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Back in high school, it was what I eventually learned. Do the smart thing. Don’t engage. Don’t try to stand up for myself. Don’t go after what I really wanted.
Just survive.
My previous record of solid A’s plunged to a C+ because of the mid-semester transfer. Anyone with half a brain would have realized that it was all but impossible to catch up on those classes with so little time left.
Not my guidance counselor. She just looked at me sideways with this fake empathetic expression in her eyes as she told me she was sorry, there was nothing they could do to accommodate or help me, and I better just work harder because the school was, according to her, just “more academically rigorous” than my previous school and that was why I’d had trouble adjusting.
She wouldn’t hear a word about how Becca’s best friend Bree had yanked my World History paper and thrown it in the trash after I’d left the classroom after I’d dropped it off so that I’d almost failed the class. Because, of course, the teacher didn’t believe me when I said, no, I had turned it in on time. I started handing my work directly to the teacher after that, but it didn’t always matter. Like I said, Becca’s daddy was the president of the Board, and what Becca wanted, Becca got.
When Becca didn’t like that I was in her English Class and didn’t always bow or kowtow to her presence, the teacher was aware. She’d cause trouble for me and make sure I was the one who ended up in hot water, and my grade suffered because of it. That teacher played politics, and he knew who to show favoritism to. So, no matter what I turned in that class, be it a multi-faceted reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Hundred Years of Solitude that I worked every night straight on for two weeks—it always came back with a big, fat failing grade.
On that one, the note stated it was obvious I hadn’t written the paper myself, so he’d failed me. When I tried to appeal it to the principal, he’d gotten offended and accused me of trying to “pull one over” on them, and I got detention on top of it.
“Where’d you go after you left?” Rafe asked, in water only a few feet away from me. “Mom said you’d gotten a great offer to go to some boarding school that would give you an edge up on getting into an Ivy League School like you always wanted. Was it everything you hoped for?”
I only just stopped myself from scoffing. “That’s what your mom told you?”
He frowned at me, but I just frowned back at him. “I told you in my emails,” I said, backing a little further away from him in the lake.
In one particularly cringe-worthy email, I’d poured out my heart about how terrible it was at my new school, how mean everyone was to me, how I missed him so desperately. How I’d do anything to just hear his voice, would he please call me? I put my phone number and then slept with my phone close to me and took it to class with me even though that wasn’t allowed—just on the off chance that finally this email would get through to him and he’d have pity on me and at least call me.
There was only ever silence. Never any missed calls. Mr. Collins finally saw me staring at my phone and confiscated it one class period. I was devastated, so sure that, the way my life went, that would be the one time Rafe called and I’d miss it because of that mean middle-aged bastard.
But nope. When I finally got my phone back after yet another detention and fervently turned it back on to check—
No missed calls. Just like always.
Did my emails mean so little to Rafe he didn’t even remember them? Had he even read them?
“What emails?” Rafe asked, and my unshielded heart squeezed in pain.
He didn’t even remember them. I turned away from him and started to swim away. I didn’t care about the cold. I didn’t care about how exhausted I was. I just needed to get away from him.
It always hurt so bad. Every single time. His casual indifference.
Just like the night, a month before he lost his brother, when everything had been… well, when I still hoped for everything like a big idiot. I was still a naive little fool who hoped Cinderella really could have the prince and the happy ending.
I’d leaned in, and he’d frozen, and we’d stared at each other.
I’d prayed he’d close the distance between us. That he’d say he didn’t want to be just friends anymore. I wanted him to pour out how passionate he was about me, and how he couldn’t stop thinking about me and wondering what my lips would feel like—the same way I constantly obsessed over him.
