Chapter One
My sophomore year of college starts in two weeks. I don’t even remember what classes my college advisor signed me up for, but I really don’t care. I vaguely even remember the conversation, but I agreed politely, signed the form and left. My name is Jasmine Stanton and my story is one in which one decision, one fifteen minute period of time in my life changed everything. A moment in time, in college, where my life was supposed to be refined, defined and started, yet I don’t even know who I am any more, but I have to start at the beginning for anyone to understand. What I would give to go back to last year. High school graduation, when I stood in front of my class as valedictorian and gave the speech that they would never forget:
“This is the time that we have all waited and worked for. We have faced our challenges and defeated them. We have grown up together, many of us, from children to young adults and now we are going to find our paths in the world. While we will be leaving behind our past, a part of it will always be with us because it made us who we are. With courage in our countenance, faith in our hearts, the wisdom of all of those who have spent years molding us into the human beings we have become and excitement to finally get to face the world, I’m proud to say that I’m not hesitant at all – I’m ready to start running and chase my dreams. I hope you’ll join me, class of 2013…” and I threw my cap. The rest of my peers did the same and we were ready to say goodbye to high school and hello to adulthood.
I so wish I could return to that time… to the time in life when I was in control, of myself, of my feelings and of who I am – or who I thought I was. I never realized the significant power of choices…even one choice…and how it can completely change your definition of yourself forever. But, I have to start at the beginning to even understand it myself.
I am your above-average college student who studies too hard, hates my classes and I spend way more time partying than studying, but it wasn’t always like that. You see, I planned my life out exactly the way I wanted it to be and everything was going exactly as planned, until this freshman year. One night at a stupid party and my whole world changed. It didn’t just change, but is irreparable at this point. No matter what I do from now on, for the rest of my life, one stupid mistake will live with me, in my mind, and be a part of who I am, forever. I can’t take it back or undo it. No matter what anyone says, there are things in life that can’t be taken back. What is it, you ask? Where should I begin?
I guess you could call me the preppy girl in school that everyone hated. My hair is medium brown, wavy, and always perfect without even trying, or so I’m told. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about primping or how I look – I just shower, dress and start my day. My dad is a lawyer who spends all of his free time at his office, probably either working on a case that he already knows inside and out just to stay away from my mother, or screwing his secretary, Jeannie. My mother pretends not to know, so she fills her mind with cotillions and bridge parties so that no one will know just how miserable she and my father really are. Jeannie isn’t his first and she won’t be his last.
I used to wonder why they stayed together, but I know now that they stayed together for me. Surely they knew that I could always hear their fights, even through a closed door, or maybe they just don’t care, but I’ve known about my father’s extracurricular activities for as long as I can remember. They are the typical married couple who stayed together “for the sake of the kids”.
What they did was teach me how NOT to be married. I spent most of my time growing up, when I wasn’t studying, watching love stories like “The Notebook” or “Pretty in Pink”, dreaming about perfect love and imagining that somewhere, in the world in a faraway place, that such love really exists. I even bought a dollhouse, one that you can decorate and paint yourself, and painted it and decorated it identical to the one in the movie “The Notebook”, wishing someday that my Noah would come along. Needless to say, I have the dollhouse, but I’m still waiting. Noah found his love in the movie in that house – I sort of consider it my good luck charm.
I still believe that real love does exist, but I don’t know that I believe that it always lasts forever. I think that there are a few very lucky people who find it and who know what it is and are smart enough to cherish and nourish it so that it never dies. I see elderly couples in public who still hold hands, and I literally start to cry. I even asked one couple once – I couldn’t help it – if they knew how lucky they were and they just smiled and said, “Yes, dear, we always have.” They knew what I was asking and knew that they were blessed. Love is a living thing, not just a feeling that stays stagnant forever. It has to be cared for and tended to, just like anything precious that you are responsible for. Too bad my parents didn’t understand that concept about their own marriage. Or their only daughter.
I don’t know how I managed to stay focused growing up. Maybe it was the big house, or all of the money, or watching my friends all screw up their own lives and hearing about their troubles. Friends who I had known from grade school were doing such stupid things like making out with other girls, or proclaiming to be bisexual or getting drunk at parties and posting videos on facebook for the world to see…I couldn’t understand if they were just screaming for attention or really just didn’t care.
Instead of worrying about whether or not I was going to start my period every month like the rest of them, I spent my time matching plaid hair bows to my Ralph Lauren plaid shirts that I always wore with khaki pants. My friends would spend hours plowing through fashion rags and trying out new nailpolish colors or weird clothes, but my wardrobe was pretty simple. I hit the Ralph Lauren racks each season and just loaded up on the newest colors and bought new penny loafers and that was pretty much all I needed. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a journalist. I wasn’t going to be just any journalist – I was going to meet Barbara Walters one day and become a household name. I wasn’t going to stop until I got there.
When we all became seniors in high school, life became more real. SAT tests were scheduled, college letters started coming in the mail, and we began to count down the months, then the weeks, and then the acceptance and rejection letters started coming in from various colleges. Before we knew it, we were standing outside James S. Hall Memorial Stadium, throwing our graduation caps into the air and standing still, waiting for the counselor to tell us what to do next.
But once we threw the caps into the air, there was no counselor – only stillness. Some of my friends went off to colleges no one had ever heard of while others went to finer, Ivy League colleges. My best friend Sabrina and I ended up both getting accepted to Memphis State University, which was an unbelievable feat, and decided to room together in the dorms. They weren’t exactly luxurious, but we wanted to experience the whole college experience, day by day, take a million pictures, get married one day to the one and only true love that we were sure we would find in college and share our pictures with our children one day while we told a million stories about our adventures.
Sabrina wanted to go into pre-med, or so she thought until her second year, and I already had my first journalism classes picked out. Writing was something that was second nature to me and I actually found it therapeutic to write when I was alone. I craved time alone in front of a computer when I could write, even if it was about nothing, because I could actually paint pictures or empty my thoughts with words. Sometimes, I would wake up, type thirty or forty pages of an outline for a story and then go back to sleep. When I woke, I couldn’t remember having written any of it – it seemed like there was always someone else inside of me, screaming to say something.
Since t
hird grade, teachers had been raving over this talent of mine, so I clung to it and continued to perfect it until I decided that it was the profession I should choose. But as I learned very quickly, life doesn’t always turn out the way we expect it to or plan for it to. It’s what happens while we’re making all of those plans that end up being our life story.
Chapter Two
First day of freshman year was probably the most hectic day I had ever experienced. Sabrina and I barely saw each other because of course, her classes were all in different buildings, her schedule was completely different than mine, and we both needed books that were either sold out or had to be pre-ordered. Just starting school was more difficult than anything I had ever done. But it was a total blast. Students were in total chaos, no one knew where anything was but of course, I had already mapped out my classes, had my books and I was ready to get back to the dorm and start our new life.
Of course we shared a room in the dorm. It wasn’t much and Sabrina and I didn’t agree on many things, but we did agree that the room was horrible. But we were going to make it our own, so we started hitting thrift stores, cashing in the gift cards that were given to us for graduation (along with the cash) and buying a pillow here, a poster there, and before we knew it, we had a home. Sabrina and I were officially college roommates.
Academics would be the draw to college, but the reality of going to college is the social life for most students. Of course, there were more guys to choose from than there were classes and the whole town was elbow to elbow girls checking out guys, guys checking out girls, and total strangers talking to everybody telling them anything they wanted to know. Most of it was made up, obviously (there couldn’t be that many pre-med students or guys with dads who owned Fortune 500 companies), but it was still intriguing to watch.
The journalist in me was already taking mental notes about everything – the environment, the school, the people, the total change from the safety of my room at home, and those moments when I would secretly long to be back in high school where everything was predictable and safe. Here, the only person I really knew was Sabrina. I was constantly talking into my recorder, taking notes and planning my first book about real-life experience in college – “what parents don’t want to know”.
The first week or two was absolutely a breeze. The professors all made it very clear that they valued teaching, took it very seriously and chose to make a lifetime goal out of changing the lives of young adults, in the hopes that those young adults would change a world that had become unrecognizable. Most importantly, they would tolerate “no tom-foolery” (as one older gentleman put it, followed by quiet snickers from the class). My professors happened to be all men, which made me somewhat uncomfortable. They didn’t look at your academic transcripts or treat you like high school teachers. They looked at how tight your pants were and how much after school tutoring you might be might be interested in. I hadn’t really dated in high school – in fact, on my first two dates, I only kissed one of them good night. I thought about it a lot. I really liked him, but when his tongue went into my mouth, I didn’t realize for a moment what was happening and I just stood there. It actually grossed me out. He didn’t ask me out again.
That date convinced me even more that I was maybe one of those people who wasn’t cut out for dating just yet, which was fine by me. All of my friends dated and most of them had already had sex, several times. They would talk about it over lunch while they discussed the mud on their new Prada shoes, as if it was an open topic to chat about. It seemed like they had come to college to talk about clothes and love – two things that I had no interest in at all. I listened intently and tried to see the draw to dating, but I was always more interested in what I was good at – schoolwork – and I stuck to that.
Besides being valedictorian, I was voted “Most likely to succeed”, and I decided that my goal in life would be to pursue the career that I had always dreamed of – besides becoming the next Barbara Walters, I would become the writer that had books and books on shelves that people would talk about forever. I had visions in my mind of people walking into the local bookstore – “Hi – do you have the new Jasmine Stanton book? I can’t wait to read it!” and the bookstore salesperson would say, “I just sold the last one – but we just placed the order and they should be in on Tuesday…”
I wanted to start small, maybe working for a local newspaper or magazine, but had visions of writing THE novel – the one that would become an elective course in most four year colleges. The one where the professor would discuss the sociological impact my writing had embedded into society. That was my future.
The professors treated you like peers – like they treated their other female co-teachers or female acquaintances. Many of the professors, within weeks, were dating students and many of them made it clear from the first moment that your success in their class would depend on just how much effort you were willing to put into your studies. Inadvertently, they made no secret of their interest in young college girls. Extra effort spent after hours would definitely positively influence your grade. Being a freshman in college, I was probably the only girl I knew who was still a virgin. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I had been on plenty of dates. And many of them were out for only one thing – to be the one guy who actually “got me”. But, no one ever did. I spent my time in high school, and concurrently in college, focusing on school and on the success of my work. I wondered sometimes, how many conversations had involved my name and how many guys had placed bets on being the one…I watch way too many movies.
As is always the case, the girls who wore the push-up bras and the extensions and had the filthiest mouths or chose the most sexually controversial topics to discuss in front of the class, were the ones who made the best grades or who were chosen to be the class helper. My work was impeccable, so I was one of the few that professors had no choice but to grade fairly. College was totally different than high school - I had never been in a situation where a student had to flirt or act out of character in order to succeed in schoolwork, and yet this is where I found myself.
Sabrina, on the other hand, was right at home in college. I learned so much from her and about her in the first two weeks of school than I had ever known after going to school with her for most of elementary, middle and high school. I so totally thought that I knew her, but the freedom of college changes you. In college, you are free to be whoever you want – not only were your parents not there to watch or other parents there to tattle, but anonymity gave a lot of students, including Sabrina, a new-found identity that they had never been able to openly exercise before.
It was a total shock to me the first time I saw Sabrina with a guy and a girl and the three of them holding hands and fondling each other in a way that I had never seen before. She later told me that they were just friends, but that she had ended up drinking too much and having sex with both of them at the same time and it “was a whole new world for her” that she didn’t even knew was there. She never dreamed that she could actually have sex with more than one person at a time, much less a guy and a girl – meaning that she was now bisexual – and she knew that she had truly found herself and that this had been her “problem “ all along and she didn’t ever know it.
“Sabrina, you’ve never had a problem. You’ve just gone batshit crazy. You’re not bisexual – you were drunk. What’s wrong with you? You don’t even know these people. What if they have diseases? Half of this campus probably knows what you’ve done and you haven’t been here for a month yet. Is that what you want? For people to think that you’re like that? What’s gotten into you??”
I was seriously mad and she could see it, but she didn’t seem to care. I looked at her and she flicked her hair off of her face and I noticed that she had pierced the top cartilage of her right ear. Last week, she had tattooed a butterfly on her right big toe. I grabbed her earring. Hard – I wanted it to hurt.
“What the hell is that?” I stopped walking and stood in front of her in shock. Sabri
na had always been very social at home and in high school, it was no secret that she loved boys, she always wore her jeans a little too tight or her skirts a little too short, but she had never done anything like this – at least not that she had told me. Maybe that was it. She just didn’t tell me.
“Jasmine, get real. Seriously. I mean how long do you intend on keeping up this innocent girl act and, really, who are you doing it for? College is AWESOME. I’ve never had such a fantastic time in my life as I did last night.” She paused.
“Why don’t you just come over? Come on, Jasmine - you don’t have to do anything – just come over and meet some of my new friends – I want them to be your friends, too. You’ll really like them. It’s just going to me, a couple of other girls, and a couple of guys just hanging out…really…come on Jazz…”
“THEM? Who are they? And stop calling me Jazz, like it’s some kind of party name.”
“Whatever. I’ve invited you to have one of the best times you’ll ever have. You’re going to have to grow up eventually, Jasmine. You’re my best friend, but maybe we really are just changing.” She flipped around, sure to cock her hip and walked in the other direction, unaffected completely by the conversation that had just taken place. I watched her walk away, like someone I didn’t know. I really wanted the old Sabrina back.
Chapter Three
Sabrina and I continued to grow apart, each day a little more, despite the fact that we shared a room. I walked in a couple of times and she was in the room with other people, but I would leave. I felt completely alone and really wanted to be part of her life again. It had been four months since that conversation on the Green (the hill overlooking the West side of the campus), and she had continued her new life with her new friends without me. I continued going to classes, we would talk just polite chat in the dorm room if we happened to meet, but my mind stayed on her, all of the time. I wanted to be with her, wanted to share this experience with her and maybe she was right. Maybe I was just being immature and it was time for me to change.
Girl Seduced (The Girl Interrupted Trilogy Book #1) Page 1