Samantha Haviland

How to tell your friends you love them - Winner (Grades 9-10)

 Get used to the idea of platonic love. Saying I love you to someone other than your parents.

Start with your dog. Repeat it to your dog as you pet his head and hug him, “I love you.”

Say it again and again, at least once a day. Partly because you actually do love him and life is short and a dog’s life is even shorter, but also to normalize the phrase in your mouth. Memorize how the consonants hook on your teeth and syllables roll off your tongue.

 Watch movies about best friends going on road trips and surviving high school, where at the end they write off the guy and hug each other. Recite “chicks before dicks”.

 Start watching Glee. The first season will bore you beyond belief. You find the characters

overdramatic, selfish and actually pretty stupid. You are surprised you make it to the second and you are about to stop but then Brittany and Santana kiss and you decide to give it another chance.

Convince yourself it is mere coincidence. You will sit through Rachel and Finn’s shitty

heterosexual romance just to reassure yourself that it isn’t just Santana and Brittany that’s keeping you in your seat.

Realize you are gay as hell in the 7th grade.

Forget about saying I love you, focus on making sure none of your friends think you like them. The last thing you want to be is the predatory lesbian.

 They, your friends, touch each other platonically in the hallways, arms hanging over each other’s shoulders, bodies pressed together, swaying from side to side as they recover from the aftermath of some bizarre inside joke. You stand five feet away, leaning against the lockers, you laugh too. It’s low laughter, more like a chuckle, really. They spot you out of the corner of their eyes.

“Sam, get over here!”

 Stop laughing and shake your head, say “I’m good” and quickly look down at your phone. Push down that feeling, that want to just hug someone, platonically. Cope by looking at pictures of dogs online. Go home and hug your dog. Repeat “I love you” into his soft, soft fur.

He just sits there, smiling. He probably thinks you are going to give him a treat. You do. He licks the side of your face.

 In 8th grade have a best friend who despises physical contact– stop thinking about hugs for a while. Then she moves back to France and the day she leaves, you hug on her front porch.

It’s long and tight. You enjoy the hug, but also hate the hug. Because the hug means she’s really leaving.

Also tell her you love her, because you do, you love her and all your friends. But that was probably the first time you voiced it out loud, you don’t want her to leave without having said that. She will not say it back.

 After that, you think about hugs. You think about hugs a lot.

You think about hugs but decide it’s probably best to take it one step at a time. Start with fist bumps and high fives. Poke your friends on the shoulder as you pass them in the hallway on your way to class. Place a hand on your friend’s shoulder when she starts crying over her failed math test. You don’t know what else to do.

The summer after your best friend moves away you go to sleep away camp. It’s an art camp. You’ve spotted guys making out behind cabins and girls holding hands as they walk to lunch. There are pride flags in every corner, every crevice of the campus. No one here cares that you have short hair, your cabin mates don’t bat an eye at your perceived sexuality, and you manage to get a girlfriend.

Not many intimate interactions occur, you don’t even kiss, but you hold hands a lot and sit together on bean bags, writing the type of shitty poetry only 14-year old girls can write. Well, she writes the poetry– you never really had the knack for it. Before she leaves for her home in Texas, more than a thousand miles away from yours, you hug her. It’s tight and warm, and it doesn’t last nearly as long as you want it to. You say goodbye.

Cut all your hair off a week before 9th grade. Embrace everything weird and odd about yourself. You’re gay, who cares.

 Your friends love running their hands through your hair now, it’s fuzzy and soft as it grows back in. Your friend Ruth’s little sister always stops you in the halls to touch it. You let her. You like when people touch your hair.

Start running track. You will find a home here, but not among the runners. Running was never your thing, instead, you take up throwing. Chuck an eight-pound metal ball across a field of grass– think the girls that do this must be tough and intimidating. You are not tough or intimidating. Meet the girls that do this, find them to be some of the happiest, most giggly people you’ve ever met. The guys are goofballs too, geeks obsessed with comic books and dungeons and dragons, you like comic books and dungeons and dragons. It’s like one big family, but sadly it’s a family that can not last forever.

At the end of the year, as you’re signing yearbooks and saying goodbye for what might be forever, they shout “I love you” and this time you are the one that says nothing. You just stand there, gaping like a fish, hoping they somehow know that you would have said it back, you would have. You would have if you just had more time.

 On the last day of 9th grade, sit in your math teacher’s classroom with your friends, Ava and Jessica, and Ava’s older sister. Ava’s older sister moves to give everyone a hug, she stops in front of you and shakes her head. “I don’t think you want a hug, right?” You do want a hug.

Don’t say anything, just nod and let her continue on her way.

 Get frustrated for no explicable reason. Think about hugs.

 Why didn’t she want to hug you? Is it your haircut, is it the fact you look like a boy? Do boys, not like hugs? No, no that can’t be it, you’ve met plenty of guys that like hugs. Right? The guys on the track team. The theatre kids. Maybe it’s not that they don’t like hugs, maybe it’s that they’re not supposed to like hugs.

Every time you hug your brother, it is a staged event. For Christmas cards, for pictures.

You’ve hugged your mother, but not a lot. Hugs aren’t a big thing in your family, you realize, they aren’t a big thing at all.

You try to remember the last time you hugged your dad. His body is broken, his spine twisted, nerves pinched. The result of a car accident that happened when you were a baby. You wonder if hugging him would twist him even more, if that’s why he never reaches for you.

You finally hug your father at 4 AM on a Tuesday morning. You are leaving for boarding school, he is not flying out with you. His arms squeeze you. You can feel the stubble on the side of his face and smell his shampoo, Men’s Head and Shoulders.

In the car to the airport, you will cry. Even though this was your choice, even though you wanted this more than anything else in the world. By the time you get on the plane you have stopped crying, you have resigned yourself.

 At boarding school, you get super close with people, super quick. By the end of the second week, people who didn’t know each other before were hugging constantly and shouting

“I love you” as they pass one another in the hallway. You feel like you’ve stepped into a foreign world. You soon find yourself among these people.

“I love you” to Chrisli

“I love you too” to Rose

“Love you” to Morgan

“I love you” again to Sara

And another and another and another, you haven’t exactly kept track.

And they say it back.

You love all these people and they love you, and for once in your life, a hug doesn’t mean goodbye.