The Only Living Boy in Mamaroneck

In October of tenth grade, I made a fleeting moment of eye contact with an interesting-looking boy and decided that we were going to get to know each other. We dated? courted? argued? for an entire standardized testing period – we met in line for water at the PSAT and broke up a week before the pre-ACT. 

He had long hair!

Lanky and almost exactly my height, we differed from our political views, general opinions, ages, and driving ability. He was almost eighteen, a junior in high school with braces and two older siblings. I was barely fifteen and the only person in my English 10 class who liked Aldous Huxley. A boy with long hair and an angular face is the closest that you can get in dating a boy to dating a girl. 

I realized later we were trying to prove something to each other, thus, to ourselves. He wore a knit sweater instead of a sweatshirt and drove a Subaru Forester, played the bass and was “experimenting with veganism.” He was too nervous to ever do any of the things that he read about people doing, but he kept turning pages. The youngest of three, he’d been trapped in the suburbs at an arrested development of fourteen. 

He was pulling himself out of a Jordan Peterson phase that lasted three years, and in the throes of radical self-improvement We self-diagnosed ourselves as all the other one had. We proved the other as legitimate, as cool, mature, normal. We got in a car crash, got into fights, and for three months, we really did love each other. One time we went to a concert. His friends staged an intervention about how I was fifteen, pointing out how he could legally vote. One week later he asked me to have sex. 

This was my Important High School Relationship. 

From October to February of 2021, I was reminded of him whenever I turned on my phone. We were each other's wallpapers in a photo we had misconstrued to be cute and candid. Standing in the rain, in a parking lot outside of his Subaru, we are frozen in wild gesticulation, and he wears a suit. You can’t see my face, but my arms swing in the live photo and my hands are sharp. Turn the camera and you could see blonde furrowed eyebrows and silver teeth gnashing. 

Fighting was part of our relationship. We dated to impress other people, and as we got closer we realized that all we wanted was to be farther apart.

We fought to show the other the person who they were really dating, daring the other to pull back the curtain and end the relationship. He wanted to be seen as a person dating a person, branching out from an insular friend group of couples that look like siblings and social ostracization from two years of doing school partially online. He tried to reinvent himself from the “dark place” he was in before we had met. I was trying to actualize my plan to be “coolest 15-year-old in the world.” If it could not be true with my mind or my body, it could be true with my words and self-mythologizing.

Someone pliable and receptive, someone I had never seen before, could be convinced of my wit, my wisdom and my outlandish belief that I was the first ever 15-year-old to have listened to the Cranberries or the Cocteau Twins. We took photos to post on Instagram, so everyone would know the dual bits we were running about our relationship – we are dating! He is dating a girl! Violet is dating a man! To illustrate how loving and caring and genuine our relationship was, and to prove our mutual desire and affection for each other, I commented “this is such an odd post who are you.” He proceeded to ironically block me on Instagram. 

But fighting eventually brought our relationship out in the open to each other. We broke character twice a week — a screaming match or argument, trying to rhetorically prove the other was wrong for disliking the person that they didn’t know. We were and weren’t the people we thought we were. We broke character until we eventually broke up. 

For me, fifteen, insecure and at the precipice of a biological conflict that would send me over a tipping point for months and months on end, spending my formative romantic year with an older boy who had a car and could play chess was perfect. I thought I loved him and that we would go to prom together. These had equal weights of importance to me. He thought that it could be a fun idea if we watched Trainspotting or Donnie Darko and he read the books that I told him to read so we could regurgitate ideas we didn’t understand into our gaping and confused mouths.