- EIGHTEEN -
I was proud of myself for not skipping out on any classes. If there was anything I wouldn’t forgive myself for, it would be failing out of my junior year of college because I broke up with my first boyfriend. I was able to get seats in the back of the class away from Jaxon in our shared classes. I didn’t meet up with Jace anymore after English, nor did I join them in the cafeteria after I noticed Jaxon sitting with them the day after the championship game. That was an awkward moment because as soon as I saw him, I backpedaled out of the room as fast as I could, and I know they all saw me do it.
I ended up finding this great big tree on the edge of campus that was an ideal place for eating lunch. Or in my case, just staring off into space, not wanting any human contact, and occasionally crying, although I’m not too proud about that. Julie, Jaxon’s mom, attempted to reach out and contact me a couple times after she found out what had happened. I tried to be polite and talk to her, but it was just too hard, so I always found some excuse to get off the phone.
Ellie and Charles ended up going with me to the lawyer’s office to read over the contract for the account my parents had set up in my name. Charles was skeptical that it was real, and therefore insisted on joining in on the meeting so that he could read over the fine print. The account ended up being legitimate, and I was basically set for the rest of my life. I guess I had my parents to thank for that.
I was still having a hard time dealing with the fact that I’d just spent the last six years of my life mad at the very parents who did everything to make my life better. My mom had always told me I should try for a career that makes me happy, not one that was all about the money. When I first started becoming interested in humanitarian journalism, I knew I wouldn’t be making the best living. Thanks to my parents, I wouldn’t have to worry about making my rent or any other payments while I was out traveling the world.
Almost a month had gone by and I was still surviving. I was almost back to a bearable state; I didn’t cry as often as I used to. Jaxon would never be out of my heart, though. I’d always think of him as the only person strong enough to actually break through my walls. Why had I been so stupid? How could I have thought it was okay just to leave Jaxon that night, with Devon of all people? Jaxon was the best thing that had happened to me in years, and I had just walked away from him, even if only for a short time.
I’d become an expert at avoiding Jaxon and all of the places I knew he would be. Surprisingly, we never even ran into each other at home. Quinn would hang out with the guys at their apartment, and every once in a while, Jace and Cole would come over to our place to hang out. I was sad for our little group; we had been so close and then I had to go and screw everything up. Now, we couldn’t even hang out together all at the same time. I never asked about Jaxon and I never searched him out in crowds. I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle seeing him with a new girlfriend when he eventually started dating again.
Meanwhile, I was also having an eternal struggle with myself. I couldn’t be Emerson anymore because she would forever belong to Jaxon. I also couldn’t ever go back to sleeping around with every guy like Em did. I needed an in-between. Quinn and Cole had finally gotten me to go out again to a few parties. Once all the guys found out that Jaxon and I were no longer together, I constantly had to convince them that I wouldn’t be going upstairs with them anymore. I honestly couldn’t see myself being with anyone like that—I’d already had the best, and the rest would be second-rate. I was thankful that I didn’t ever see him at these parties, because I wouldn’t be able to handle them if I did.
It was hard enough staring at the back of his head in our journalism courses. Students would come up and talk to him; he even had two new girls that sat on either side of him, but I never really saw him actively engaging with them.
One day, as the professor was dismissing us and trying to add on more reading material, I watched as Tatum Johnson stood up in her seat next to him and kissed him on the cheek. Right then I thought I was going to be sick all over my desk. I scrabbled to push my papers and books into my bag. When I stood up, I saw that Jaxon was staring right at me. I slammed my chair in and darted out the door.
I ran across campus. I couldn’t leave because I still had another class, and Quinn had the car today, so I couldn’t go hide in there. I realized where I was subconsciously going: to my tree. I wish I had found this tree earlier in my time here at school. It was peaceful to lie under it and just look up at the swirling branches and intertwined leaves. It was so dense that the sun couldn’t seep through, which created this beautiful glow around the outer edges of the leaves. This was the perfect place to hide and calm down so that I didn’t hurl in front of all my classmates. The girth of the tree trunk was wide; I could sit up against it on one side and no one would be able to see me. I always sat on the side opposite from campus; I didn’t want anyone to come bother me.
A few times Quinn and Cole had asked where I went for lunch and if they could come and join me, but I just told them I went to study hall. I’m pretty sure Quinn went to check on me one day, because later, she asked which study hall I was in. I eventually told her I had found a place to hide, but I couldn’t tell them where I went because this was my happy place. I liked coming here alone.
I sat on the roots of the tree with my knees pulled up to my chest and my face in between them. I closed my eyes, pulled in long, deep breaths, and released them slowly, willing myself not to cry. I had known this was coming; I had told myself he would eventually get a girlfriend again. Warning yourself about something and then having it actually happen are two different things. At least I didn’t see her full-on kiss him; it had only been a cheek kiss. It could have been so much worse.
“Hey, Emers—uh . . . Em.”
Startled, I jolted backward and knocked my head on the trunk of the tree, once again embarrassing myself in front of Jaxon. I laid my head back down on my knees. Maybe if I kept my eyes closed tightly, he would go away.
“Oh, shit, sorry! Is your head okay?” He placed his strong, warm hand on the back of my head.
I winced and moved out of his hold. “Jaxon, please don’t. I don’t know how you even found me here,” I said into my legs.
“I know that you always sit here,” he replied, crouching down in front of me. When I finally looked up at him, confused, he continued, “I’ve been sitting under that tree over there”—he pointed across the lawn to another tree about fifty yards away—“for a while now. One day I noticed you walking over here and hiding behind this one. I started coming out here every day to watch you sit here. I just needed to know if you were okay. I hate when I see you cry over here by yourself. I almost told Quinn once where you were so she could comfort you, but then realized you probably come here to be alone.”
All this time, I’ve come out here to release some of my most private thoughts, frustrations, and sadness. I’ve cried and I’ve screamed. All along, he was fifty yards away watching. This was about a hundred more times mortifying than my courtyard spectacle a month ago.
I stood up and grabbed my bag. “Well, I’m glad I’ve been over here putting on a show for you. I hope you’ve enjoyed my humiliation, but I think now it’s time for the curtain call.” I started walking away from him.
“Emerson, wait . . .” He came jogging up to me.
“It’s Em! You don’t get to call me that anymore!” I yelled at him. I was thankful we were so far away from the main hub of campus, because I really didn’t feel like having an audience for another scene with Jaxon.
“Em, I didn’t mean to make it sound like I’ve been enjoying your pain. I came over here to make sure you knew that I’m not with Tatum. I don’t know why she kissed me on the cheek like that. I think she just wanted you to think something was going on. I told her not to do that anymore.”
“You don’t need to run anything by me. I don’t have any hold over you or your actions.” I continued walking away from him. What was he doing? Didn’t he understand how much it hurt to talk to him?
This must have set him off finally, because he hollered back at me in the empty field. “You think I’m not in pain? You think my heart wasn’t ripped out of my fucking chest until I couldn’t breathe anymore? You think this is easy for me?”
“Isn’t it, though? I mean, this was your idea. I certainly didn’t choose this for myself,” I quietly said, turning toward him.
Trying to throw my words back at me, he said, “Didn’t you, though? When you decided to run away from me to go bar-hopping with Devon and get so wasted you couldn’t answer your phone?”
“How did you know I was at a bar with Devon?”
“Oh, he didn’t tell you?” he spoke with ice in his words. “Around three a.m., he started answering your phone to let all of your friends and your boyfriend, who had been calling you all night, know that you were with him!” he shouted. “I had to hear from some other guy that my girlfriend was safe. That he would take care of you!”
“If Devon answered my phone, then you know that nothing happened with us and that he has a fiancée he loves.”
His surprised face showed me that he did have doubts whether I had done anything with Devon. No matter what he said, he still held my previous reputation against me.
“You are the most frustrating person ever! Don’t you understand? It’s not that I thought you were cheating on me. It’s that you were mine! Not his. Mine, Emerson! But in your time of need, you chose someone else over me.”
I felt as if I had been slapped. A slap I deserved, nonetheless. The thing was, I hadn’t chosen anyone. I only went with Devon because I knew he wouldn’t make me talk. He just sat there quietly all night, while I zoned off into my own world and my own problems. It didn’t really matter if I clarified that for Jaxon anymore, though; the damage had already been done.
I turned around and walked away. “Don’t follow me, Jaxon.”
That semester I had to take a class in preparation for my summer internship. It was all about what to expect and making sure we knew exactly what we were walking into. I learned that I was going to need an insane amount of vaccines. Quinn was going to have to come along for that because otherwise, I might chicken out. We also found out that we needed to fund-raise a significant amount of money; there were a lot of supplies the school offered to provide us with, but currently the program didn’t have enough funds to get everything. Professor Patterson was in charge of the internship. Since I felt relatively comfortable with him by now, I asked to speak with him after class one day.
I told him how I had come into some money lately that I really had no need for, and that I wouldn’t mind helping out the program. He was floored and very appreciative of my offer. He said that he wanted to try some fund-raising techniques throughout the rest of the semester first to see if we could raise the money. If we didn’t reach our goal, I could come back and talk to him again about helping out. I hoped he didn’t think I was trying to be a brown-noser, because that certainly wasn’t my intention.
Every time my mom had passed a collection jar for a charity, or passed a homeless person on the street, no matter what, she always tossed in money. Once I asked her why she didn’t just save that money for herself, since she could buy herself something nice if she just kept it. She had simply replied that she didn’t need anything nice if there were still people out there that needed food or water. Every day she taught humbling moments and how we should appreciate every little thing we were given. I think she was the one who had inspired my future career choice. I was starting to understand why I never knew how well off my parents were—thus, my discomfort with having the amount of money I had in my bank account. I knew that there were people out there that needed it, and I had no idea how to begin to help them.
I asked Professor Patterson what his ideas for fund-raising were. When he told me a few of them, I realized that although they would bring in a decent amount of money, they would never bring in enough for us to be able to survive in Africa. I suggested we have a date auction, one where we find a bunch of guys or girls and we auction them off for dates. I had heard about other colleges doing it before. He loved the notion and brought it up in class the following day. The students instantly became excited about the idea.
The first thing after that class, I went and requested a meeting with our school’s Interfraternity Council president. I explained to him our idea and how this would put out a good word about the fraternities and their generosity in helping out other areas of the university. He loved the idea but told me that some of the fraternities had been in trouble too often lately. He didn’t want people to think that they were selling sex. I thought that was an obscene assumption, but I understood where he was coming from.
Professor Patterson suggested I ask Coach Chase if we could auction off his players now that they weren’t bogged down with championship practices. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that guys would pay more money for girls than girls would for guys. So I decided to ask Coach Chase if we could get all of his players to go to a date auction to raise money for the journalism trip.
Coach Chase liked the idea of the auction and said that as long as we specified that the football team was sponsoring it, he would make sure all of his players were present. I ended up finding twenty willing females to be auctioned off. It really wasn’t hard. When you post “Do You Want A Championship-Winning Football Player to Buy You for a Date?” all over campus, you have to start turning away girls.
Originally, Patterson suggested we just use the gymnasium for the event, but I convinced a local hotel to donate their beautiful ballroom for the night. The event was blowing up and I heard people talking about it all over campus. I’m not sure at what point I became the coordinator for this whole event, but it was nice to be able to throw myself into something that required all of my attention. It helped to keep my mind off of everything else, namely Jaxon.
Later that night, I pulled out my text to prepare for midterms next week. Typically, I would jump into a study group, but tonight I didn’t feel like being social. Professor Patterson always tried to make it easier for us college students when he could. With one of the journalism classes I had this semester, he let us use the same text we used in the prerequisite class, the one I had taken last semester with Jaxon. He and I had shared this text last time, but I assume by now that he had bought his own book for the class or that he was sharing with someone else. Why did my thoughts always stream toward him, no matter the topic?
The annoying thing about college textbooks is that, when you buy them used, they often come with writing and highlighting marks already in them. It’s very distracting when you’re trying to study. This text in particular had no rhyme or reason to all the marks inside of it. One word would be circled on a page and then you could go twenty pages to find one or two more words circled. I started to get distracted by the circled words. I started at the beginning and wrote down every word I came across. It took me two hours to find every word. I began thinking about how much time I had just wasted when I could have been studying, until I realized that all of the words together meant something.
I just met you and I’m amazed by you already.
Your beauty has me blind to all others.
My eyes will always find you in a crowd.
My favorite part of the day is when I get to hear your laugh.
One day you’ll let someone in and he’ll be a lucky bastard.
One day you are going to discover how beautiful and strong you are.
I hope that I’m standing right next to you holding your hand when you do.
My first thought was how impressed I was that he had found the word bastard in our textbook. My next thought was unimaginably heartbreaking. I couldn’t believe what he had done in my book. I remember how he had borrowed it the night I came over to the guys’ place after work. I’d fallen asleep on him and he’d carried me to my bed. Then he’d taken my textbook, the very same one we both studied in countless times after, and he’d written the most amazing love note I’d ever read. Never in my life did I think I would get something like this.
He had written that he hoped he could be standing next to me when I realized how beautiful and strong I was. There was a moment when I thought those things about myself: He brought them out and reminded me daily. In a way, he had been beside me when I comprehended it. He just didn’t stick around afterward.
I knocked all of my notes and books off of my bed and crawled under the covers. I reached under my pillow and grabbed the T-shirt I had taken from Jaxon’s room the first time we slept together. He knew I had it here, but he never asked for it back. I pulled my knees up to my chest and tried to fight off the tears.
As if to dig the knife in deeper, I heard music begin playing through the wall coming from Jaxon’s bedroom. It took me a couple of minutes to recognize it as the mix CD I had made, which I had never heard him listen to before. In fact, he hadn’t even mentioned it since I had given it to him, not that we had discussed much of anything since then. Why, now of all times, had he pulled it out? To increase my torture, he played the disc four times in a row that night. When it finally shut off, I succumbed to a restless sleep.