Reclaiming the Sand(46)

I seesawed back and forth between excitement at the possibility and total denial that I could do it at all.

It had been a week since I had gone with Flynn to his house. I struggled with a glut of new feelings I hadn’t experienced since I was a child. I had felt more guilt in the past month than I had in the past fifteen years combined. Every interaction with Flynn brought with it wave after wave of emotion that threatened to rip me apart.

I had made peace with Dania, though it had involved considerable groveling on my part. She had been furious. Nasty words were hurled and I took them like I always did.

And even though I gave her the lip service that she expected, I was quickly growing tired of our vicious cycle.

Watching her attempts to humiliate Flynn last week had wrenched something loose inside me. I had been reminded of that day in high school when Stu and Dania had pushed him into the freezing stream by his house.

They had thought it was funny. I had gone along with it. I hadn’t stopped them.

I remembered the look on his face. He thought they were being friendly. He didn’t understand the calculated cruelty that they had planned for him.

I had played my part in it. I had been just as culpable.

But that had been the first time I had truly felt bad for my behavior.

By that point Flynn had become my friend. Sure, no one knew but us. I wasn’t willing to endure the wrath of my friends should it come out. But he had become someone important to me.

He was the only person who had accepted me for who I was and liked me anyway. He didn’t expect me to be anything but Ellie McCallum. And I had been such a messed up kid that his simple, unconditional affection became the balm for my tormented heart.

But my self-loathing was unstoppable. And it managed to destroy the only good relationship I had ever had in my life. It was my fate to push him away. To hurt him. To hurt myself.

And I had done that in the most destructive way possible.

But that day at the stream I had hated Dania and Stu for hurting Flynn. And it was my one moment of courage.

I had run off with my so-called friends, leaving Flynn freezing in the stream. But the sudden over powering sense of shame had stopped me. Dania had asked what was wrong.

I told her that we couldn’t leave Flynn like that. That’d he’d freeze to death. Stu had called me a f*cking *. Then they started calling me a Freak Lover. And it had made me so incredibly angry. They had turned on me in an instant.

For a brief moment, I hadn’t cared. I had turned around and gone back to help Flynn. Stu and Dania’s taunts ringing loudly in my ears. And that had felt good. It felt right. Because I cared about him.

It was the last good day we had together. It was the last time I had spent with him unencumbered by my own shit.

It was the last day I had been truly happy.

So watching Dania’s passive threats had triggered inside me the instinct to fight and protect all over again.

And just like all those years ago, I had paid for it afterwards.

“I just keep running into you. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the universe was forcing us to be friends.”

I looked up at the sudden invasion of my personal space and bit down on my frustrated sigh.

At some point in the two weeks since I last saw her, Kara Baker had shaved her dreads. She was sporting a buzz cut so short that I could see her scalp. I wasn’t a big fan of the Sinead O’Conner look, but at least she had the head shape for it.

“Or you could just have a thing for stalking,” I remarked dryly, already resigned to at least fifteen minutes of asinine chitchat.

And honestly, Kara wasn’t too bad. She was chill and laid back, even if she was too damn nosy for her own good.

“Nah. If I wanted to stalk someone, it wouldn’t be a bitch with a bad attitude,” she quipped and I had to smile at her comment. She could hold her own, that’s for sure. I had to respect that.

“Fair enough,” I conceded and watched as she settled into the chair opposite me and pulled out a textbook.

“Whatcha workin’ on?” she asked, poking her pencil at my English book. I flipped over the cover so she could see it.

“Trying to write an essay on the fundamentals of personal liberty as found in the short stories of Kate Chopin,” I answered drolly.

Kara arched a blonde eyebrow. “Whoa, heavy shit. And you like that stuff?” she asked and I realized that yeah, I did. I was really enjoying my class. It allowed me to flex my brain in a way that working at JAC’s would never provide.

I didn’t have any opportunity in my everyday life to discuss the meaning of Byron’s poetry or to talk about the theme of greed in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. For the four hours a week I was in class, I didn’t feel like a useless failure. I felt competent and smart and Professor Smith seemed to think I actually knew what I was talking about.

Sure I’d always had Julie in my corner cheering me on, trying to build up my shaky self-esteem but I had never internalized any of it.

Until now.

“Yeah, I do,” I answered.

“More power to ya, I guess. I don’t have a head for that stuff. That’s why I’m going into political science. I much prefer the drama of lawmaking any day.”

Kara was a talker but it wasn’t overly obnoxious, as I had first thought. Her uncomplicated conversation was nice.

“So you’re going to be some Congressman’s bitch? That sounds like an HBO special waiting to happen,” I said, my lips curling into an awkward semblance of a smile. I didn’t get much practice at making small talk so I hoped I wasn’t rude or aggressive. My personality didn’t lend itself well to polite niceties.