Sweet Romance10 min read
First Week of High School, Lasting Summer
ButterPicks11 views
I remember the first day of high school like a photograph taken in too-bright sunlight—edges blown out, colors too sharp, and a shadow I kept stepping into without noticing.
"You look a little out of place," I said, fanning myself with the campus map and squinting at the lineup of backpacks and parental goodbyes.
Esteban laughed, long and easy. "You only need more luggage if you plan on moving in for good."
"Move in for good? What are you, my father?" I jabbed the air with a finger. "You and your height."
He stood there, comfortable at one hundred and eighty-five centimeters, and I kept being myself at one hundred and sixty-three. The heat held us both in a slow, sticky embrace. The sun caught on his cheekbones and I almost forgot to glare at him. Almost.
"Esteban, you wait!" I called, giving his shoulder a playful slap when he turned away.
"You two are ridiculous," Beatrice said from the doorway, eyes smiling as she watched us. "You should stop pretending you're not attached at the hip."
"Stop talking," Esteban grinned. "She hits like a feather."
"Then why does your ear look like you were strangled by your own earring?" I said, because the truth was we fought like siblings and slept like roommates and studied like rivals.
"Because you were twisting it," he answered, rubbing his ear dramatically.
I punched his arm. "I'm not a violent person."
"Not on Wednesdays," he said.
We had grown up across the street from each other. Our parents were friends—too friendly, in a way that scraped the edges of my privacy. When the two families talked business, their voices got that quiet, same-toned comfort that made me think of warm kitchens and difficult decisions away from the table. Esteban—my Esteban—had keys to my house; I had a pinned-up photograph of him winning a medal back in middle school because he couldn't find his own parents' camera. We were a pair everyone assumed was more than friends, because we fit together like puzzle pieces that had been borrowed from the same box.
After we finished registering, he took me to a tiny dessert shop down the block.
"You'll need sugar to survive military training," he said, waving at the fluted pastries like they were a flag.
"I have a plan," I answered. "I'll live on desserts and grit."
"You sound terribly practical."
"I sound like someone who knows herself."
He smiled and the line at his mouth made my heart trip once. The first small moment that made me notice him differently arrived like that: a corner of his mouth lifted when he caught me staring at a chocolate tart.
"You're very small," he teased later that afternoon when the sun sank and we walked home with our arms full of snacks.
"Small is efficient," I replied, hopping up on a low wall to show him I could climb.
"You could also be my daughter," he said, smirking.
I punched him again. His laugh became the soundtrack that looped through my head that night when sleep refused to come and the air tasted like lemon and night.
The first week was a tangle of marching, sweating, and singing until my throat felt raw. The sergeant taught us to pivot and breathe, to step in time like a single animal. Our teacher kept the worst parts brief, because she tipped into kindness when she met our exhausted faces, but the sun was relentless and my skin tasted like salt. We had breaks in the shade and that shade was my oasis.
"You'll be fine," Esteban told me when I dragged my feet toward the water tent.
"Will I though?" I asked, exhausted. "My lungs feel like rusty bells."
"Then I'll help you keep them moving."
He took my water bottle, handed it to me, and leaned over my shoulder as I drank. It wasn't heroic or cinematic; it was the tiniest gesture, but it sent a new warmth through my chest like someone turning a dial up.
That small kindness was a second heart-throb: the day he set aside his own bottle and fussed like an older brother over my bandage after a stupid practice knock. He ruffled my hair, gently, the way someone rearranges the world to fit a person inside.
At night, our dorm rooms were across from each other. I would study until my eyes burned, telling myself I'd sleep early only to slide into the chair again. Esteban would sometimes keep his lamp on later than he should, and I began to think he was awake mostly to be near the light that seeped under my curtain. Once, exhausted, I crept out to study in the room beside the little study nook because I wanted to look at the book he had left on his desk—math problems he loved and solved with a neat cruelty of pencil. He turned and gave me a look that landed somewhere between annoyance and something softer, and I felt seen in the worst, most thrilling way.
"I can help you," he said with a careless grin.
"I can do this alone," I insisted, but I leaned over his notebook the way someone leans over a neighbor's garden to see how the tomatoes are growing.
We became the duo people whispered about: "Are they dating?" they'd ask. "No, they're just the top of the grade," someone else would say, with a glance that tried to sound neutral but failed. Rumors found us because we shared everything from study notes to borrowed socks. He'd tease me about my messy handwriting and I would make a point of writing the answer exactly the way he did, just to irritate him. When I corrected his small mistake on a test, he pretended to be mortified; when he corrected one of mine, my heart stuttered in a new pattern.
For a while, school was a rolling routine of practice, quizzes, and midnight study sessions. Then the first monthly test arrived like a tidal wave crashing into the sandcastles we'd barely finished.
"Why now?" I asked, staring at the test packet like it was a creature from another planet.
"Because it's tradition," Esteban said. "And because we like pain."
We sat in the examination hall with our backs straight and our hands sweating. When the teacher read the list of scores at the end of the afternoon, our names were announced together at number one.
"First: Juliette Friedrich, Esteban Elliott," she said, and I remember how the room did a small shuffle of attention then went back to its own center.
"Same as always," I whispered.
"Except for the choice," he replied, and we both smiled.
We chose our seats in the last row—two rebels who opted out of the front line. When people came to congratulate us, I felt weirdly shy. We were only good at being together inside the borders of our rivalry; in that liminal space, we were delicate and loud in equal measure. The small, sweet moments kept coming: his hand finding my shoulder when a teacher lectured too long, his thumb smoothing the tear of panic from my temple after a stupid mistake.
I was called out, once, for being careless with a water bottle. "Juliette, you're not allowed to bring phones," our homeroom teacher said with a stern smile. She took my phone and said she would hold it until the next test—if I placed first next month, I could have it back.
"One month to first place," Esteban said, leaning against the back wall and making this into a challenge rather than a punishment. "You can do it."
"There goes my social life," I sighed.
He grinned. "You never really had one."
The month buzzed past with study groups and quiet conspiracies. I learned to map out my weaknesses, the slow and unromantic way that comes when you decide to be excellent at something because you chose it, not because someone told you to. Esteban would help me with math problems—sometimes gently, sometimes like a drill sergeant—and when he'd spot me scribbling his name in the margins of my notebook, he'd snort and pull my book closer.
"You're ridiculous," he said.
"Maybe," I admitted. "But it's you, so what can I do?"
Our camaraderie had its own gravity. People began to notice. The class had a couple of comic pairs: Enzo Clemons and Nikolai Tarasov, who argued like they were in a sitcom; Brecken Persson, who never failed to bring everyone levity; and Laylah Fletcher and Beatrice Jorgensen, who kept the gossip and the spreadsheets. They were all part of the background noise of my life, the chorus that made our daily routines feel theatrical. No one was cruel for long; we were a weird, efficient pack of students built to survive high school.
One afternoon, after we'd returned from a small but triumphant camping trip—where we learned the virtues of mosquito repellent and the low art of sharing a single tent—I dreamt a dream that felt like a bell.
"Is this our house?" I asked, because in the dream there was a small white cottage with purple walls and a threadbare rug.
Esteban wore a black sweatshirt and turned with a smile that made everything else fall into soft focus. On the wall hung a photograph of the two of us in wedding attire, a ridiculous image that tasted like wonder and terror both.
"What are you doing in my head?" he asked in the dream, like he could read the certainty underneath my hesitance.
"Only convincing myself," I said.
"You sound like someone trying to write a plan," he told me. "Don't write plans that lock you up. Live a little."
I woke with the memory of the photograph burning like a new sun behind my eyes. For days after, the beaches of my thinking were littered with small questions: when do we become more than partners in competition? When does the race give way to the race for time? I told myself I would preserve our friendship above everything—the perfect, wonderful fragile thing it was—because sometimes to cherish something is to set it gently on a shelf and buy it a lamp.
We spent the rest of our small holiday like teenagers who have been given a day with no obligations. We ate, we argued over which bread to choose for dinner, we chased the sunset with a tripod and a camera. The third heart-throb came suddenly, not with prayer or plan, but when he passed me the last piece of halved plum pie without asking and smiled like it was the most normal thing in the world.
"You're stealing my last piece of pie," I said.
"Am I?" he replied, eyes serious in the twilight.
He was not the dramatic type. He was a quiet force, the kind of person who would go on no-show panic nights just to make sure you were safe. The moments that made my heart lurch were always small and unspectacular: his shoulder against mine in the dark until sleep pulled us both into the same shallow breathing rhythm; the way he kept an extra bottle of milk because I liked it; the way he'd record me stumbling over a math answer and then make the same calculation wrong on purpose to make me laugh.
We were content—or so I told myself—until a small, confusing distance grazed our days. Nothing catastrophic; it was more like a slow fog on a familiar path. We fought less playfully. I grew quieter. Maybe it was the pressure of tests, the responsibility of a promise to get my phone back, or a fear that if I let heart feelings in, I'd lose the race that had become such a part of me.
One night I found Esteban packing his camera and extra batteries. "Are you leaving?" I asked.
He paused. "No. I might go on a short trip with Mom. Nothing big."
"When?" My voice tightened without permission.
"In a few months," he said. "Why?"
"No reason," I lied, and it sounded thin.
Maybe I wanted to be selfish. Maybe I wanted him to stay. When he left for a short trip a few weeks later, I felt something unravel. The bed felt bigger. The night was louder. I would stare at the pillow and try to make a plan to be first in our next test. The idea of being first had become not just academic success but a way to deserve the space beside him. It was a dangerous thought, like trading a weekend for a future.
When the next monthly test came, I fought like a different person—sharpened, deliberate. I wanted my phone. I wanted the freedom to call my mother and to scroll at night. I wanted the small human comforts the teacher had confiscated. On the hot day the grades were posted, my palms were so sweaty I thought my fingers would slide off the paper. When our names were once again called at the top—my name and Esteban's—I felt both victory and a hollow triumph.
"First again," he said as students clapped half-heartedly. "We did it."
We sat the choice as both a shared crown and a private debt. I kept thinking of the photograph in my dream and of the small decisions that make a life. Maybe I was being ridiculous—maybe love is a season that you can sit in and enjoy. Or maybe it's a fire you refuse to feed.
"Promise me something?" Esteban asked that night while we sat on the fire escape looking at the streetlights.
"I already promised you," I said, intentionally vague.
"No," he murmured. "Promise me you'll take care of yourself."
"I promise to take care of the science of my lungs and brain," I joked.
He smiled and passed me his favorite camera picture—a blurred but perfect capture of the sky over the beach. "Keep this," he said, meaning the memory of that sunset for me to keep when he was away.
The most ridiculous, tender moment happened later, on a routine evening with no grand plans. A stray thought bumped into the edge of my life: what if I let myself want him? Want is a soft, dangerous thing. I almost told him, but stopped because I loved the line between us. I loved that he could still make me laugh when everything else went to low light.
We ended that semester with small trophies—friendship nailed careful to a wall—and a thousand more tiny gestures. The tests kept coming, and so did the nights when he would record me falling asleep and then hide the evidence in a "secret" folder on his phone. The biggest change was how our simple rituals, like sharing a slice of pie or a warm cup of milk, came to mean more. The smallest actions were the most resonant.
"Promise me," I said to him one evening, because promises seemed the least hazardous vows.
"What now?" he asked, watching the moon float over the city's edge.
"Promise you'll be honest if you ever want more than this," I said.
He turned to me and for a minute everything narrowed to the space between his eyes and mine. "Promise me if you ever want that, too."
"I promise," I whispered.
We kept our promises to a degree that made them both safe and dangerous. That was the smart thing. But sometimes smart feels like a bandage over something raw, and sometimes it's okay to let that rawness breathe. The summer stretched out. We rode it out with the tired joy of students who had found a small harbor with one another.
Every so often someone would tease us in the hall, and we'd exchange looks that were heavy with history and the possibility of future conspiracies. Enzo would make a joke, Nikolai would roll his eyes, Laylah would jot the teasing into the class log like she was collecting ripe fruit. It was a large world in a small town.
At night, when everything quieted, I would think of the photograph on the wall in the dream. Sometimes I wanted to step into it and feel the weight of a more permanent decision. Other times I guarded the photograph, as if leaving it unframed on the table was the only reasonable way to keep the wonder intact.
It was not a dramatic story. There were no villains to smite, no betrayals that demanded theatrical justice. There was only me, learning how to be a person who could choose both victory and tenderness, and him, the one who kept shifting from rival to refuge.
The summer ended, the school year slid on, and our first year together became a collection of small victories, smaller kindnesses, and a promise we kept and unkept in equal measure. The very best moments, the ones that hammered most quietly at my ribs, were not grand declarations but tiny maintenance work: a warm nap on a couch, a hand that steadied a book as I turned the page, a smile that acknowledged me in a hallway full of people.
"You're still first-rate annoying," I told Esteban one day as we walked the long way home, the sun clinging to the edge of the horizon.
"And you're still irresistibly infuriating," he answered.
We argued, made up, fought over last slices of dessert, and studied until our eyes blurred. We shared dreams and secret jokes. We kept the photograph without ever needing to frame it. And under all the small rituals of our days, something like hope waited patiently, like a tide behind a soft, whispering shore.
The End
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