I was told when Josh and I broke up that I hadn't really been in love. That love at fifteen isn't real love. Dave's brother came to visit us soon after the breakup, you see, a burly man called Zach who thinks he has all the answers to life. He took one look at my pathetic state and spouted all that out. About how I'd grow up and realise that what Josh and I had hadn't been love.

Mom had told him politely to shut up.

And anyway, I disagree. Teenage love is fickle, sure. I had been sure just weeks before getting together with Josh that it was James Miller who was The One. But Josh, he was different. Our dates hadn't even been branded as such for the first few weeks. It was just grabbing Subway together and seeing a film together and going to the arcade afterwards.

"Eve," he'd said, not looking away from the race car game we were playing. "You're, like, really pretty."

"You're really pretty too," I said, swerving past him on the digital track.

He kissed me in the car park when we were done playing games and winning tickets. He'd begged for my tickets and taken them to the machine to load them up onto his card (he was a regular there, that didn't surprise me) before heading to the counter. He won me a teddy, a soft brown thing with a cute waistcoat and monocle. We kissed as I held the bear to my chest and he told me once again how pretty I was.

And that first kiss is the one I would've liked to tell people about. A sweet kiss from a sweet boy after he won me a teddy bear at an arcade. Not my actual first kiss. A dare from Kylie Renner, a girl in my form, who'd dared me to kiss her best friend James. And I kissed him at the bus stop, acting like I wasn't scared even though my heart was racing.

He blinked. "Thanks, Eve."

Who did that? Who said thanks after being kissed? I stopped liking him after that, letting that girl from the school down the street get with him instead and avoided him at all costs. But Josh? Josh didn't say thanks. Josh took my hand and walked me to my mom's car and told me what a nice time he'd had and how he'd like to do it again. That was early in Year Ten, both of us fourteen.

But I think it was love. Because seeing Josh in the next few weeks always brought a smile to my face. He'd shoot me secret smiles in the corridors, keep texting me deep into the night while we both should've been asleep. It was during one of those conversations that he asked, one in early December.

want to go out with me?

we're already going out idiot

you could've let me know lol

we're basically together, inez told me

well if inez said it, it must me true

seriously though be my girlfriend?

sure :)

:)

And that was that. We weren't just Eve and just Josh anymore. We were Eve and Josh. We showed up to parties together and held hands at school and forwarded cheesy Instagram posts to each other. And isn't that what love is when you're fifteen? And falling out of love, that's all part of it, right? It was normal to stop seeing things through tinted lenses. It was normal that Josh and I started fighting more and more.

But this isn't normal.

Shouldn't I have been able to point Josh out in a crowd in twenty years to my kids (if I ever have any) and tell them that's the first guy who broke my heart. The first guy who smashed it up like it was glass dripping on concrete. I shouldn't be able to go to his funeral at fifteen and see his sixteen year old corpse in the coffin.

But that's what it is.

"Eve?" Mum walks into my room cautiously. "Dave told me."

She doesn't say anything after that, she just holds me as I cry for the first boy I ever loved being dead.