All About You

Chapter two

Chapter two 

Back to square one

Present

“Can you believe that it was him?” Dora asks for the fourth time, pacing around the room. I try to take a long deep breath, hoping the nausea will pass, but I feel like I’m going to throw up at any second. My heart is still pounding, pumping way too much blood to my head. In a matter of seconds the past is crushing back at me, and Christian’s body is lying next to me. Everything is falling apart. 

“No, I can’t,” I reply with an uneasy tone. “What the hell is he even doing here? He was supposed to be in Edinburgh.” 

She looks at me, tossing her brown hair behind her. Dora is a beautiful girl with olive eyes and long thick eyelashes. She is short, only five foot four, a petite woman with a sharp tongue. She doesn’t let people to walk over her. 

“That’s what we all heard, but he obviously didn’t go to Scotland,” she mutters. “He looks so hot. And did you see his muscles? I never knew that he worked out.”

The panic passes through my body. This wasn’t the Oliver that I used to know. The one from the past was this unpopular, nerdy teenager that everyone used to make fun of. He was always in the shadow of his brother. Today I just met a new Oliver—strong, gorgeous, and confident. And Oliver remembers; he never forgot how I used to bully him.  

“I guess he looks better,” I mumble, trying to take my mind off the man outside our building. Only a few minutes ago we got the keys to our apartment, but Dora doesn’t seem to care. She wants to know everything about the new gorgeous Oliver and the transformation that he went through. 

She flops on the sofa staring at me with her mouth wide open. “Are you blind, India? Can you not see how much he’s changed? He is so much handsomer than Christian,” she hisses. “Besides, our group in high school gave him a hard time. I always wondered—why did you hate him so much?” 

“It was never about hating him. He just annoyed me,” I tell her, although we both know that it’s a lie. She is right. I hated him because he wasn’t there for me when I needed him the most. 

“Bullshit, India. It all started after Christian—” She goes silent, not finishing that sentence that always makes me mad. She knows that I don’t react well when she mentions Oliver’s brother, Christian. 

“After the accident,” I say quietly. The uncomfortable silence blows out around us. I’ve forbidden her from talking about him. When people remind me about him I become a different person, cruel and defensive. No one knows what happened, even Dora. She thinks that I changed because I lost him.

“Yeah, after that,” she says, scratching her head. “I don’t like that new you. The old India was more fun.” 

I don’t respond, pretending to look around our new apartment. I intend to not talk about my past for the rest of the day. Oliver is in Braxton and I need to try to deal with this the best I can. Dora needs to understand that the old India has gone, and she is never coming back. 

    Dora starts talking about something else, and I’m glad that she ditches that uncomfortable subject. An hour later, she vanishes into her bedroom to deal with unpacking. 

Dora’s mum and dad divorced when she was around ten, and since then she has been floating between both parents. I don’t think that she ever got over the fact that her parents split up. Her father couldn’t see her that often, so he made sure that he gave her money to make up for the lost time. Back in high school Dora had the best clothes and the latest technological gadgets that everyone else could only dream of. She never had to chase after guys. She was popular and never had a problem with dates. We were close, but only two years ago I found out that she was suffering from depression and anxiety. She was seeing a psychologist occasionally. Apparently it had something to do with the fact that her dad wasn’t around.