washed sheets, whether someone else learned to protect him. I hope someone new became his weapon.

But Jared stayed. From the moment we met, he threaded himself into my life and never really left. We were both hiding from identities we didn’t want, from the truths we weren’t ready to speak. He didn’t ask about my disease, but he knew it lived beneath my skin like a second pulse. I didn’t ask about his secret either, the one he wouldn’t allow himself to name. We wore our disguises like armor, and maybe that’s why we held on so tightly.

My parents loved him instantly. I was allowed to go to his house, to LAN parties where twelve-year-old-looking teenage boys yelled into headsets, to eat grilled tuna sandwiches in his kitchen, to sit on the couch while his mom’s twelve cats migrated around us. We walked to the local pizza parlor and talked about everything and nothing.

With Jared, I was granted a new kind of freedom—the freedom to exist without explanation. He wasn’t looking at me through the lens of sickness; he was seeing me. The version of me I thought I could still become.

He needed the cloak of a girlfriend to silence the assumptions about him; I needed the cloak of a boyfriend to prove I could still be the girl everyone expected me to be. Together, we stitched our illusions into something that passed for real.

And sometimes, pretending is its own kind of truth.

The kiss happened at a Summer party at my house, a night humid with sprinkler mist and the smell of BBQ smoke. As Jared was leaving, he hugged me in the driveway, and before I could pull back, he kissed me on the mouth. My hands were still on his shoulders from the hug. When his lips left mine, my body froze so completely I thought I might calcify on the spot, become part of the cement beneath our feet.

He trotted to his mother’s car, and only then did the air return to my lungs. A and R were definitely giggling from the bedroom window above us, but I didn’t move until the taillights disappeared.

Jared was carved into my history then as my first kiss, permanent and unerasable.

He relived the moment in our texts for days, overjoyed that his mother had witnessed it. There was pride in his voice, something innocent and sweet. A and R interrogated me: Did I feel butterflies? Did I want to kiss him back? Did I love him?

Their questions made my stomach turn.

Was I broken?

Bradley had stirred nothing.

Jared stirred nothing.

I still hadn’t felt the pull people described, the urge to follow someone into the dark.

My intuition knew what my heart refused to say: I could never be what Jared needed. I wasn’t his weapon, but instead I was his shelter, the cover for a life he didn’t want to explain. And he wasn’t my love story, but he was the safest place I’d ever been.

Something had to break. If we peeled away the parts that weren’t real, maybe something honest could survive.

Jared tells the story differently, depending on the decade. Sometimes I broke up with him gently, sometimes cruelly, sometimes for another boy. But the truth is this: I had a friend deliver the news for me because I did have a heart, and hurting him directly would’ve been unbearable.

He claims I left him for Derrick, a boy I later dated who was dumber than a bag of rocks, as my grandma would say. Derrick was tall and easy to manipulate, a basketball player who didn’t go to our school. He left me voicemails of himself singing, which alone should absolve me of any guilt about ending things. He was a convenience, a checkbox, a placeholder.

Jared was not, which is why his heartbreak mattered.

He didn’t speak to me for a while. It gutted me, but I let him have the distance. He deserved that dignity.

But even after we shed the cloaks, even after the pretending burned away, Jared came back, just not as a boyfriend, but as someone who didn’t flinch when I let him see all my truth.

So when the pain crept back into my body, quiet, familiar, unwelcome, he was one of the first people I told.

Because first boyfriends don’t always give you butterflies, heartbreak, or lifelong romance, sometimes they give you a place to stand, a hand to hold, a mirror that reflects the possibility of being chosen.

Sometimes the first boy isn’t the one you love.

Sometimes he’s the one who teaches you how to love.

And sometimes if you’re lucky, he stays.