Casualties

A few weeks passed up until the point where Kennedy only had two and a half weeks until school ended. She had talked to Jack a little bit but didn’t tell him what had happened because she didn’t want him to feel bad about advising her to do something when all it did was hurt her worse. She avoided Alex as best she could, but since Jack was her only friend it made it kind of difficult to avoid him.
He tried to talk to her a few times and left messages on her phone more often than not but she just ignored them. She still loved him more than she’d loved anyone or would ever love anyone again and each day she cried for a while when she went to bed at the mere thought of him and being around him made it that much harder.
She often had to go to parties with Jack and would see Alex flirting it up with some girl that Kennedy either knew or didn’t. It didn’t really matter, what mattered was that she saw that he was moving on even though Jack had convinced her on more than one occasion that that was the opposite of the truth. He was hurting more than ever and he was just having sex with girls to stop thinking about her which just made Kennedy feel worse.
Kennedy hadn’t had sex with anybody since Carl and everybody was spreading rumors about what happened between her and Alex, some things were completely atrocious but some of them were true, like that Alex had sex with The Skank and that was why Kennedy got mad, but some people also said that Kennedy gave Alex and STD which is why he broke it off with her. She hated gossip. Especially when it was about her, but over the years of having sex with numerous amounts of people you just kind of get used to people talking shit (true and not) about you.
Her mother hadn’t been home much and Kennedy was just about positive that Lorelei was seeing Rob again and was just unwilling to tell Kennedy because she didn’t want Kennedy to be disappointed or she didn’t want Rob to meet Kennedy because he’d want her more than he actually wanted Lorelei. People always scoff at that, but it had happened with them before which was why, eventually, Lorelei stopped introducing her boyfriends to Kennedy.
Kennedy walked into her room after Jack left her house and she grabbed her phone off her bed and she saw that she had three missed calls and one voicemail. She dialed in her voicemail and listened.
One. “Kennedy, I need you. I know that you try to pretend that I don’t exist, but I do and I need you. I love you more than you’ll ever know and I just need to be with you. I miss you so much and I miss being with you. I want to ask you to do it again – the window. If you want me to come up then leave your window open and if you want me to go away forever then shut it. I’m seriously hoping that you leave it open because I would give anything to hold you one last time. I love you.” A very drunk Alex.
She let out a deep breath and looked at her window. It was wide and took up the majority of the side of her wall. She’d left it shut because she didn’t want to be reminded of it being open and him sneaking into her room to sleep with her. She had even left the blinds down and the curtains over it so that she wouldn’t have to think about it.
She erased it immediately and shut her phone. She sat down on her bed and started typing up an english assignment but her mind couldn’t focus enough to actually comprehend what she was writing – it was wandering to places that she knew it shouldn’t be wandering. Alex places. A place in the past where she and Alex had sex, cuddled, and talked for hours. That kind of place. She didn’t want to think about it though, in fact, it was the last thing she wanted to think about.
Her phone started buzzing next to her. She reached for it and answered when she saw that it was her mom, “Hello?” she asked.
“Hey, honey, it’s me,” her mom said, sounding ecstatic, from the other line.
“What’s up?” Kennedy asked, now welcoming the thoughts of Alex.
“I just wanted to let you know that I’m not going to be home tonight, but I’m going to be back tomorrow when you get home from school and… there’s someone I want you to meet. Anyway, it’s going to be a surprise so just make sure that you’re home as soon as possible and that no one comes to the house with you. As much as I love Alex and Jack I think that I should introduce this person to you alone first,” her mom said.
“Sure mom, whatever you say,” Kennedy said, not really caring whatever it was her mom had to say or whoever it was her mom wanted her to meet the only thing that got her was her mother saying how much she loved Alex.
“You’ll really like it, I promise,” her mom said then hung up. Kennedy shut her phone and set it down on her night table.
She didn’t really care who her mom was going to introduce her to because odds were that it was Rob because of course they’d gotten back together. She always gets back with the ones that hurt her the most, never the ones who actually love her.
Kennedy did her homework until nine o’clock and then decided that it was time to go to bed because she had nothing else to do and no one else to talk to. She shut off her lights and crawled into her bed, staring at her window, wondering if she should open it or if she should just leave it closed. Her head told her to leave it closed but her heart told her to leave it open. If she really loved Alex as much as she said she did then she knew she should have left it open but her head got the better of her.
She flipped over onto her other side so that she would stop thinking about it because she knew that it would be better if she just leaved it shut instead of even considering opening it for him.
It was around midnight and Kennedy had fallen fast asleep, but Alex had just gotten to her house. He saw her window and at first he was going to leave, just walk away like he promised her he would in the message if she left it shut, but he couldn’t. He wanted to talk to her. Needed to talk to her.
He climbed up to her window and started banging on the window as hard as he could to get Kennedy to wake up.
When Kennedy first woke up she was scared that someone, like a burglar, was there or a rapist but then she remembered that Alex had wanted to come up that night. Kennedy flipped around and saw Alex dangling from her roof and she opened her window.
Before she could even get a word out he swung through her window and she immediately shut it again. “What are you doing here, Alex?” she asked. This was the first time they’d talked since she told him that she didn’t want to be with him in an actual relationship even though she loved him more than he would ever know.
“Kennedy, I needed to see you. That’s why I asked you to leave your window open,” Alex said as though it were obvious.
“Yeah, I know, that’s what your message said, too,” she said, not looking at him because she didn’t want to break down with him there. She folded her arms across her chest and looked directly at the ground with every word he or she said.
“Why didn’t you leave it open?” he asked her after a moment. He sounded genuinely hurt and in pain, but not as much as her.
“Because I didn’t want you coming here, because I didn’t want to talk to you. Didn’t you understand that from all the calls of yours that I’ve ignored and the ones I haven’t returned? I do not want to talk to you Alex Gaskarth,” she yelled the last part at him but it felt like someone was stabbing her in the heart with tiny little knives.
He looked at the ground and shoved his hands in his pockets, “I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t really think… Jack just kept telling me that you still loved me and that I needed to try and talk to you and be with you because you were more in love with me than I was with you,” he told her, and looked at her from underneath his eyelashes, almost looking for confirmation that what Jack had told him had been true.
“Well I don’t,” Kennedy said, her tongue sharp as knives, the biggest lie she had ever told.
Alex looked like he’d been slapped but he nodded anyway. “I guess I should go then,” he said, not looking at her. He stood there for a minute and he was about to walk out but then wrapped his arms around her tiny body compared to his and she couldn’t move because she didn’t want to cry. He smelled exactly how he used to and he was soft and she never wanted him to let her go, but a few seconds later he did and he was out her door, down the stairs, and out of her house.
She stood there and let out short little breaths at a time. She couldn’t breathe and then the tears came. They came to the surface and her legs crumpled under her just like they did when they broke it off and she cried on her floor for well over two hours. She hugged her knees to her chest and tried to regain all the control that she’d been trying to get ever since she and Alex had split up but all of her control that she had worked so hard to get had left the minute he hugged her, touched her.
She didn’t want to do anything except for cry for the rest of the day, but she knew that she needed to go to school since she had finals because it was a week or so until it was out for the summer.
Her shower used to be her refuge but after Alex and she split up she stopped using her shower because whenever she did she would have memories flood her of their time in the shower together which would make her break down even worse so she ended up using her mother’s shower whenever she needed to because it’s not like her mom was home often enough to really care anyway.
She showered in her moms shower and then went and made herself some breakfast because it was already four by the time she stopped crying and she decided to just get a head start on everything. She did some yoga and started doing her hair and makeup and picked out a simple pair of ripped jeans with a black tank top and a pair of flip flops to wear to school even though flip flops were against the school dress code.
She dialed Jack’s number, “Hello?” he answered, sounding distracted.
“Hey, am I picking you up today?” she asked him getting in her car.
“If you don’t mind. When will you be here?” he asked her.
“Well, I’m in the car now but I was going to stop and get some coffee so you can come with me or not,” she told him.
“Not. I’ll see you soon,” he said then hung up.
She stopped by Starbucks and luckily she beat the morning traffic, “Hey, what can I get for you?” the barista behind the counter asked her.
“Can I get a 20 oz. skim iced caramel latte with three shots instead of two?” she asked, pulling her wallet out of her purse and getting it ready to give to her.
“That’ll be 4.67,” the barista said as she started making Kennedy’s difficult drink. Kennedy gave her a five and she gave Kennedy back the change.
She left, got in her car, and started on her way to Jack’s house. It wasn’t that far of a drive since one of the closest Starbucks was about 2 minutes away from his house. Kennedy got there and honked her horn to let him know that she was there. She turned off the car and grabbed one of her cigarettes and lit up. She took a deep, long drag from it and exhaled after her window was open. Jack came running out and got into her hand. “Let’s go,” he said and she took off down the road. Jack looked at her. “You know that smoking can kill you, right?” he asked her and she chuckled.
“Yeah, but I’d say it was worth it,” she told him and then pulled into the school parking lot. She saw Alex waiting for Jack by the doors they went into.
“How’d it go with him last night?” Jack asked because of course Alex would have told him.
“It didn’t. He hugged me and I cried after he left and I told him I didn’t love him,” Kennedy told him, gave him a half smile then got out of the car before Jack could respond.
“Wait,” Jack said hopping out of the car, “you told him you didn’t love him?”
“Yes. I just can’t deal with all of this anymore and he was just making it worse,” she told him.
“You know that that is going to destroy him. He’s been holding on because I kept telling him that you do love him, and you do, right?”
She paused, “Of course I do, but I don’t need him knowing that,” she told him then walked away from him and started toward her side of the school.
Jack walked toward Alex. “Hey,” Jack said.
“I miss her,” Alex told him.
“I know you do,” Jack said back.
“What did she say to you?” Alex asked, shaking his hair back and trying to regain control of himself before going into school.
“She just told me what happened last night, but even though she told you she doesn’t love you anymore she does,” Jack told him, worried about his best friend.
“No, I don’t think she does,” Alex said looking down at the ground.