by Ana Sparks
Now, Eugene strode up to me, staring into my face, his bulging eyes insistent. I didn’t meet his gaze. His words were stupid, ridiculous, clasping at me with sticky hands and pathetic grasping fingers. I wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t answer him—couldn’t.
“Just think about it,” Eugene said before he strode away.
I slammed the door behind him and stormed back to my chair. Too bad Eugene had come for nothing. Because I wasn’t going to think about it. Not for a second.
I opened my laptop to the article on a Sacramento news site that had caught my eye: Local IT Whiz Makes It Big, with a picture of Kristin smiling oh-so-happily underneath. My gaze hovered over her beautiful face and then, slowly, I closed my laptop.
I had an idea.
Chapter Fifteen
Kristin
Three months wasn’t so long when you thought about it. That’s what I told myself as I woke up after once again dreaming of stupid Clark Denton. Him, pinning me to the bed, kissing me, touching me. And to think I had thought the dreams had stopped.
Shaking myself, I rose to find Romeo and Juliet sitting on the end of my bed in the exact same position, staring at me as if they were deliberating whether I would make a good meal nor not.
I went to their food bowls to find them empty. This was less-than-surprising. Both had simultaneously, at some point in the last two months, decided to get fat; no matter how much food I piled into their little smiley-faced bowl, they gobbled it down in record time. The funniest part was that they were growing fat perfectly in sync, their cuddling lick-fests apparently only enhanced by the extra rolls.
After I had doled out more food for them, I opened the fridge to get some food for myself. Inside was a big slice of cake from Harmony’s birthday party the day before. I stared at it for a good minute before I reasoned that if dreaming about the man who had broken your heart and humiliated you didn’t warrant a nice big piece of chocolate cake, nothing did.
I opened the window and sat down in my old favorite spot, cake in hand. I gazed over the trees and reflected over the past few months. Really, I shouldn’t feel all that bad about my dreams about Clark; it wasn’t as though I could control them. And, when you looked at what I could control, what I had accomplished over the past few months, it was nothing less than astounding.
Three months ago, I had been broken, dejected, betrayed, and ruined. Three months ago, I had lost all hope and still, I had gotten back up. Still, I had kept on trying. And it had paid off. I had built my own IT business, started volunteering for the local homeless shelter, and successfully avoided getting back in touch with Clark or Veronica despite their repeated attempts. Veronica’s attempts at reaching out had involved family manipulation, while Clark’s had consisted of constant calls from different phone numbers, as well as driving by my apartment building repeatedly. And, despite the pang in my heart whenever I heard that familiar voice on the other line or saw that familiar red sports car, I had stayed strong. I blocked each new number, and began to leave my building by the back entrance. And I had gotten on with my life.
I finished my cake and took one last breath of fresh air, then hopped off the window and returned to my laptop. It was Saturday, but I liked to get my emails over with before I set off for the day. A quick scan of my inbox revealed something from my old high school. Attention, Class of 2007, the subject line read.
I clicked on it and read it through:
Grass Valley High School would like to welcome back all students of its graduating class of 2007 for a reunion. Food, drinks and music will be provided. Many of the former staff will be present. We hope to see you there!
I moved the cursor over to the delete button, but couldn’t quite click it.
Why should I go? I asked myself. Did I really want to go back to the school where I was still doubtless remembered as the girl who was stood up at prom and now, tried to auction off her virginity?
Because, I told myself, of what you did, despite that. To show them that these setbacks hadn’t broken me. On the contrary, I had built myself up in spite of them. I was the owner of a successful business. I had everything to be proud of.
I closed the tab, and then my laptop. In any case, I didn’t have to decide whether to go or not now. The rest of the day I spent wandering round the neighborhood, stopping in shops and browsing through things I didn’t need. A nice long walk through the forest raised my spirits, but the whole day, I felt indelibly as if I was avoiding something.
In the middle of the night, out of a dead sleep, I sat up straight in bed.
I stumbled through the dark to my laptop and opened it. Reopening my email tab, I found the reunion email and RSVP’d.
YES.
“There,” I told myself as I lay back in bed. “I’ve done it.”
Chapter Sixteen
Clark
Is this really going to work?
As the limo zipped along the highway, I shook the thought away for the fifth time. This was going to work, it had to. I’d tried just about everything else to get in touch with Kristin at this point.
But showing up at her building unannounced, demanding that she come with me to our high school reunion—wasn’t it a bit much? Gazing out the window revealed the sky was an ominous-looking grey. I looked away. Maybe this all was a bit much, but I had to try.
The closer we got, however, the more the question returned, the more the anxiety closed up my throat. By the time we pulled up to the familiar off-white apartment building, I was practically hoarse and had almost crushed the corsage box in my hands. When I got to the building receptionist, I parried requests to call Kristin’s apartment with the old man’s stoic refusal to do anything that “wasn’t by regulations,” before finally paying him off with a fifty.
“Tell him there’s something here for her,” I told him as he rung her, and he did so.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, Kristin was walking into the lobby. Her gaze stopped on me, and her face fell. I was speechless. Kristin looked even more gorgeous than I remembered. Maybe it was just not seeing her for so long, or maybe it was the chiffon and jeweled mint glory of a dress draped around her body, but I was utterly frozen. Until she turned around to walk away from me.
“Wait,” I croaked, and she paused.
“Is that…is that the dress you were going to wear—”
“For prom, yes,” Kristin declared, whirling around to deliver me an icy glare.
I nodded dumbly and Kristin demanded “What are you doing here Clark?”
I looked at her sheepishly. Judging by her enraged reaction, I was beginning to wonder that myself.
“Well?” Kristin asked and the words poured out of me.
“I just wanted to see you. I thought that maybe, I don’t know, you were going to the reunion too. And if you were then maybe I could give you a ride.”
Kristin’s frown didn’t budge and showed no signs of doing so, so I continued.
“It’s just a ride. You can ditch me when we get there, if you want.”
Kristin’s glittering eyes surveyed me coolly, while I tried to give her an easy, reassuring smile. Apparently appeased by what she saw, she nodded and strode ahead of me outside. At the door of her building, however, she’d stopped.
Turning to me with a smile, she said, “Oh Clark, you didn’t!”
Clearly, she had spotted the limo waiting outside for us. I took her arm with a shrug. “It seemed appropriate.”
At the limo, I waved the driver aside and opened the back door myself so she could climb in. I climbed in right beside her and the driver pulled away from the curb. I glanced over to see that Kristin, for all her indifferent bravado, was clearly flustered at sitting so close to me.
“So…” she said, staring determinedly out the window, “Why would you bother going to the reunion?”
Edging a bit closer, so our knees were touching, I asked, “What do you mean?”
She turned to look at me, her gaze flicking down as soon as it met mine.
I put my hand on her arm. Leaning towards her, in her ear I whispered, “I have some unfinished business there.”
While I waited there, so close to her, Kristin stayed immobile. Her hand was trembling, her body urging her to do what her mind was clearly so against.
But all she said was a quiet “Oh,” so I moved my hand away.
The rest of the ride was more enjoyable and Kristin opened up when I asked her about her company’s recent success, and we even shared a laugh about our cats.
“They’ve gotten crazy fat!” Kristin exclaimed and we burst out laughing.
“No way,” I said.
“What?”
“My cat, Nala. She got fat, too. I think the maid has been slipping her treats.”
Kristin laughed some more.
“Both Romeo and Juliet are chunky, now they cuddle in all their blobby glory. We should have a cat playdate sometime.”
At her artless suggestion, she fell silent, her gaze flicking back to the window.
“Yes,” I said softly, taking her hand, “Yes, we should.”
Kristin said nothing. Her hand was trembling, but she didn’t move it away. The limo rolled to a halt and the driver came over to the door and opened it. I waved him away once again.
“We’re going to need a minute.”
Kristin said nothing, and I took her other hand.
“Kristin, please. Just hear me out. Whatever happens tonight, whether you even want to talk to me after you step foot out of this limo, I just wanted to apologize. I want you to know how sorry I am for failing you like that. For disappointing you and proving that all of the horrible things you thought about me after prom were true. For embarrassing you and hurting you again, when you were the last person I ever wanted to hurt.
“After that night, after prom, I wanted to explain it to you, but even now, Kristin, my darling, I’m afraid there’s no explaining it. How utterly different I feel in your presence—how light, authentic…how free. How your laughter is contagious and your smile even more so. How, after we reunited this past year, as my thoughts turned to you more and more, an equally powerful current rose within me—that of fear.
“Yes, Kristin, I feared you and what you did to me. And that night, that stupid, horrible, mistake of a night, as I sat in my office, as I watched the clock tick from 5:50 to 6 pm, I was afraid. I was afraid of going to you and losing myself, of giving into the overwhelming affection that I could already hardly resist. And so, I sabotaged it. I sat there and, while everything in me urged me to go, fear urged me to stay. I thought of the weeks after the prom, the breathless, painful weeks that I only got through by using work as a drug to escape the pain, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take that helpless feeling again. No, I couldn’t bear it; I wanted you out of my life; I wanted this horrible vulnerability gone for good.”
Kristin’s hand stopped trembling.
“And I almost got my way,” I continued, “You know, I almost pulled it off. As I sat there, and 6:20 became 6:25, I had almost convinced myself that I was doing the right thing; sparing you the disappointment of being with me. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from calling you and begging for your forgiveness; but I was even a bit grateful for your refusal to talk to me. I was actually relieved. As the days passed, I figured that was it; that I’d gotten away with it, that all I needed was a few more days, and you’d be out of my system.”
I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it.
“But Kristin, I was so wrong. Because, you see, hours stretched into days, stretched into weeks, stretched into months. You want to know what changed with all this time, all this distance? Not a damn thing. If anything, I missed you all the more, I ached for you—a physical urge there was no escaping. I realized that I hadn’t gotten you out of my system at all, I had simply thrown away my last chance at happiness.”
And then the words were out and Kristin’s eyes were shining. I let go of her hands and helped her out of the limo. Taking the corsage out of the box, I tied it on her wrist.
Then, with my hand on her back, I said, “So come on, Kristin, let’s go inside so that you can have the time of your life. Ignore me if you must; never speak to me again if you think it’s right. But just know this: that a thousand words can never express how sorry I am, and that I will never stop loving you.”
Her blue eyes were bluer with tears, but I wasn’t going to make my move now that she was so vulnerable. No, she deserved better than that. For once, I was going to the right thing.
So, giving her a light kiss on the cheek, I strode away from her side and into the old high school without looking back.
Chapter Seventeen
Kristin
Why on earth did he do that?
I stared at Clark’s back as he walked into our old high school without me. Everything he had just said, everything he had done up until now, none of it added up.
“Kristin, you came?”
At the sound of my sister’s incredulous voice, my shoulders sagged. Once again, it wasn’t even her year and yet here she was, in all her ruby-dressed, fuchsia-nailed glory.
“Hello, Veronica,” I said. She looked me up and down, her thick eyebrows arcing, a malevolent smile making its way onto her deep red lips.
“Now, that isn’t the same dress…”
I lifted my chin to look her in the eye.
“It is.”
She warbled a laugh, and then tilted her head at me like I was the most pitiable thing she’d ever seen.
“Well, let’s hope tonight goes just a bit better.” As her friends joined her, Veronica took a theatrical look around. Her charcoal lined gaze stopping on me, she said, “At any rate, history seems to be repeating itself; Clark is nowhere to be seen!”
As she and her friends swapped snide smiles, I strode past them. Heading for the high school’s rotating doors, I tossed my answer over my shoulder: “Actually, he’s in there now.”
And then I was through the doors and hurrying to my favorite hideout, the single stall girls’ bathroom that was tucked in the corner.
I shut the stall door and sat down on the toilet. Huh, its old gray door even had the same graffiti as it had ten years ago: the same fat purple heart swooped around Nicole and Anatoli, whoever they were. In thick pink scrawl, someone was telling me God was here, while someone else, in a thin black angry slash, was telling them to go fuck themselves. Yes, being in old Grass Valley High like this, sitting here now, it was like being in a time warp. The only problem was that the last thing I wanted to do was go back in time to my high school, where my greatest memory was prom—the night my whole world had come crashing down around me.
I stared dully at the stall door. Really, I had just hurried inside the school to escape Veronica; I still hadn’t made up my mind whether I was actually going to go through with attending this thing. It had been bad enough with the possibility of everyone knowing about the infamy of my virginity auction and remembering my prom humiliation. But now that Veronica was here, with her posse of snobs, did I really want to torture myself by being anywhere near them? And Clark, regardless of what he had said, did I really want to be around him now—the man who perpetually disappointed me?
I opened the stall door. The woman in the mirror was all dressed-up and ready to go, but in reality she was more afraid than the girl who had worn the same dress had been, because she knew better. She had watched the girl get beaten down time and again, she’d watched her be humiliated, betrayed; she’d watched disappointment became the girl’s sad sort of creed. So now, the smart thing was obvious: learn the lesson, leave, save yourself.
I took a deep breath, in then out. Yes, leaving would be easy, it would probably be the smart thing to do. The only problem was that the woman in the mirror, the woman I was, wasn’t only smarter than the girl she’d been—she was braver, too. All the hardships hadn’t just ground her into
the ground, no—they had chiseled her, like a fine marble statue, into someone that could withstand pain, that could take risks and live with the consequences, into someone that could do this.
So, I did. I walked out of the bathroom, down the hallway and followed the scrawled signs to the gym. There, I stepped back down memory lane. The gym was decorated with the exact same decorations as it had been for our prom in 2007, transformed into the same silver wonderland. The floor and walls were reflective metallic silver, while the ceiling fluttered with silver streamers. There were even the same mini brownies on the banquet tables.
It looked as though even the same crowd was there too; none of my old friends could be seen, while Veronica and hers were eyeing me with thinly veiled glee. Clark was nowhere to be seen, he had probably left already.
“Well if it isn’t Kristin Blair.”
I turned around to see another one of the last people I wanted to see at the reunion. Gary Vanderchuck looked much the same as he had in high school, with the exception of having more of a beard on his chin, and less hair on his head. He was eyeing me with the same condescension he had at prom.
Yes, history was repeating itself. My instincts had been correct. This had been a terrible, horrible mistake.
I forced a smile, “Hi, Gary,” and then I fled towards the banquet tables in the far corner of the gym. The mini brownies. This time I took five; I had less than high hopes at this point, I had none. So, I flopped onto a wobbly classroom chair with my pathetic bounty and started to dig in. The soundtrack to my latest humiliation was, appropriately, the same music they’d played at prom, the same mockingly upbeat poppy hits.
