The Girl Who Saw Through Jem

EPILOGUE

Ellis

The day I came back to Philly was somewhere in May.

The skies were beautiful in the way only God could make it so and the trees were greener than it had ever been. The sun was beaming, saturating the world in this bright colour and contrast, and streams of light appeared in any visage possible filtered from every corner of the Earth. The clouds lazily stretched itself across the sky, curling itself aloft in the bright blue skies. I fanned myself as sweat pearled down my forehead and shifted my hair away to expose my neck so the soft breeze ruffling down the pavement can brush across my skin and offer me some coolness in this stuffy, humid heat.I breathed in its sweet scent of summer and exhaled. The knot of stress piling up in my chest seemed to almost melt away. Not only was Philly different when I first left but so was I.

My dad picked me up from the train station and chatted to me about how things had been great with Paige since I left. Not to mention, my mother- Marissa- came to visit and they had a pretty cool mutual understanding about how my Dad was with someone else and my mother was with someone else, therefore they were relatively okay with how things turned out. I told him about how my dorms were decent, my friends were decent, classes have sort of began and things were challenging but engaging. I told him about how after I return from my short mid-term break, I would be experimenting in the prestigious Harvard lab for the first time. I didn't ask him about Jem- I wanted every bit of the mystery of what he had been up for the last two months to remain a mystery until my eyes grappled for him again.

I settled back in my old room. Nothing much has changed but it felt like it did. Maybe I did. The white walls remained its signature eggshell cream colour. The bedsheets were still scrupulously and stainless white, much to the satisfaction of my OCD-prone mind. Everything was still aligned symmetrically to my conditions- as if I had never left but I did. Some things did change, though. Like my closet no longer restricted itself to its restrictive, uniformed collection of pencil skirts and Donna Karan blouses. And Paige had changed the tulips into roses. 

I blew out a deep breath, ran my hand down the smooth silks and landed on the bed with a soft thump.

"You ready for the graduation?" My dad asked when he knocked on the door. I nodded.

"Let me get my bag."

It would be weird to see all my classmates in red caps and red gowns. It would be even weirder to see Jem...

My breath became shallow at the mere thought. What would I say? What would he? Should I kiss him and say everything I want to say, undiluted and unbridled, or should I be more logical, just in case he had someone else by now?

The last time I spoke to Jem was...a month ago? I don't know why. With everything going on, it just felt easier to focus on them rather than Jem and phones and texts didn't justify the importance of our conversations. It felt like, after everything, we couldn't just go back to messages on a screen and static skype calls. There was a weight behind every feeling and emotion invoked with just the simplest thought of him- a mixture of hate and love, of blood and sweat because all of this never came without strings attached. Everything about Jem was so perfect- from the way he breathed out a mixture of smoke and carbon dioxide, from the way he looked with his incorrigibly messy and rebellious hair that matched his rebellious and impulsive personality. That boy was a hurricane and so close to perfection, I was almost convinced that it didn't exist. But my endless fascination of the enigma that was Jem reminded me that he was human and humans were flawed and he was flawed in every sense of the word.