﹙ HURTS ME TOO ★ ﹚

ESTRELLA GONZALEZ!

was nothing and everything.

Her life was encapsulated and defined by the thin walls of her and her father's 2 bedroom apartment above the corner store that made them only enough money to get by.

All she had to her name was a couple of friends, a taped-up guitar, and clothes multiple sizes too big for her frame.

Because she never had anything more, she never found herself wanting anything more.

Except for Dylan Hoffman. It'd started in third grade, around the same time that Estrella was developing her sense of class consciousness. Her father had purchased a knockoff t-shirt from a flea market and one of the kids in her class pointed it out.

A childhood innocence still existed in Dylan. He'd tapped his friend on the shoulder and told him to shut up.

He had shown her a warmth nobody else had. Her lack of privilege kept her permanently one foot away from her peers. She was different than the other kids. She missed field trips and her clothes were often sewn together.

As the ruthlessness of conformity left the children's minds with age, Estrella settled into the quietness of middle school. She faded into the lockers, she was missing from the yearbook.

She wasn't disliked, she was just objectively abnormal. She didn't fit into the social circles that already existed, so she created her own.

Estrella understood she was odd and she wasn't interested in being anything else.

Dylan was the only objection. She admired him from afar, despite the school-imposed hierarchy that made no sense past sixth grade.

Dylan was plain. From his name, to the sports he played, to the way he dressed, but he remembered the R in her name. Estrella, not Estella.

She adored him like any little girl liked her first crush. Her friend had slipped up and announced her feelings to their entire class, and by the end of the day, everyone knew about it.

To make things worse, Dylan knew it, too.

Estrella tried to make an effort to speak to him. She'd sign up for classes he liked, hung out where he did. People teased her for her attempts, but Dylan never did. In fact, he barely spared her a glance at any time.

Estrella eventually tied her nerves into a bow and approached his lunch table, trying to memorize the script she and her friend crafted. She held two tickets in her hand. Pull him aside, ask him out, run away if he said no.

"Do you guys know who you're taking to the Valentine's Day Dance?" The most pressing event a sixth grader faced.

"Yeah, he's taking his girlfriend Estelle." A boy named James mocked.

He used the incorrect name, but everyone knew who he was speaking about. The curly-haired girl who lingered in any space Dylan found himself in. He'd gotten shit about her for as long as he could remember.

"Gross." Dylan stated, maturely. "She's weird. And she practically stalks me."

Estrella swallowed and shoved the tickets in her pocket, playing off her approach by beelining to the next table over and asking a vaguely familiar girl for homework answers.

She winced all the way over to her. Part of her had to have known Dylan wasn't different from his friends. She'd foolishly stepped out of line and paid the price in humiliation as she overheard their giggles.