Walker
The first time I saw Miranda she was diving into the water off the pier at her parents’ house in Hyannis. She was blond, whippet thin, beautiful in a way that few people outside the pages of a fashion magazine are—and she knew it. She was my friend Brad’s little sister. A true East Coast princess whose parents had given her everything she ever wanted, including a brand-new Mercedes for her sixteenth birthday, a nose job, and an unshakeable belief in her own position at the center of the universe. A belief that was cemented by the actions of every boy within a fifty-mile radius for whom Miranda Scholes was the center of the universe.
There was an unofficial contest among us all to see who could get her to notice them. And she chose me. I won. For four years I got to call her my girlfriend. I thought she was the love of my life: the girl who stood by my side at my graduation from the Naval Academy, holding on to my uniformed arm, beaming with pride. The girl the rest of the boys would make lewd comments about when they were trying to get to me. Her photo was stolen so many times from my bunk during basic training and returned to me so many times with stains on it that I hid it away and instead made do with the photos of her on my phone, which I kept password protected.
I thought I would marry Miranda. I’d spent three years saving every dollar of my wages so one day I could afford the kind of engagement ring a girl like Miranda Scholes would say yes to. Three carats, and she did. The wedding date was set for November, when my tour was due to end.
She came to visit me in the hospital the week they shipped me back to base in pieces. She came with my parents, but she waited until they’d left before she told me she was breaking things off.
“Things are different now,” she said in a faraway voice. She wouldn’t even come and stand by me when she gave me the news. She stood over by the door, eyeing her escape, no doubt, and delivered her speech with cool perfection, as though she’d rehearsed it for hours in front of the mirror, which, knowing her, she probably had. She hadn’t touched me the whole time she was there, other than for a brief cold sweep of the lips across my forehead when she first entered the room. I think I knew from that moment, when she avoided my lips and wouldn’t take my hand, that she was no longer mine. It made me wonder, though, if she ever had been. How else was it possible that she could be so cold?
“I don’t think I can be there for you or give you what you need,” she explained with the clinical detachment of a doctor.
“I just need you!” I yelled at her. “I just need to know you’re there for me. That’s all.”
She didn’t say anything. No, that’s a lie. She did. She said, “Sorry.”
I hate that word. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard it in the last six weeks. Enough times to last me a lifetime.
So that was it. She said “sorry” as if that one word was enough to wipe the slate clean. Then she walked over to the bed and I heard the clink of something metal being dropped on my nightstand.
I heard her sobbing as she ran down the hall, and I reached over, fumbling blind, to find out what it was she’d left behind, knowing before my fingers closed around it that it was her engagement ring, but not ready to believe it.
I roll my head back against the pillows and take a deep breath in, then out. Fuck this day. Fuck this life.