Too Far

01: Hallucinations

The veterinary field at Auburn was a hard one to get into. Luckily, I was smart. Only smart enough to just make it, considering my undergrad years were, in fact, completed at Auburn. Let me tell you this, though, the brutal truth: maintaining an amazing G.P.A. is a tough thing to do when you have one thing dominating your thoughts.

Or rather, one person.

I mean, here I was, four years later and ready to kick off my career in college football and my school in the veterinary field, and I still couldn't get over her. I was a pathetic excuse for a human being. I mean, surely someone would be over the death of their girlfriend after this long, right?

Right?

Well, of course, it had taken me two of those years to accept the death. For the first two, I had kept a board full of places she could be and, for any leave I had for Christmas or Spring Break, I spent it going to those places and searching. It was all for naught; Louise was nowhere to be found. My parents were growing quite annoyed. After all, why pine after a girl you only dated for a few months? And why search for her even after she's gone?

Of course, Selena refused to go to Harvard after Louise's disappearance. She could hardly go a single day without crying about it all at first, so she followed Jay, her boyfriend, to Auburn. So the whole kitten caboodle was here without their main source of happiness accompanying them.

Depressing, right?

That's not even all of it. My dad, living close to the campus, had a new wife and, get this, she looked too much like Louise for me to visit often enough. I couldn't help but wonder if Louise's mother had faked her death, and if Louise had as a side effect of being in that family. Maybe faking death was hereditary.

Turned out, after a brief study of genes and hereditary behavior, I concluded that that was not, in fact, on the list of hereditary things passed from a mother to her daughter. Therefor, Jordan Parker was not, in fact, Louise's mother. Really, she wasn't even Jordan Parker, anymore.

She was Jordan Dean. My mother wasn't happy about it all, but she'd also gone and found herself a new boyfriend. He was ridiculously "hip" and had hair longer than my mother's pixie cut, but you can't judge a book by its cover, right?

That's why I dug a little deeper. Now, rather than his cover, I'm judging him by the felony charges I managed to have Selena dig up and the weed I found in one of his boots. As it turns out, he's dealing and begged me not to tell my mother. I don't see her often enough to let a little weed spoil our visits.

Louise's funeral had never taken place. It felt wrong to do it two years after, when we'd finally given in to the terrible fact: Louise was gone. Selena had still barely accepted it, and she was just about to finish college to have a degree in cosmetology. She cut my hair anytime I needed. Jay, who had given up his nickname of J.P. in his first year of college, even let her practice makeup styles on him.

As long as she didn't try and make him wear it out, no matter how beautiful he looked.

I walked into my dorm after football, heading straight to my bedroom. It had been a particularly rough day. It was Halloween and I planned on holing up in my bedroom and watching Louise's favorite Halloween movies. My life was completely pathetic and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.

Of course, like any other college kid, I tried to drown my sorrows in girls. It didn't work. They were all fake and moved on to a new boy every day. I, however, could barely bring myself to look at them without thinking about Louise. How could a dead girl have so much influence over me?

Like I said, pathetic.

I twirled the ring hanging on my wall absentmindedly. The jewels in it still shone in the light when I turned it. Sighing, I opened my closet and grabbed some clothes, ignoring the diagram of possible places Louise could have been. There were pins in each place I'd checked.