I could see him out of the corner of my eye, shuffling to keep up with my quick strides, and eventually, I felt him pull on my arm. I yanked it away from him and continued, but he grabbed me again.
I snatched my headphone out of my left ear and glared at him. “What do you want?”
“What’s wrong? Did something happen at school?” he asked and his naive expression pissed me off.
“Yeah, apparently I’m a sadist.”
Colin looked as if I’d just slapped him in the face. “Oh…”
I put my headphone back in and started to walk again, but Colin grabbed my arm once again. I tried to pull away, but he grabbed my headphone and pulled it out of my ear and held it above his head. Colin was over 6 feet and I was lucky to be allowed on rides at the amusement park.
“Give that back.” My tone was low and seething.
“Just let me talk.” I didn’t really have a choice. I crossed my arms and he brought his arm down a little, but not so close I could grab my gadget. “I didn’t mean that.”
I blinked a couple of times, the anger leaving me like a deflating balloon. “What?”
“I just said that, because I’m hurting? Because I’m stupid? I don’t know.” He furrowed his brow. “But you have been acting kind of sadistic lately, just FYI.”
And just like that he patched the balloon. What was left of my rage had my hand flying at his stomach. I didn’t make contact, but when he doubled over to try and dodge it, his hand came down enough that I could grab my headphone. I took it, put it back in my ear and started off with him calling after me.
People can’t just say horrible things because they’re hurting.
‘Gross. I would never be his girlfriend.’
Shut up, brain. That was then, this is now.
11
Colin
“Undinger, you good? I thought you’d be elated for the first game?”
I was sitting on the bench in the locker room lost in thought when my football coach, Damian Nash, walked up to me. The rest of the guys were all floating around, buzzing with excitement as the first game of our season got closer to beginning, but I was distracted. I had everything on my mind from my parents to Tatiana, and mostly I just wanted to go home and crawl into bed.
Coach Nash sat down next to me on the bench and I felt immediately calmed by his presence. He was the kind of guy that you could trust with your grandma, but also could hide behind if someone suddenly appeared with a gun. He had deep brown skin, but glowing hazel eyes, and brown hair that was dreaded and flowed down his back. He had a muscular upper build, which made him feel larger than he was, given he was actually rather slim and was just under six feet tall. He was our high school’s student counselor by day and our varsity football coach by night. There wasn’t a student in the school that didn’t like him.
“Hey, coach. Um, I guess I’m just a little lost in thought.”
That was an understatement. I was thinking about Tatiana and how she could honestly be surprised that I would call her sadistic. She seemed to take pleasure out of torturing me, and had even admitted herself that she went too far sometimes. She’d flipped on a dime back when we were kids and had been downright evil to me ever since. Sure, a few of our recent interactions made me think that maybe there was something hidden deep, deep, deep beneath her surface that still held something for me, but the fact that I had to claw through miles of thorny bushes to get to it almost didn’t feel worth it. I loved her, probably more than I had loved anything in my life, but was I prepared to sacrifice that much of my sanity? How much of myself would I lose trying to find her?
Then there was Harlie. It was a shock to say the least that she thought I was sleeping around on her when we’d had multiple conversations about my former flame. It was even more surprising that she thought it was Tatiana, when I’d been very careful to only tell her I had been in love before, but never with who. I’d told her time and again how much infidelity hurt me, and knowing Harlie as a person, she probably went that route just to spite me. It was a big misunderstanding, based on what I didn’t know, but a misunderstanding nonetheless. Did I see myself marrying Harlie someday? No. But was she something like a friend when I had very few to speak of? Yes. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to clear the air and make nice with her, even if it meant ‘getting back together.’ The thought of being anything other than single at that point made my skin crawl, but I might have found myself in a ‘lesser of two evils’ situation: but who was the lesser of two evils?
“Well, you know,” Coach Nash pierced my thoughts with his NPR-esque voice. “I’m always here to talk if you need me, but I need you in top form tonight. Game one. We’ve got a reputation to set.”
“I’m on it coach.” I stood up from the bench. “Let’s go get this win.”
Coach Nash stood up and punched my chest. “That’s what I’m talking about! Let’s do it!”
Coach Nash gathered the team and led us in his inspirational, beginning of the season speech. For about half the team, it was the final season of their high school careers. I fell into that category, and the more Coach Nash talked, the more pumped up I got. I didn’t want to tank the first game of my final season because I was thinking of two women, both of whom had shown me that they couldn’t really give a rat’s ass about my emotions. The sadness in me started to seep out of me as anger started to seep in. What the hell was I doing letting those two occupy so much of my brain?
“Bring it in, boys! Tigers on three!” Coach Nash put his hand in the middle of the huddle and everyone piled theirs on top of his. “One, two, three.”
“TIGERS!”
The team broke and everyone rushed out of the locker rooms and out onto the field. There was a roar of fans as we ran out. A vast majority of the Orchard Mesa community was packed into those bleachers. They all wore different shades of orange and black and cheered on the players they knew as we ran over to our bench. I scanned the crowd even though I knew I wouldn’t see my parents’ warm, inviting faces among it. I would never see their faces again.
A shudder ran down my spine. It was an unexpected experience. I was working on coming to terms with the fact that they were gone in general, but I hadn’t considered moments like these. All the ‘firsts.’ The first time they weren’t there to say goodbye to me when I went to school in the morning, the first time they weren’t there to greet me when I got home--the first time they weren’t there to cheer me on at football. My throat collapsed in on itself and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Even with the cool night air slicing against my face, I was burning up.
“Undinger.” Coach Nash was at my side in a second. I blinked and all of my teammates who’d been behind me a second ago, were suddenly all the way over at the bench already. How did they move so fast? “You good? You just sort of froze.”
“Um…” I took a deep breath, trying to bury my pain. “Yeah. I’m good.”
“Check that out.”
Coach Nash pointed towards the sea of people and followed his finger to a few people situated on the bottom most bleacher, dressed head to toe in the school colors, and waving at me wildly. It was Kya and Cristiano Marquette, and next to them was Tatiana. She was dressed in black as she normally was, but she did have an orange scarf wrapped around her neck. When my eyes landed on her, she grinned a little before flipping me a middle finger. It wasn’t the malicious way she’d done it in the past, but more like she was letting me know, in her own way, that she was there.