Uncharted Frontier Issue 13

by Allan Kaspar

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  I had expected her to call me that night or sometime that week. As it turned out I didn’t hear from her until a couple days before the dance.

  On the night of, she and two of her friends picked me up from my house in a limo. We then picked up their dates and went to a French restaurant in Bethesda. I couldn’t read the menu so I ordered French onion soup and was hungry for the entire night.

  The dance itself was fine. Classic Wellcourt thing. Lorna and her friends tried not to vomit their spiked orange juice on the principal when we greeted him at the entrance. Shortly after that she abandoned me. She danced with her friends and I mostly stood by the sidelines drinking water and talking to other athletes.

  But at the end of the night she found me and we all got back in the limo, which I guess they had paid to wait for three hours. We dropped off in reverse and so by 1 am it was only Lorna and I in the back. She asked the driver to pull over and rolled up the window that divided us.

  Turning to me, she said, “My boyfriend broke up with me because I’m a virgin. He said he didn’t want the responsibility.”

  She put her hands on each side of my face and angled it towards her own. “You seem like a pretty responsible guy.”

  I had never thought of myself as such, but she proved to me that night, that I could in some ways be.

  Ultimately, however, it was the Michigan guy who was considered responsible by the general Wellcourt public. Lorna went back to him shortly after her and my rendezvous but he had cheated on her within a month and then she hung herself with a Juicy Couture belt his dorm room.