I rolled my eyes, laughing. “I didn’t park too far from here,” I said. “It’s in the back, just follow me.”
He did. He finished smoking his vape, then stuck it in his back pocket and looked down at me. He was still about a head taller than me and I could see his smile, which was still playing on his lips. I didn’t want my heart to flutter when he was around. I didn’t want to think about the way he made me feel, about the way he made me feel like I was being swept off my feet.
We walked to my car. He whistled as we walked up to my gray Lexus. I clicked my keys and opened the backdoor.
“A black jacket, a button-up shirt, and your wallet?”
“You have my wallet?”
“Yes,” I said, handing a black leather wallet to him. “It has your license in it. This is yours, right?”
He nodded, looking bewildered. “I just didn’t think you’d have that.”
“Why?”
“I thought I had lost it somewhere else,” he replied.
I pressed it into his hand and his fingertips touched mine. He smiled at me as I felt electricity jolting up my hands. I moved away from him and tried to flash him a smile, but it was too hard. Focusing on him was too difficult, and I wanted to move away from him, and forget about him having walked back into my life.
“Anyway,” I said. “It was good to see you. I need to get back to work.”
He nodded, but as I turned around, he caught my wrist.
“Wait,” he said. “Can we talk?”
I turned around to face him, so quickly I practically gave myself whiplash. “Listen,” I said. “I’m going to need you to leave me alone.”
His smile dropped, but only for a second.
“I will leave you alone,” he said. “For good. I just need you to listen to me for a second.”
My lips a straight line, I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “I can give you one second of my time.”
“I just—things have changed, okay? I’m not the same person anymore.”
“Okay,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“And I—I made mistakes, okay? I was a stupid kid. But I was just a stupid kid, and I know I made some shit decisions, and I shouldn’t have done any of the things I did,” he said. “And if I did, I would go back and change my behavior.”
I felt a flash of red-hot anger in my chest, climbing up my body and culminating in my head. “Is that right? Which part are you most sorry for, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it for implying I was a slut for liking you every time I went near you and your friends were around, even though we had been dating for the better part of a year?”
“Jess—”
“Or was it when you disseminated my nudes and got away with it because I had turned eighteen that year? Which one was it?”
“I didn’t do that on purpose.”
“You still did it!” I said. “I almost dropped out of school because of you. I hope you’re proud of yourself. After you did that, my grades dropped and—no, you know what? I’m not getting into this with you.”
“I am sorry,” he said. “For what it’s worth.”
I softened a little. I hadn’t expected an apology. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
Then I walked away from him, not looking back once, despite how much I wanted to.
CHAPTER EIGHT
2010
I walked toward the cafeteria. It was early in the morning, and the school was full of students of all walks of life going back and forth, none of them making eye contact with me.
I didn’t expect that I was going to end up in community college, but I supposed it was better than not going to college at all. I told myself this would be cheaper, that it would be better for me if I did this. Getting into college was hard, but getting loans was especially difficult. The financial crisis meant trying to go to a four-year college had gotten way more competitive. I was working on a full scholarship, but even with that, something had to cover my living costs.
The plan was to make it to the honors college in the community college, because people could transfer to Ivy League schools from there. I didn’t know if I was going to an Ivy, but I knew I was going to four-year schools, and the sooner that happened, the better it would be for me. I knew it was selfish, and I knew my mother wanted me to stay for as long as possible, but things were not that simple. I wanted to get as far away from the people who were my high school classmates as quickly as I could.
Ever since the whole thing with Jody had gone down, I hadn’t been able to shake the humiliation. Every time I ran into one of my old classmates, I felt like I was going to throw up.
It wasn’t anything that they did. They could’ve chosen to be cruel, but they didn’t. They never were. They were always extremely kind to me, to the point where it was concerning. It was clear that they felt sorry for me. It wasn’t what I wanted, so I needed to get away.
I needed to forget about them. I needed to forget about Jody, about high school, and about what had happened. I was going to, that was the plan.
I ordered my food from the counter, opting for Chinese food, waited for it, then sat down in a large round table near the entrance to the cafeteria. A girl I had seen in my classes asked if she could sit next to me, her food
