She was definitely prettier than me, and quite a bit thinner. I should’ve known he’d like her more than me. She had a cherub-like face, beautiful in a cutesy way with slightly chubby cheeks. It amused me how she tried so hard to hide it with heavy black eyeliner and dark grey eyeshadow, but I hated the fact that it just made her look even more stunning, like an angel with an edge.

They say that when a person gets called a certain name enough, they begin to believe that it is true, if my words are making sense. I think that was what happened with her. I’ve known her for eleven years and she’s always had very dark, almost black hair contrasting with her extremely pale skin. People used to always call her a Goth just because of that. She never even wore any black clothes back then. But this year, a few months in, I think she finally let go and just did it – she stopped putting bronzer on her face, stopped lightening her hair. She stopped wearing pink and threw away the colour from her closet. She smiled less and didn’t care as much what people thought.

The next step was to talk to me. We were close in primary school, but drifted apart and when we passed in the corridors we wouldn’t even smile at each other. Then I started to get her bus to school, and she would talk to me. We discovered that we had more in common than we thought. It was amazing that years after we stopped all communication, we liked the same bands, the same shoes, even the same type of boy. I was still a blonde back then.

It’s funny that I mention that we liked the same type of boy, because we both fell in love on the same day, with the same boy. A rock god more beautiful than words could ever describe. I think she was jealous of me because I was friends with him and she was only half-friends. But I guess that didn’t matter to him in the end, because she was always the prettier one. We would have conversations about him, about how we were both going crazy because we loved him and he didn’t have a clue.

It was about then when I dyed my hair black. A lot of people confused me for her that day, and I hate to admit but it made me feel good that I must have had even a slight resemblance to my beautiful friend. Of course, there were the nasty people who talked about me behind my back, saying that I was just trying to turn into her. She didn’t think this was right, she knew that I’d rather die than be like anybody else.

Another aspect was the difference in our clothing choices. She was the type to team a black skirt with combat boots and a long-sleeved shirt. It always had to be long-sleeved for both of us, because we could never let people see our scars. I feared being thought of as insane and she feared people looking down on her as just another depressive teenager. But back to the clothes. She was lucky enough to be able to wear tight shirts because, as the voice in my head keeps on saying, she is thinner than I am. I hated my weight. I knew that I wasn’t as fat as some others, but I also knew that I looked unattractive and huge whenever I looked in the mirror. So I had to wear baggy trousers and loose-fitting black shirts to cover myself up. I had some shorter layers cut in the front of my hair so that I could leave it hanging in front of my face to stop people seeing how unattractive I was. But whenever I said anything about my appearance she’d tell me to shutup. “Quit your whining,” she’d say. “You know I think you’re beautiful.”

I remember her talking to me about him. She’d say that she was going quietly insane. She’d say that she had to tell him that she liked him soon or she would die. She’d say that if the opportunity arose then she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from telling him. I didn’t want her to tell him, because I knew that he would fall for her. I didn’t like the fact that she had impure thoughts about him. It was as if she was tainting him somehow, that her liking him was destroying him from the inside. I mentally scolded myself for thinking bad thoughts about one of my best friends, but I couldn’t help it. She was so perfect and I was so imperfect. At least, that’s how I thought at the time. I know now that she has so many imperfections that it would stun the average passer-by. She was incredibly insecure but tried so hard not to let anybody know, because she feared they would abandon her if they knew what went on inside her head. She tried desperately hard to not be like anybody else in the world, because she knew that it made her unremarkable and exactly the same as all the other tryhard-individuals. I once asked her what she wanted most in the world, and she replied: “I want this whole earth to mourn me when I die. I want them to make a miniseries about me and I want people to write books about me. I don’t want to be just another person. Oh, and I also want to make out with Chris Cheney.” She always did that. She’d say something deep and serious, then realize she was revealing information about herself and say something stupid to make you try and forget it.

But I guess these qualities can be endearing to some. Like him. We got into a fight the day that she told him she liked him. Apparently he didn’t have a problem with it at all and they were going out that very same day. I told her that she knew I liked him more than she did and that she should have been more sensitive. She replied by telling me that I had no clue what she felt for him and asked me what would have happened if it had been different. “Picture if you were going out with him instead of me.” She would say. “We’d be having this same fight but my words would be coming from your mouth and my words would be coming from yours.” I couldn’t really think of anything to say to that so I just walked off. It was torture for me to see them together, to see her making him so happy. That should be me, I kept on thinking to myself, but always dismissed it. That could never be me. Look how thin she is.

I hated myself four months later, when he finally broke up with her. She was still head-over-heels but he had decided that music was a bigger love for him and that he didn’t have enough love for both music and her. So he chucked her. It was on the last day of school, right before we got onto the bus. She half-smiled at him and said “okay”, as if it were fine, but as soon as her butt touched the seat tears started to fall from her eyes. She had her head turned away from me so that I wouldn’t see, and she wasn’t making any of the normal cry-noises, but I could still tell from the way her body shook. I suppressed an evil grin, knowing that I was an insensitive bitch for feeling happy at her misfortune. She mumbled something that was incomprehensible but I didn’t press to find out what it was. I shifted closer to her and noticed that she was sitting cross-legged away from me, staring out the window. I moved until my shoulder was close enough for her to rest her head back on, and she did so, still staring out the window.

Now, she had never been a good singer. Her voice could strip wallpaper. But there was something about the words to the song she chose, paired with the slow, mournful tune she put it to, that moved me to tears.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” She sang quietly. She sniffed pitifully and continued. “You make me happy when skies are grey. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you.” I stroked her hair and she sang the last line so softly and slowly that I had to strain to hear. “So please don’t take my sunshine away…”

It was then that I felt all my anger towards her fade, and I felt even more like a bitch for reveling in her sadness. I realized that all this time she had been my angel, my inspiration, my sunshine. And if anybody tries to take my sunshine away, they’ll get the teeth knocked out of them.