Glad It's Over!

We know what teenagers are like.  We’ve all been through that stage where our hormones trolled us into believing we were adults. Infatuation, crushes, minimal forces of attraction were terms that only meant one thing – LOVE! Ironically, love was something we didn’t really know of back then.

Rachna was just another 13 year old. Fretting over pimples, trying to fit into her 18 year old sister’s shoes, clothes, social circle etc, comparing whether her Math text books had more problems than her best friends. And, Rachna was crazy about her class teacher in school. He looked all right, but when Rachna compared him to the scrawny boys in school, he looked nothing short of a Greek God.

He wore the correct shoes with the correct clothes. Every girl in school was madly in ‘love’ with this teacher already. Dimples and nicely cut hair, clean shaven and eyes that would shine every time his students needed help - what more qualities does a teenage girl seek in a crush? Rachna felt her desperate attempts to seek his attention were overshadowed by the smarter chicks who strut around confidently around him. In a bid to be one-up on them, Rachna decided to write him a love letter.

How does one proceed to write a love letter? She picked up a letter-writing book and ran her finger through the index looking for a love letter, unfortunately, there were no sample letters. Her love story started with a shy Good Morning – on most other occasions her jaw would drop so low that it was impossible to utter anything coherent. She wrote what she saw people write in the movies – she poured her heart out, just like some actress in some movie had, some clichéd nonsense about how they were going to make it till the end and all that jazz. It seemed a little too perfect to her, but then that's how she wanted her love story to be! She blushed and did not write her name in the end at all. If they were meant to be, he would find out. A few little hearts danced around her head with a few glittering stars.

She carefully placed her letter on his desk the next morning, in between the attendance register. She kept her fingers crossed, hoping she’d get what she had always longed for, a fairy tale love story, her prince charming. When Mr. Prince Charming entered the class, Rachna crossed her fingers so hard that they could have almost broken her metacarpals. 

As soon as she saw him open the letter, everything around her played in slow motion - her heart sank a little lower to her stomach, the sleeping butterflies in her stomach woke up with a stir in response, cold sweat beads formed on her forehead. She saw his expression go from good to bad to ugly to worse … until he finally tore it apart into little pieces and dropped it in the dustbin.

15 pieces of her love letter multiplied by a million - exactly the amount of pieces her heart broke into.

Tears welled up in her eyes but she had to show no emotion. Her friends would probably disown her, laugh at her and do everything a teenager did to make another teenager feel miserable. Of course, he was her class-teacher; he knew it was her handwriting even though it had no name.
Lessons learnt: Never write down a love letter in your own handwriting, especially when your teacher knows what it looks like and your class has only 22 students.

She couldn’t study well for his paper due next week - final exams! She plugged her iPod into her ears and wailed for hours listening to the saddest songs and downloading even sadder songs that she could manage to find under 'Heartbroken couple songs MP3 download', 'Cheated in love songs MP3 download', 'Love songs  Sad MP3 download'  on Google. She filled up her personal diary with paragraphs after paragraphs about how she had to show that heartless beast that she was doing great without him. The very next moment she felt she couldn't fall in love again. She switched on the TV and saw Kajol sobbing uncontrollably to Rifat Bee 'Mujhe mera pehla pyaar nahi mila..'. It was getting worse by each passing day. She didn't speak to her friends at all, none of them bothered either because it was exam time. The entire next week she tried to avoid eye contact with him, she couldn't just leave school, that wasn't even an option for her. Okay, she couldn’t concentrate.

 A quick calculation showed that she needed 55% in his paper to clear the hurdle on to the next class. She studied enough to secure 55%, wrote enough in the paper to score that much too.

When the report cards were finally being given away to the parents, Rachna was only worried about Prince Charming’s paper. It was awkward to be in love with someone and then fail their paper. That morning she kept her fingers crossed for a good 30 minutes. Failing his paper wouldn't just ruin her reputation before him, but would also mean a grand lecture from her parents at home. It felt wrong to be standing in front of him; it suddenly struck her that she was beyond foolish to have done what she did. She was WRONG, so WRONG!

She couldn’t pay attention to the conversation between her parents and Prince Charming. Her fingers were still crossed because she didn’t want him to complain to her parents about her absurd behaviour. She peeped into her report card and saw a 56 against his paper. She didn’t know whether she had earned it for herself through what she did to him or if she had really studied only that much. There was just one thing she could write in her diary that night: Why must everything have a happy ending? Why can't we just be glad that it's over?

PS: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead is purely coincidental, except maybe a few instances where Rachna was Yours Truly. 

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda