I’ve always had a best friend growing up: Johnny. Me and Johnny have been through everything together. We go to the the same school, went to all of our birthday parties so far. And even crazier, we were born the same time, same day, and in the same hospital. We’re both in our junior year of high school now, but our friendship is stronger than ever, and it always will be. I think the only time we’ve fought is when we were at Johnny’s beach house when we were 9 and we couldn’t choose between “Spiderman” and “Iron Man” to watch.

There’s just one thing about Johnny though, his older brother Levi. Johnny and I made up a set of rules to follow throughout our friendship. But more specifically, rule number 10 – “Levi is always off limits.”  Now I’ve never had a boyfriend but I’ve had lots of crushes. I’ve never felt the way about any of them the same way that I do with Levi. Levi has had my heart since the day that I new what feelings were. But like Johnny always says, Levi is and always will be off limits to me.

We were all hanging out at the beach house the summer before our senior year started, and of course Levi had his situation over on the couch with him watching a movie, and all I could help to do was stand back on the balcony and watch and wish it was me. Johnny comes out of his bedroom, but I don’t even realize that he’s out of his room until he stands next to me staring at the two just as I do. So I have to hurry up and think of an explanation of why I was staring at them instead of “I wish it was me,” to something like “I wanted to watch the movie they were watching, but I didn’t want to go down and it be weird.” Luckily, he bought it.

It’s now towards the end of our time at the beach house, and Levi and I were both sent out to go get groceries by his mom, so we both decided to ride our bikes to the store, because it was such a nice warm night. I thought to myself, “This is my chance to make a move.” And that’s exactly what I did. I kissed him, but little did we know, Johnny was following us this whole time. He was marching up to us with nothing but anger. I was extremely frightened, because I knew that I had broken the forbidden rule and I knew Johnny was going to be extremely mad at me. We both tried to calm him down, but he threw a punch at Levi. He started walking back to the house, but I couldn’t decide whether to tend to Levi and his soon to be black eye, or go after my best friend that I cannot afford to lose. And so I ran after Johnny after I apologized to Levi for what he did.

I finally got Johnny to let me into his room after an hour since we got back to the house, but he was furious with me. I managed to get him calmed down a lot, and he explained why it was such a big deal that I didn’t fall after his older brother and I began to realize why he was so strict about it. He refused to talk to me for a couple days but I went up to his room so that I could apologize, but he opened the door just as I was right in front of it. He suddenly apologized and then I did the same thing. He did something I would have never guessed, he gave me his blessing to be with Levi. He said that he always wants me to be happy. So, I got to spend the rest of our time at the beach house with the best guys in my life, Johnny and Levi. Me and Levi have been dating happily since then.