Tesco Boy

This was the first boy I ever properly called my boyfriend. I think we were together for about a month. He was a few years older than me, and had a car, which obviously made him instantly appealing. He was a lovely boy, very pretty, with very nice hair. I met him at a friend’s birthday party in a tiny village in the arse end of nowhere He lived at the opposite end of the village to the friend. We spent the whole night away from the rest of the party, kissing in a gazebo in the garden.

After that, sometimes he would come to my house in the evenings, we would spend a couple of hours kissing in my room, and then he would leave. Some weekends I would stay at my friend’s house and a whole group of us would hang around together, bored and looking for something to do in the day time, before he drove me home on Sunday afternoon.

After a while he stopped calling me, and when I called him his sister would tell me he wasn’t home. I drove my friend mad moping around, asking her what I should do, whether he’d said anything to her, whether he didn’t like me any more. She knew as much as I did, but she also knew that he worked Wednesday evenings at the supermarket on the trading estate outside of town. So that Wednesday after school we walked into town together, and then we walked out the other side of town, in the rain, and up to Tesco. We wandered around the store but he wasn’t on any of the checkouts. She said maybe he was in the petrol station, so we went over there to pester him. We went in and bought a couple of bottles of drink when we saw that he was behind the counter. He said hello, but little else. I was distraught. When we came out of the petrol station we saw his car in the car park, so I left a note on the windscreen. I have absolutely no recollection of what it said, but he was clearly unmoved by it; I didn’t hear from him again.

About six years later, I got an email from him. I think we’d both been included on an email forwarded by a mutual friend. It turned out he was working at a shop in town, so I visited him on my lunch breaks from time to time, and we became friends of sorts. He apologised for the way he’d treated me and I told him it wasn’t a problem – it was too long ago for me to have held a grudge. After a while, our mutual friend was back from university for a weekend, and I went to her house in the tiny village. A group of us went out for a drink to catch up, and he was there too. It was nice to just hang out as normal people, rather than him being my ex. I think he’s married now. We’re not really in touch, but we’re Facebook friends. You know how these things are.