Hartbeat

I cry in the deepest parts of me that no one sees. The tears that once were snatched, stolen from me, still manage to rise. It’s the comfort in the pain that I decide to keep pushing aside. Their taunts kept my lips clamped shut, tight like a grip on a gun. Letting it all go before the limit becomes a blow. Breathe. This is what he told me.

His name was Dean Hart. I knew that he would sneak those silent glances my way. Cornered at the side of the school’s building, hidden from where the rest of the students played. There he was.

Dean, the light green-eyed boy with a tic that would flicker his eyes shut as if a thought bloomed in his head. I wondered if he felt the same pain that I did. He came around me, like he was the voice that I needed to hear to cancel out the nosy playground.

“Breathe,” he whispered one more time. I took a breath as he insisted.

“Stella, they don’t deserve to see you cry,” he said softly, like he caught a breath with me. My eyes filled with tears, searching to meet his. There I saw it again, the tic in his eyes fluttering. The cuffs of his sweatshirt brushed my face, wiping away what I hadn’t even realized had begun to show. The same tears I’ve restrained came rushing down, but Dean Hart kept himself near. He didn’t budge but let me rest my head on his shoulder. It felt like something inside me shifted as I could finally let everything go. For the first time, I wasn’t a ghost drifting through a crowded room; I was a face someone understood. Someone saw me, not just in passing, and not just to taunt.

From then on, we were inseparable. In the schoolyard and later on the bus, he held on tightly, like he didn’t want my emotions to combust. He was the protector, the one he described as the knight from the movies who is sworn to protect the princess. We braced it one last time.

A group of school kids taunting, “Cowgirl and Blinker!” over and over again.

The laughter from the crowd rippled through, replaying in my ear—the moo sounds and the reenactment of his blinks. They continued until the trigger finally went off.

Boom.

Dean landed his fist across the face of one of our taunters.

“You can make fun of my tics, but leave her skin alone. I find it very beautiful,” he snapped, his stare deep without breaking eye contact. I knew at that moment he meant every word he said.

The crowd was utterly shocked by the sudden atomic bomb that had just blown up in their faces. No one had seen Dean like this before, but it was over. Ever since that day, he made a promise to me that he would never let anyone make fun of my vitiligo or his Tourette’s.

I wrote in my journal that same night, a submission to my heart, an ode to the pain that I’d buried: Nobody has seen me clearly before, but Dean Hart will be the one I will forever adore.

Years later, he still had me. Tucked into his arms, where my head lay on his chest, feeling his heartbeat. I knew with a last name like Hart that I would someday have his. At least that’s what I wanted, and I felt myself drawn to him more.

By the time we reached high school, his tics had become almost non-existent. The stares when we walked through the hallways remained, mostly because of me. I’ve come to accept that I was a stranger to this world. I still ran into people who touched my arms and quickly recoiled, as if I carried some contagious disease that required isolation.

“Normies,” Dean called them. Everyone who stuck to what they called ‘normal.’ Normies were our way of attaching a label to those who would call us names.

Cowgirl and Blinker, they said, but the same names used to demean us ironically sounded like a superhero duo, and that’s how it felt at times. Dean never made me feel like a sidekick, either, but a partner in crime.

Our first kiss was at the Dayton High School Senior Prom, in the midst of the bass coming from the speakers, which played a nostalgic song that made everyone jump out to dance. We were always different. The music didn’t entice us; instead it kept the flame dim for just a second. We held each other’s gaze, scavenging through the spaces between the words we never spoke. Dean looked the same way I remembered from the first time he told me to let go.

We moved from the dance floor to the hallway, alone. We could hear the echoes of chanting from inside. At this point, I didn’t know if Dean liked me or if he thought of me the same. Was I just the little princess he wanted to protect forever? Or was I anything more? I wrote continuously to myself, the words creating a fantasy that only I lived in. I wrote in my journal that I was in love with Dean Hart. I thought of this moment exactly as described. This wasn’t just the knight’s look anymore; it was an intense allure that made me hungry for more.

“Come here,” he said. Our lips moved in a quiet harmony. Just like that, all the pain from before rushed down to escape me, and we finally released. That was the day everything I longed for came to an end.

The kiss felt like the final page of the chapter of the story I’ve been writing. An unpredictable plot twist that was going to invite us into a different part of this world–one that didn’t feel stuck in a time zone that ignored me, but a place where the pieces all aligned into a perfect harmony. He was the one I’ve been missing all along.

I went to sleep with a sense of relief knowing that Dean Hart likes me. He wants me just as much as I wanted him. That our love didn’t consist only of a fantasy, but it was reality.

The next day was a quiet storm. I went to school with my head high in the clouds. Replaying the kiss that would soon become a testament to the beginning of something new.

I wasn’t expecting that when he approached me that day, it wouldn’t feel the same. After the dance, I thought we would fall into that same rhythm. That inseparability that has consumed us since childhood. Our lives were moving parts, and this time, they were all tangled. The kiss that felt like a confession changed everything.

Then he finally spoke.

“We can’t, Stella,” was the last thing I heard before the walls came bursting down in a stampede of rushed emotions.

“What do you mean?” I replied. The weight of his words pressed against my chest.

“You’re my best friend. I can’t risk losing that.” His last words to me sliced my throat, forcing me to just stand there staring hopelessly.

I didn’t see Dean. I didn’t see the little boy who controlled the narrative of middle school teasing, and I didn’t see my knight. That was the scariest night of my life; the boy I had loved all my childhood revealed the broken truth.

We didn’t say anything else; it was a silent understanding because when you enter uncharted territory, things never remain the same. I loved Dean Hart. He was the first ever assigned the protector of my heart, and the same one to rip it out of my chest. Our communication became silent ever since.

I was in love with my best friend, but he didn’t see me that way, not even with a kiss, not with a dance. I was just the princess in his story, one that wasn’t supposed to go that far. The saddest part is that I knew the outcome. My journals wrote of a fantasy, and it was intended to stay that way.

I watched him move on, without a fleeting thought toward what could have been. Quickly, he drifted toward a life beyond the “protector” role he had carried.

After high school, we grew apart, not intentionally, but almost naturally. I was no longer the vitiligo girl, and he was no longer the boy with Tourette’s; instead, we had become separate people with a shared past, admirable, but content. What I thought was love was merely a naive fairytale in disguise. I learned that love is never a one-way street, and when it doesn’t go your way, it isn’t simply the end, but a lesson meant for you. I lingered on thoughts of him, but he was already sealed away in the vault of my mind, labeled The One Who Never Was.