Casualties

Kennedy drove in her lonesome to school all week long. She’d never realized before how much she really relied on the guys to keep her time, not doing homework, exciting and fun. She managed to avoid Alex and Jack all week long until Friday.
She had been walking down the hallway to her english class and she looked up for a split second and there’s Alex with his hand propping himself up on a locker with The Skank leaning up against it, holding her books tight to her chest, and laughing at every word he said. He did look up briefly and saw Kennedy looking at them, but she quickly averted her eyes and continued walking.
Seeing that scene had made her want to go to the girls’ restroom and stay in the biggest stall all period long and just ball her eyes out, but she didn’t. She had an essay due on The Bell Jar so she decided to go to class, but it was like after she saw him that one time she saw him all over the school throughout the entire day.
She just kept reminding herself that there was only just over a month left of school and then she would be out and wouldn’t have to worry about running into him or seeing him with somebody else for at least three months, until their senior year started up and by then she highly doubted that he would even remember what happened between them let alone acknowledge her if he did remember.
Not only did she see him with The Skank but she saw him with two cheerleaders, a girl from her chemistry class named Lauren, and some other girl who she’d seen him talk to before now.
Kennedy walked out to her car after her last class and saw somebody leaned up against the hood of her car the way Alex used to and at first she thought it was Alex, until the figure came into recognition and she realized that it was Jack waiting for her. Apparently he was done with being ignored like he had never mattered to her.
She considered turning around and staying in the school until he left, but he had already looked up and spotted her so she kept walking over there and just as she got there he got off the hood of her car and stared at her, “Kennedy,” he said like he was going to say a full sentence but didn’t know how to finish it.
“Hi, Jack,” she said unevenly. She crossed her arms across her chest and slouched down a little bit to make herself look less uncomfortable even though to Jack it said just the opposite.
“Kennedy, I really want to talk to you,” he said and he had a pleading look in his eyes.
“Jack, I told you I really can’t do this,” she reminded him and just being near him reminded her too much of Alex and it took all the energy she had to not let tears stream down her face right that instant.
Jack paused and took a long second to evaluate Kennedy and decided that this was not the place to have this conversation, “Let me tell you what, if you let me come over right now so we can discuss everything then I won’t make you have this confrontation with me right here and now, but if you don’t then I will, Kenne,” he told her. She didn’t want either option. The option she wished he’d offered instead would be to crawl into a shell on the beach and just stay there until Alex had completely forgotten her.
“Fine,” she said, “come over, but just you and I.” She passed him and walked to the driver’s side of her car and he quickly got in the passenger seat and buckled up. She tried to drive as slow as humanly possible for her because she was hoping that she could find a way out of having this conversation with Jack, but nothing came to mind except to push him out of her moving vehicle, but she knew that that was not a very plausible option.
They arrived at her house and he was the first one to get out of the car. They didn’t exchange one single word to each other the entire ride there and she just had to remind herself to take deep breaths. She didn’t even know why she was acting this way with Jack since it wasn’t even him that she had something happen with, but she got out of the car and locked it up then followed Jack up her walkway and to her porch then let them both inside.
She took off her shoes and set down her bag and he did the same, “Kennedy, can we go upstairs to your room?” he asked her, shoving his too-big-for-jean-pocket hands into his skinny jeans. She nodded and led the way up there even though he’d been up there a million times before, but this time felt different.
She shut the door behind them and he turned around and gave her a gigantic bear hug that made her go rigid. She was used to gestures like this from Jack, but it just took her by surprise that she was unable to move or even get out a syllable. He released her and sat on her bed, “Kennedy, I want you to tell me what happened,” he told her and patted a spot next to him on her bed.
She looked down at the ground and went and sat on the spot where he had patted, but brought her knees to her chest so she was less accessible. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Jack. I mean, we had a fling and it ended and that’s just that,” she told him nonchalantly with a shrug of her shoulders.
“Come on, Kennedy, we both know that there’s more to it than that or else neither you nor Alex would be acting this way. Now, he told me the gist of what happened, how you got together, and how it ended. Kennedy, I just want you to know that I didn’t tell you to hurt you because I love you, I just honestly thought you knew and when you didn’t I thought it was a juicy piece of gossip to spread about with my friend. I’m truly sorry for being the main cause of all this hurt both you and he are feeling right now,” he apologized, but all she really got from it was that Alex wasn’t doing so great either, but it sounded like he was doing about as great as she was, he was just always better at hiding it.
When she still didn’t say anything to him he let out a big, exasperated sigh and touched her leg, “At least tell me this, do you love him as much as he loves you?”
That’s what got her. She couldn’t contain it anymore, she burst into tears and let her head sink to her knees and her jeans got stained with tears, but she just kept crying. She missed him more than she’d ever missed anyone and she had missed a lot of people. “Jack, I am so in love with him,” she told him through her sobs.
“This is great, Kenne, you guys can be together,” he told her with enthusiasm. She looked at him like he was crazy. “What?” he asked her, with a confused look on his face.
“I can’t get together with him, Jack,” she told him wiping her nose with her sleeve.
“Why not?” he asked, still confused.
“Because I can’t,” she told him, but she really didn’t know the answer to that question herself.
“But Kennedy, you love him and he loves you. He has been dying without you and you made him so happy, I just want both of you to be happy and if you love him and he loves you then I don’t really see the problem,” he admitted like there was something wrong with not knowing.
“I can’t. If being with him, and not actually even having a relationship with him, hurt me this bad then I don’t want to know what would happen if we got seriously involved,” she told him because it sounded like the best answer.
“What do you mean you weren’t in a relationship?” Jack questioned, confused about something else.
“Oh, so he didn’t tell you that part,” she said with an amused smile.
“What part?”
“The only reason Alex and I had a ‘relationship’ was because it was no strings attached and we could have sex with whoever we wanted whenever we wanted without the other getting mad and we were just fuck buddies. Nothing more,” she explained to him. Apparently Alex had left that minuet detail out.
“He definitely didn’t tell me that part,” Jack said to her, with apology written all in his eyes.
“Yeah, well, that’s why we can’t get back together. I broke the bargain. I got mad and jealous and I tried to get revenge by having sex with The Skank’s boyfriend,” she said and her lip curled just thinking about her.
Jack cracked up laughing.
“What? What’s so funny?” Kennedy demanded, hurt that he was laughing at her pain.
“I just think it’s funny that you refer to Miranda as The Skank and that you actually had sex with Carl. He’s so dumb, I didn’t think you had sex with stupid guys,” he told her, quoting what she had once said.
“It was simply for revenge purposes,” she claimed and stuck her nose slightly in the air.
“In any case, I think that both you and Alex are being really dumb about this. I know you guys didn’t tell me because you didn’t want it to feel awkward with me around, but Kennedy, I’ve been waiting for this day to happen since Alex and I first met you. He has honest-to-god liked you for that long,” Jack told her and it kind of took her by surprise. She never knew that Alex had actually had feelings for her before they started fooling around. “What?” Jack asked after seeing Kennedy’s confused look, but then it dawned on him, “Oh my god, you didn’t know that either?!” he exclaimed in shock.
“What do you mean ‘either’? What else don’t I know?” she asked.
“I just meant that I’m the one who keeps telling you things like Miranda and now this, god, Kennedy, for being such a smart girl you are really oblivious,” he told her with a chuckle. She wiped the tears off her cheeks that stayed there, but for now they had stopped flowing.
Jack always did make her feel better, but it still reminded her too much being with Alex.
Jack placed his hand on Kennedy’s hand, “Kennedy, you know that you need to be with him,” he told her softly and delicately. It was almost like he’d done this a thousand times before.
She looked up into Jack’s eyes and he smiled down at her. She leaned forward and kissed him and he was so surprised that he didn’t respond at first, but then he grabbed a hold of her waist and brought her closer to him. Her heart was beating because it didn’t feel right. She loved Jack, but it didn’t feel right the way it did with Alex. But she continued. She kissed her way down his neck in a hurry, but he quickly put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back lightly.
“Kennedy, what are you doing?” he asked her in an urgent voice.
She looked at him and tears started swelling up in her eyes, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said over and over again and put her head in her hands and propped herself up with her elbows on her knees. “You’re just so caring Jack, and I love you so much that I thought I could kiss you and make the entire Alex thing go away,” she told him being 100% honest.
He smiled, “As much as I love you, Kennedy, you and I both know that that did not feel right,” he told her and put his hand on her back.
“That’s true,” she told him and brought herself up from her position and took a deep breath. “But I don’t know what to do,” she confessed to Jack.
“You need to go to Alex and just talk to him. I know Alex and so do you, you know that he will forgive you for all of this because he loves you, so don’t say you’re not going to do it just because you think that he’ll turn you down because he won’t,” he told her and she knew he was right, but she honestly didn’t want him to be. She wanted Alex back, but she’d become so accustomed to the hurt that she’d been feeling that it would feel weird to let all of that go so that she could be happy with Alex.
“I’ll think about it,” she agreed and Jack just nodded with a half smile on his face.
“Alright, now, as much as I would love to stay, I can’t. I’ve got to go, but I will see you later, alright? Please, even if you don’t go to Alex, promise me that you won’t end our friendship just because of him. I care about you too much to let you go,” he told her as he stood up from her bed.
“I promise,” she said and looked up at him. “Do you want me to take you down?” she asked, hoping that the answer would be no.
“No, Kennedy, I can show myself out,” he told her and left her room silently and shut her door behind him.
Kennedy waited until she heard her weighted door downstairs shut to lie down on her bed. She couldn’t help but think about Alex. She wondered if he really would take her back and completely forgive her like Jack said he would.
Before she even thought about it, she grabbed her cell phone and dialed his number. It rang one. Two. Three. “Hello?” said a girl’s voice on the other end.
Her heart stopped.
“Hi, is Alex there?” she asked.
“Um, well, we just got done showering together and he’s still drying off. Do you want me to give him a message?”
She hung up. She shut her phone. Apparently Jack had been wrong. He was still having sex with The Skank and she knew that it was The Skank because she sounded just like her.
Kennedy curled her knees to her chest and started a new stream of tears that wanted to go down her soft cheeks.

[.x.][.x.][.x.]

Alex walked out with a towel wrapped around the lower half of his body and saw Miranda lying on his bed, wrapped in his sheets and nothing more. “Someone just called you,” Miranda informed him as she flipped over onto her back and sprawled out her arms.
Alex nodded and walked over to his phone without a word to Miranda. He picked it up, “It doesn’t say I have a missed call,” he said, wondering if it had actually been Miranda’s phone that she had heard.
“No, I answered it,” she told him like it was no big deal.
“You answered it?” he asked, baffled.
“Well, yeah,” she said as she sat up, “it was right next to me and it was ringing so I picked it up.”
“Who was it?” Alex asked in an urgent pissed off voice.
“I don’t know, she didn’t say,” Miranda said in a terrified way because she’d never seen Alex mad before.
“What did you say to her?”
“I told her that we’d just got done showering and that you were still drying off,” she said, proud of herself that she remembered.
“You told her we were showering together?” he exclaimed.
“Yeah, it was the truth,” Miranda told him as if it were obvious.
Alex shook his head, looked down at his phone, and scrolled to where it said all the calls he’d received. Kennedy. Kennedy had been the one who had called and talked to Miranda, “It was Kennedy!” he yelled at Miranda ferociously enough to make her yelp and jump back a little. “Get out,” he told her and pointed toward his door.
She gathered her clothes and put them on and then walked out of his room without another word.
Alex wondered if he called her back if she’d actually pick up, but he decided to do it even though the odds were great that she wouldn’t.

[.x.][.x.][.x.]

Kennedy’s phone didn’t stop ringing all night long. She continued to click ignore because she had a pretty good guess at who it was who was calling her.
Eventually, after about 30 missed calls or so she decided to just turn off her phone. She didn’t want to talk to him.
She had given him a chance, or was about to anyway, and she was planning on being with him but he had already had some other girl at his house. Apparently Jack was wrong; he didn’t care about Kennedy anymore because now, now he had Miranda.
Kennedy didn’t eat anything all day and did what her mother always did when she was in this situation. She watched a slew of depressing movies and cried at every single one. She ate three pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and two Hagen Dazs all in the evening and when she went to bed she had to take a muscle relaxer to calm her down enough to actually fall asleep.
She tried her hardest not to think of Alex even though for the past week or so the thought of him was the only thing to help her get to sleep. She didn’t want to think about his naked body pressed up against The Skank’s naked body in the shower… a shower that he and she had shared together on numerous occasions.