I Do

Chapter 27 - Neighbor in 3C

Beth’s Point of View 

I feel cruel, crueler than any villain portrayed in cinema. I feel dirty, dirtier than any manufactured girl or boy in the world who made bad choices regarding intimate decisions. I feel cheated, more cheated than I should, considering you can’t be cheated out of something that was never yours. 

And I feel alone, more than alone, stranded, isolated, abandoned, than ever before in my life. 

Ignoring my vibrating phone for the thousandth time, I allow my eyes to take part in surveying my new apartment. I’ve been here a whole week, and still, the place feels nothing like home. It doesn’t have the familiar brown stain where I spilled hot chocolate when I was thirteen, or the crack in the wall where I launched a softball when I was ten. It doesn’t have the all consuming smell of coffee, or the fridge with all the pictures and magnets marking different events in the life I shared with my family. 

It has none of it. 

It does have a nice television, which flickers with the images of Pretty Little Liars, and casts shadows around the dark living room. Lucky for me, the apartment came furnished, so the maple colored couch and dark brown rug that adorn the space are brand spanking new. 

I consider heating some hot chocolate to spill just to make the place feel less like a showroom and more like a place I would actually live. I grip my blanket tighter around my shoulders, shaking in the draped fabric as the scene unfolds before me. 

Shane used to hate it when I watched this show. He was convinced it was only a typical white girl obsession, and by liking it, it made me less of an interesting person. I begged to differ, but if I tried to bring it up, he would cover his ears or something equally childish, never giving me the chance to speak. 

I don’t miss him, I realize. Not at all. 

He wasn’t a bad person, that isn’t what I’m trying to say. He was good to me, and when we met and began dating, I’ll admit, I thought I felt it. The feeling everyone wants, everyone craves. He treated me like the special girl I wanted to be. The girl I didn’t think existed. 

He was good enough to show me that she did.

He was good enough to help me regain the parts of myself that I lost during the time spent missing people, and other parts I never knew were a part of me. 

But he also became the boyfriend I didn’t want to spend every waking moment with. His flaws I was too quick to become irritated with, like how he popped his mouth when he started speaking. Every. Single. Time. Once I made a game out of it; how many times could he do it in a minute?

I counted twenty-five. 

We were known at school for being together for an outstanding length of time, and I think that that was part of what kept us together. Not out of love, or even desire to be with one another. It just became such second nature to be each other’s significant other that we continued to be without thinking about it. 

We never talked about our future, if we would stay together after high school or if we wouldn’t. I didn’t even know if he planned on going to college. As far as I knew, he had no dreams, no aspirations, no goals. And it was the same for him; he didn’t know any of my secret dreams. The first person I had ever told was him.

It hurts to think about him. What he might be doing right now. Who he might be doing God knows what with. Was what happened special to only me? Is he thinking of me right this moment, these same thoughts, only reversed?

I probably wouldn’t ever know. 

I knew that leaving would benefit everybody, namely me, because then it would decrease the risk down to zero of anyone finding out my secret. It was very selfish, but it would’ve been more selfish to stay put and drag everyone through the mud with me.