Eat Your Heart Out by Katie Boland

I’ll leave and never come back.” God, I can be a real selfish bitch sometimes.
    And then when Hedge wasn’t looking he whispered, “It’s romantic, okay?”
    As Bob Dylan once said, we started out on burgundy then soon hit the harder stuff. I shouldn’t have let them do that because sometime around midnight Hedge threw a small rock at Seb. It was totally out of nowhere, like when George Bush just plum didn’t help the black people in New Orleans.
    â€œWhat the fuck?” Seb screamed, throwing another bigger rock.
    â€œStop, you guys!” I yelled.
    Then before I knew it, they were punching each other, so hard. I’d seen them play-fight before, but this time they were truly going at each other, vicious. I started crying because I felt so helpless. God, being a girl is helpless sometimes and it really pisses me off. I kept screaming at them but they didn’t even look at me. Then Seb’s nose started bleeding and Hedge fell to the ground like he couldn’t breathe. I had never felt so panicked in my whole life.
    Then do you know what those assholes did? They started laughing! Laughing like maniacs. Then they picked up sand and rocks and driftwood and threw it around, yelling like lunatics released from the asylum.
    â€œFUCK THIS!”
    â€œFUCK YES!”
    â€œTHE LEGEND CREW!”
    Then Hedge started crying, really hard, and I’d never seen him cry before. Seb walked up to him and they hugged each other. A few seconds later, they started wrecking shit again. It was like a scene out of that terrible book everybody has to read in Grade 10, Lord of the Flies . I was just waiting for one of them to eat the other.
    I left five minutes later and they didn’t even see me go.
    It really is true that men deal with things totally differently than women.
    Seb came and found me the next morning.
    â€œSorry,” he said from my doorstep.
    â€œYou look like shit.”
    â€œCan I come in?”
    I moved aside. Now that he’d been inside me, I acted totally different around him. It is a universal girl law that you can never act normal when you want to. I felt like my mouth was chicken-wired shut. There were about eighty-five things I wanted to say to him, but they were lazy fucks and just refused to slide from my brain to my lips.
    â€œSo . . . I brought you your birthday gift.”
    It was a mix CD .
    â€œShould I listen to it now?”
    â€œYeah, if you want.”
    I put it on, and we sat on my couch. The house felt cold, like fall decided to just show up that day, like when your aunt from out of town comes by for no reason and then you later realize it’s because she’s getting divorced. But with Seb next to me, I began to feel warmer. I had goosebumps, but I was sure I was also sweating.
    â€œWhy are all the songs in French?”
    â€œBecause I’m moving there.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIn six months, I’m moving to Paris.”
    â€œYou are?”
    â€œCome with me.”
    I started laughing, like I knew he was kidding.
    â€œI hate it here. You do too.”
    â€œYou’re serious?”
    â€œYes. Colin hated it here and he never got to leave. Remember how he’d talk about getting a passport and taking off to Europe and he’d have that obscenely hopeful look on his face?”
    I did remember.
    â€œWell, we get to leave. There’s nothing keeping us here. I want to go and I want you to come with me.”
    â€œBut we don’t speak French.”
    â€œI think everyone speaks English there anyway.”
    He kissed me, and once I started kissing him back I couldn’t stop. We spent the rest of the day kissing and then talking about French things like cheese and wine and the Eiffel Tower and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s.
    He ran his hands through my hair, and I fell asleep on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, dreaming about France and Europe and London and Big Ben, places I