“Is it really that bad?” Alex looked down at her half-packed suitcase, a heavy sadness settling on her chest.
“No.” Ashley sighed, her own side of the room in a complete state of disarray as she also attempted to pack for the summer.
“It’s not bad at all. If anything it’s sweet, and I’m just still twisted and bitter about my breakup with Pierre.” Ashley momentarily stopped folding up items of clothing to sit among the chaos of her strewn belongings and ponder sadly on what could have been.
“Maybe you’ll find someone new this summer,” Alex suggested brightly.
“That’s the plan.”
“Like some hunky millionaire who will whisk you off to Milan or Rome.” Alex smiled.
“Ooh yeah, I like the sound of that.” Ashley managed to smile and got up to continue packing. “But I’d settle for love.” She sighed. “You’ve got love, and that’s enough, right?”
“Right.” Alex nodded. She loved Oscar with all her heart. She was giving her entire summer to him, so love must surely be enough.
“And it didn’t come easy. You guys had to work at it.”
“Yeah,” Alex agreed. “My mom always used to say that anything worth having, you have to work for.”
“Sounds like a smart woman.”
“How about next summer, after we graduate, you come with me to Woodsdale for a bit, meet my family?” Alex suddenly suggested, realizing how much her mother would love to meet Ashley and vice versa.
“Oh yeah, wow, that would be amazing!” Ashley beamed. “I’ve never been in a trailer before.”
“Trust me, you get over the novelty pretty quickly.”
“I bet it’s not so bad.”
“It’s bad enough I’d only want to spend a few nights there, tops.” Alex frowned to herself at the thought of returning to the cramped living conditions of the trailer.
“Okay, so how about after we visit Woodsdale, we go travelling next summer, together, just us girls,” Ashley suggested excitedly.
“Sounds amazing, but where?”
“Europe.” Ashley breathed the word softly into the room in a fake foreign accent.
Alex began giggling as she put the last of her belongings into her duffel bag. “Europe would be awesome.” Alex nodded.
“Oui, oui!” Ashley quipped, maintaining her accent. “And just in case I don’t meet my mystery millionaire this summer, at least I can console myself with the fact that next summer I’ll be visiting Rome, Milan, Venice, the works, with my best friend!”
“It will be an adventure.”
“Our very own Thelma and Louise adventure, without the dying bit but hopefully with a Brad Pitt look-alike!”
“I can’t wait!”
The girls met in the middle of the room to embrace, both to seal the promise of a European adventure the following summer and also to bid farewell to one another for the end of their third year.
“Just make sure you do graduate,” Ashley said faux sternly, tears misting her eyes. “I know how that Oscar can be a distraction.”
“Don’t worry, I’m intent on graduating,” Alex promised.
“Good! Now I’ve got to finish packing. The car will be here to pick me up soon.” Ashley snivelled, heading back to her side of the room.
After a few minutes of more packing, a sharp knock sounded at their bedroom door.
“Come in!” Ashley ordered, not even looking up as she began to frantically throw things into bags, no longer caring to fold them, too concerned that she was running late.
“Hey.” Oscar edged nervously round the door. He looked at Alex and smiled, but when his eyes crossed the room to Ashley, they widened with shock.
“Holy crap, was there a tornado?” he joked.
“Ashley’s an organized chaos kind of person,” Alex explained fondly.
“Definitely chaos,” Oscar mused.
“If I wasn’t so busy getting my stuff together, I’d defend myself!” Ashley declared, cramming still more items of clothing into her largest Louis Vuitton suitcase.
“Alex, my dad is here to pick us up.” Oscar smiled. “Want me to take your bags down?”
“Um, yeah, thanks.” Alex looked back shyly at the single duffel bag on her bed. She still didn’t own enough worldly goods to have bags in the plural sense.
“I like to travel light,” she explained nervously.
“More room in the car for us, I like it.” Oscar smiled, lifting the duffel bag up and turning to leave the room.
“I’ll wait downstairs so you girls can say goodbye,” he offered and then closed the door behind him.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Oscar is actually okay.” Ashley smiled.
“Yeah, he’s a good guy.”
“Enjoy your summer with him.” Ashley was poised atop her suitcase, using her weight in an attempt to zip it closed.
“I’ll miss you.”
“No mushy stuff, we’ve got another year of misadventures yet! And when we come back, we’ll be seniors, and that means we’ll run this place!” Ashley smiled mischievously.
“Too right. Not that you’ll have much time for me, Madame President.”
Ashley had previously been voted as the next president of Kappa Pi, which didn’t surprise Alex. Ashley was so thoughtful and personable; everyone in the sorority loved her. They couldn’t have chosen a better representative.
“Yeah, yeah, to the minions I’m Mrs. President, but to you I’m always Ashley. Don’t forget that.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m terrible at good-byes so go on, get! Enjoy your summer; you deserve a good one!” Ashley had almost zipped her luggage shut, sweating with the exertion of getting the busting suitcase to seal.
“Love you.” Alex smiled, opening the door to leave.
“Love you too.”
Alex stepped out into the corridor and heard Ashley exhale euphorically, the suitcase now closed.
“And make sure you call your mom!” Ashley shouted after her as an afterthought.
“I will!”
Alex headed down the staircase to the waiting car containing Oscar and his father, whom she’d never met. She felt nervous but also excited. Her life finally looked how she’d always dreamed it would.
Pulling her cell phone from her jeans pocket, she called her mother, knowing how pleased she’d be to hear how happy her daughter was.
Chatting away, Alex stepped out of the sorority house and into the sunshine, excited by the prospect of an amazing summer and drawing ever closer to graduating and commencing with her life in the great wide world.
Senior Year
Mark Simmons looked across the sea of faces in his classroom and inwardly sighed. Each student looked up at him with bored, disinterested eyes, already lost to apathy. Using his sternest voice, Mark ordered eyes forward to the board as he began to commence explaining the syllabus for the upcoming semester.
As he scrawled on the whiteboard, he began to feel more like a machine than a man, simply going through the motions. He’d entered teaching out of a genuine desire to inspire others, to mold young minds, but somewhere along the way he’d lost his enthusiasm for the job, his passion, and became another teacher just existing for the holidays, resenting each new crop of students who congregated before him.
He was in a funk, or so one of his friends had so eloquently told him over a beer.
“It happens to the best of us,” Rob, a teacher at a different high school, had stated.
“But should it happen so early in my career?” Mark asked sadly, struggling with having already lost his verve for the job.
“It’s just a bump in the road. You’ll get over it. All you need is that one student who you inspire and ultimately change their life. They come along every couple of years or so, and I promise you that when they do, you’ll realize it was all worth it, and you’ll reclaim your joie de vivre as the French say.”
Mark had nodded and taken a sip from his cold bottle of beer, not wanting t
o explain how he’d already encountered that student, the game changer, whose life he’d not only changed but also his own. Meeting and mentoring Alex had irrevocably changed him.
****
Looking at his new batch of students, Mark knew without a doubt that the reason he had begun to loathe his profession was because he was pining for the girl he’d let get away, and he resented himself and his position for it happening.
Regularly he battled with his inner demons over whether letting Alex go had been the best decision. She’d said she would stay, but he’d told her to go because that was the best thing, for her. But what about him?
Gazing sadly at his class, Mark tried to focus on the job at hand, on the math. The math, which was always the same, never changing, a source of comfort in its predictability.
There had been no more letters. Each night after work Mark would drive home, buoyed by the prospect of a letter sitting patiently in his mailbox, waiting to be opened, but the only mail he received were bills. Alex had not written to him in almost a year. It was a painful truth to face, but Mark had to accept that she’d moved on with her life and forgotten about him.
The hardest part was that he struggled to forget about her. It had been three years since Alex had left Woodsdale to study at Princeton, and still Mark found himself sniffing at the wind, thinking he’d caught the last fragments of her delicious scent. He’d awaken in the night, hot and panting after yet another dream where she was the main star.
While Alex was out living her life, forgetting all about her old math teacher, Mark was frozen in time, unable to move forward, unable to forget.
His friend had been right; he was in a funk. But it wasn’t a job-related funk, it was woman related. Therefore, the only cure was to get back out into the dating world and stop waiting for the letter and its author, which were clearly never going to arrive.
Mark found the prospect of dating oddly daunting. He wasn’t short of female admirers, even doing his grocery shopping he’d find that women cornered him to start making idle chat about the weather or the produce. He’d play along but never wanted to take things further. He was a firm believer in chemistry, and when he’d first seen Alex, something deep in his heart had stirred, even though she was a student and off-limits. But no other woman had made him feel that way. Perhaps no one ever would again.
At Woodsdale High there was a young female art teacher who’d started the previous year. She was tall with bobbed blonde hair, blue eyes and a smile that showed too many teeth. Mark was not interested in her, but she made her desire for him extremely obvious. She’d regularly enter his classroom just to ask about his day or if he needed a lift home. Despite his clear disinterest, she’d been persistent for nearly twelve months, which meant she was perhaps as lonely as Mark was. He decided that in Alex’s continued radio silence, he owed it to himself to start dating once more.
That afternoon, after the students had run out into the late afternoon sunshine, eager to escape the oppression of full-time education, Sophie Lars had predictably come and knocked tentatively on Mark’s classroom door.
“Come in,” he instructed, not looking up as he graded papers.
“Hi, Mark.” Sophie blushed nervously within the doorway.
“Hi, Sophie.”
“I was just on my way out and thought I’d check in and see how your day had been.”
“Same crap, different day.” Mark shrugged as Sophie laughed overzealously at his comment.
“That’s exactly how I feel.” She batted her eyelashes at him, but the gesture came across as awkward and unnatural. She lacked the effortless femininity that seemed to ooze from Alex, making her every move seem overtly sexual, yet she was oblivious to the spell she cast over men.
As Mark looked up at Sophie his mind instantly recalled the instant when Alex had lingered in his doorway, breaking off their relationship, pulling away from him. He’d hated that doorway ever since. But this was the start of a new era in his life, when he wouldn’t pine for someone who didn’t care for him in return.
“Sophie, I was wondering what you were doing tonight?” Mark asked, putting on his most dashing smile.
“Tonight?” She was instantly flustered by the question. “Oh, erm, feeding my cat, listening to some Joni Mitchell, my usual evening, really.”
“Do you fancy going out for a beer?”
“Yes!” Sophie replied emphatically. “Yes, that would be lovely!”
Mark smiled, though internally he felt nothing. His heart remained empty and hollow. There was no magical movement within it to suggest that this was the start of something beautiful.
****
“I was so surprised when you asked me out,” Sophie gushed over her beer. She was wearing more makeup than usual, having clearly made an effort for her date.
“Well, I thought it was about time we got to know each other.”
“Oh, absolutely! You are such an enigma, Mark Simmons. I want to know all about you!”
“There isn’t much to know.” Mark waved his hand modestly.
“I bet there is. I bet you’re just full of interesting stories.”
And so Mark talked about the more mundane aspects of his life: where he was from, why he’d gone into teaching, but he found himself being overly cagey about the topic of college.
“I went to UCLA,” Sophie explained. “I loved it there. College is such an important time in someone’s life, so instrumental to their adult development, don’t you think?”
“No, not at all,” Mark retorted a little too sharply. “I think college is just an excuse to get drunk, sleep around and neglect your life back home.”
Taking a long drink from his beer, Mark thought of Alex, off at Princeton and living it up, probably partying each night and not even giving him a second thought. He resented himself for being unable to give up thinking about her. He’d torture his mind, imagining her with another man, being intimate as she had been with him. But then, he’d let her go; he’d known the risks.
“Sophie, can I ask you something?”
“Yes, of course,” Sophie replied too eagerly.
“Do you believe in the old adage that ‘if you love someone, you let them go, and if they come back, they’re yours, and that’s how you know’?”
Sophie frowned a little at the question, pursing her thin lips slightly, and then shook her head. “No, I think that if you love someone, you wouldn’t let them go. There is a risk that they won’t return.”
“But you do it for them if it’s in their best interest to go.”
“If they actually go, though, does that not mean that they don’t love you in return?” Sophie asked the question simply, but it entered Mark’s chest like a bullet.
Looking across the small booth at Sophie, Mark was finally confronted with the unavoidable truth. While he loved Alex, she did not love him back, and there was nothing more pathetic than unrequited love. Mark was done wallowing after a woman who would never return. He was a young man in the prime of his life, and it was high time he started behaving as such.
“Sophie, how about we cut the small talk and just go back to my place?” Mark was unapologetically direct. A woman with a higher opinion of herself would have slapped him hard for being so blunt, but Sophie looked elated, like a child being presented with a mountain of toys on Christmas morning.
Back at his apartment, Mark made love to Sophie on his couch, not yet wanting to invite her into his bed, the bed where he’d been physical with Alex. Sophie was a poor lover, unresponsive and rigid, bound by the constraints of her own insecurities. Not like Alex, who was confident and enjoyed every minute.
But Alex was gone and just a memory; Sophie was real. Mark felt that in time she’d get better in bed, and for the time being at least, he wasn’t alone. He kissed her on the mouth and willed himself to feel something, at least something temporary to help him finally get over Alexandra Heron once and for all.
****
“We’re seniors, bitches!” Ashley de
clared as she threw open the front door to Kappa Pi.
“I think the whole campus heard you.” Alex smirked as she walked up the front garden, pulling along her own bag and one of her friend’s many suitcases.
“Come on, it’s exciting, our last chance to rule the roost here!”
Alex shrugged in a noncommittal gesture.
“I need you to rally some enthusiasm for our last year. You were giddy with excitement during the drive down! Aren’t you glad I finally pulled you away from Oscar so you could have some girl time!”
“Yeah, it was fun.” Alex smiled.
“So where is all that energy? Where is the girl who mooned an old man on the interstate?” Ashley giggled at the memory.
“I just… now we’re back here, it’s real, you know? This is our last year here, our last chance to do this, and then we’ll be in the real world and not together all the time.” Alex’s shoulders slumped with sadness.
Ashley wrapped an arm around her best friend and nodded knowingly.
“Alex, I’m sad too that this is our last year here together, but that’s all the more reason to make it count. This is the fourth and final time we get to do this, so let’s do it in style and go out with a bang!”
“You’re right!” Alex declared, sounding more enthused.
“That’s the spirit! Now wake up this house and tell them what the hell we are!” Ashley instructed in a loud and passionate voice as though she were a football coach giving a mid-game pep talk during a playoff match.
Alex smiled at her friend, wishing she could mentally photograph each and every moment they spent together so that it would forever be committed to memory, never losing its magic or potency.
Then she turned her head into the Kappa Pi house and shouted at the top of her lungs:
“We’re seniors, bitches!”
****
For Alex the jubilance of her senior year was short lived. All of her classes were tougher than previous years, the assignments requiring more of her time. The visions she had of a fun-filled final year turned out to be mere illusions.
Letters of Love (Lessons in Love) Page 12