Casualties

The entire weekend went by and she didn’t get one single call from Alex. She looked back on their conversation and she wondered if she was too harsh, but she immediately decided that she wasn’t. She was not his beck-and-call girl and he couldn’t come to her whenever she pleased and she had to let him know that.
She eventually received a call from him on Sunday night, at around 11 in the evening. He told her that he was sick and to not pick him up in the morning because he didn’t know when he was going to go to school next and to not even worry about it until he called her again to ask her to pick him up.
She was kind of disappointed that she would be unable to spend ten minutes alone with him after not having seen him since Friday and god knows when she’d actually be able to see him again.
A brief thought went through her head that maybe he was just pretending to be sick because he didn’t want to see her today and he knew it’d get him off the hook for not calling her all weekend, but she decided that that most likely wasn’t true. He’d want to see her just as much as she wanted to see him, right? Maybe he thought that she didn’t want to see him that much since she told him he couldn’t come over Friday night, but that still wasn’t an excuse to not see her today.
She got through the day somehow, even without the happiness of getting to hang out with Alex after school and just make out with him. It was so hard to find a guy who you could just make out with without them or you getting emotionally involved, but that’s what they had. Neither of them was hung up on each other, and they both did what (and who) they wanted and when they wanted. She was glad that the one guy she found to just make out with and have sex with just happened to be one of her best friends, but that got her wondering: what if it had been Jack?
What if Jack had been the one to make the move and what if it was them right now, secretly making out, having sex, and licking ice cream off each other’s bad-bad-no-no parts? Would it be any different than it was with her and Alex? Theoretically, no, nothing should be different because it would still be two best friends making out, but there was just something so right about her and Alex.
Jack would end up getting emotionally entangled with somebody, but Alex didn’t and never had. He didn’t love and didn’t expect to be loved, even though most of the time girls ended up falling for him and he broke their hearts. She would not be one of those girls because that’s how she was with guys. She broke their hearts. Sometimes she felt bad because they would say that she led them on, but she never led anybody on. Everybody knew her intentions up front: just sex, and nothing else.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday Alex was sick. Kennedy assumed that if it was bad enough for him to be out of school for three days then he must really be sick, but she still couldn’t believe he hadn’t called her since he told her that he wouldn’t be coming to school. She trusted him when he said that he would call the night before he came back to school, but he didn’t. She didn’t even know that he was at school, until later that day when she saw him walking in the hallways with Miranda.
Her temper flared up, but she automatically pulled herself back and reminded herself that she had no claim on him and she wouldn’t care if he was just with Miranda. It’s not like they were having sex or making out right in front of her.
She decided not to jump to assumptions since she didn’t really have anything to base it off of, but that didn’t stop her from thinking about it for the remainder of the day. She wondered if he was going to be waiting, leaned up against her car, to get a ride home or if he’d be getting a ride from Miranda. She wondered why he’d decided to start talking to her again when, just the other day, he’d told her that he didn’t care about her. She wondered why, if he was going to have sex with her, he would do that to Jack. His best friend, of all people to do that to. Was it just to get back at her for something she said, or maybe at Jack, but Alex couldn’t possibly have anything to be mad at Jack about.
“Kennedy? Are you with us?” Mr. Randal asked, in a condescending tone.
She snapped back to attention, “Sorry, what’d you say?” she asked, automatically straightening up and looking at the board to see if she could decipher anything about what they were talking about.
Mr. Randal shook his head, “Will you stay after class, please?” he asked then called on Carol to answer the question that had previously been hers. She felt dumb and low. She’d never been called on in class when she didn’t know the answer spot on, and she felt like she’d just been humiliated in front of her entire class. Everyone was staring at her, or at least that’s how it felt.
When class was over, Kennedy gathered all her things and walked over to her teachers desk, “You wanted to talk to me?” she asked Mr. Randal, who was currently looking at a stack of papers.
“Yes,” he started, set the papers down, then turned to her, “is everything okay with you lately?” he asked and placed his hands, interlaced, in his lap.
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, you used to be one of my best students, always focused in class and ready to answer questions, but now you just seem so… lacsidazical ,” he told her after trying to find the right word. “Has something new happened in your life that would make you so unfocused?”
Just having sex with my best friend, “No, not really,” she shook her head.
“Parents?” he asked, prodding. She hated it when teachers prodded.
What parents? I’ve never met my dad and my mom hasn’t been home for a week, “Everything’s good,”
“Boy problems?”
Again, just having sex with my best friend who may or may not be sleeping with his best friend’s crush, “I don’t date,” she said simply with a sly smile. It was true.
“Girl issues?”
All of them hate me and never talk to me so not many problems to have there, “I don’t really have girl friends,” she said.
“Well, I just want you to know that you can talk to me because I really want to get my old student back. You had an A+, but now you’re barely making a B. I want to get you back up there,” he said with a nod and she knew that he meant it. She was probably one of his only students who focused in his World History class.
“I will if anything comes up,” she said, and at the same time made a silent vow to herself that she would bring her grades up to an A+ because anything less than that was unacceptable, and if that meant giving up one very unlucky Alex Gaskarth, then that’s what she had to do.
Luckily, that was her last class of the day, and as she walked out of the school building, she couldn’t even wait until she got off school premises to pull out her pack of cigarettes and light up right then and there. She tossed her long dark hair behind her and put her sunglasses on the top of her head. She walked toward her car and everybody was staring at her. She was used to people staring at her, but they were staring a different way. She shook it off and walked up to her car to see that her prediction had been right. Alex was leaning up against the hood of her car, staring at her, with one foot on the ground the other on the car. He looked like a total stud. “Hey,” he greeted her and she could feel his eyes all over her; between her low cut jeans, her low cut top that came up a little too high, and the fact that it was completely see-through in the back, she couldn’t really blame him.
“Hi,” she said curtly, made her way around him and unlocked her door and let herself in. He stopped her from shutting the door and got in her way so that he was standing next to her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her, and stroked a rogue piece of curl away from her face.
“Nothing, I just had a bad class is all,” she lied then turned on the car and saw Jack walking towards them.
“Tell me,” he insisted, obviously not seeing Jack.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were back?” she asked sharply.
He looked taken aback, “My mom wanted to drive me, so that I could get excused from the days that I missed. I didn’t realize it mattered that much to you,” he said and she could tell that he was resisting the urge to smirk at her because he thought that he had caught her – he thought that she had fallen completely in love with him, of course he was forgetting the fact that they’d only been having their little fling for barely a week.
Jack walked up to them, “What are you guys talking about?” he said and he could feel the sexual tension between Alex and Kennedy.
“Nothing, my history teacher just kind of made me feel like shit,” Kennedy told Jack and he just nodded.
“Are you sure that’s all?” he asked, not looking in Alex’s direction at all.
“I’m positive. He just informed me that I have a low B,” she said and there was an audible gasp that came from Alex’s lips. “What?” she asked.
“Well, a B wouldn’t be bad for me, but for you… that must feel to you like what an F feels like to me,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. He didn’t really make sense, but she got the basic concept of what he was saying.
“I know. I just need to focus on school and only school,” she said and directed the last part to Alex and he was the only one who caught it. Both Jack and Alex nodded their heads and walked over to their side of the car, Alex got in back and Jack in front. She pulled out of the parking lot again, only this time she did it a lot quicker than she ought to.
She dropped Jack off first and he said his goodbyes and that he wanted to hang out with them tomorrow night and Kennedy told him that she’d think about it if she finished all of her homework. Alex moved to the front and put his hand on her leg which she automatically jerked away.
“Can I come over?” he asked.
“What part of ‘I have homework to do’ are you not understanding, Alex?” she asked, still furious even though it’d been two hours since she’d seen him with that skank.
“I just thought that you could do your homework while I play video games, or watch TV or something. I don’t just want to have sex with you – I’d like to just spend time with you without all the making out and having sex,” he said, sounding genuine, but also hurt that she didn’t want him at her house.
“I just want to be alone tonight,” she told him.
“You just wanted to be alone the other night, too, and I let you. Kennedy, I’m worried,” he told her as she stopped the car in front of his house.
“Why would be you be worried?” she asked, playing dumb.
“Because, Kenne, you’re pushing me away and treating me like one of your boy-toys who you don’t care about. You’re treating me like you’re dismissing me because you’re through with me,” he told her, sounding fierce.
“Maybe I am,” she said and an automatic pain stabbed through her chest because she knew it wasn’t true.
He looked like she’d just slapped him, “Is it?” he asked, his voice trying to stay steady, but she could detect a sense of shakiness in it.
She let out a sigh and shook her head, “I don’t know, Alex, I just want to figure things out. We had a great few days, but we’ve only been at this for a week and we’re already arguing. Maybe we gave it a test run and it failed miserably and we should just go back to being friends,” she suggested, she didn’t even really mean it - and truth be told, the thought of them not being together made her cringe.
“Well, call me when you ‘figure things out’,” he said and rolled his eyes at her as he got out of the car and she didn’t wait for him to get inside. She sped away immediately and tried to think.
“It’ll all be alright,” she kept telling herself. “He’s just a guy and you need to let go of him anyway – your grades are dropping and you don’t want to be just another average student, do you? Who cares if you never have a relationship because the people who make fun of you for it will be groveling at your feet when you go to Harvard and become a big-shot lawyer,” she said to herself out loud.
She got to her house and saw her mom’s car, for the first time in a week, sitting in front of the house.
Kennedy got out of her car and walked into her house, which was already unlocked, and saw her mom sitting in front of the TV, with her knees curled to her chest in her pajamas, eating popcorn and watching Moulin Rouge. Kennedy knew what this meant. She’d just been dumped.
Her mom, Lorelei, looked up at her, with tears streaking her cheeks. She didn’t need to say a word. Kennedy walked over to her, after she dropped her bag and fell in the seat next to her and wrapped her arms around her and her mom just started sobbing, “Shh, it’ll be okay,” she kept cooing while stroking her hair.
After a few minutes of crying, her mom straightened herself up and wiped the tears away from her eyes. “Sorry,” she whispered and looked back at the movie for a split second before returning her attention to Kennedy.
“Tell me what happened, mom,” Kennedy demanded in a soothing voice.
“I don’t know. I met this guy at the bar, Rob, and we started talking a few months back and he took me on a few dates and then this last week he told me he wanted me to stay over at his house. I reminded him that I had you to take care of, but he insisted that if you were as good as student and as responsible as I thought you were then it wouldn’t be a problem and so I asked you if I could stay late. I’ve been spending the night as his house all week and then today, this morning at 3 am to be exact, he told me to get out. He told me that I was a whore and I was horrible in bed and a lot of other really mean things, so I left. I sat in my car until about 8 to comprehend what had happened and of course I balled for the majority of that time, but then I saw him come out of his building and I drove home. I’ve watched every depressing movie I own since 9 o’clock,” her mom finished telling her.
Kennedy should have guessed. She’d seen her mom get so wrapped up in guys before, but her spending the night at their house was something new entirely. Usually Lorelei brought the men back to her house.
“Let me guess, Kama Sutra, Fox and the Hound, Brokeback Mountain, and of course Moulin Rouge?” Kennedy asked trying to make the situation sound lighter than it was.
“Sounds about right. I watched Kama Sutra and Moulin Rouge twice, though,” her mother told her.
“Well of course, they’re the best ones,” Kennedy told her.
Kennedy wanted to tell her mom everything about Alex and what had happened between the two of them and ask if it was possible to fall in love with someone in a week or if she’d just fallen so deeply into lust that she couldn’t tell the difference. She wanted to cry freely like her mom and eat fattening food and watch fantastic depressing movies and just indulge herself in an entire pint, maybe two, of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to push away all the things that had happened, what she’d said, and what he’d most likely done with The Skank.
But she didn’t.
She kept herself composed and asked once again if her mom was okay and when she told her she was, Kennedy headed up stairs and undressed herself in the bathroom. She turned on the shower way past scolding that when she got in it felt like the flesh was being seared of her body. She liked it though. She sunk to the bottom of the tub and curled her knees to her chest like her mom had been doing and let the tears fall silently from her eyes.
She got out an hour and a half later and went back into her room. She let her hair dry naturally and got into her blue pajamas with green and white polka dots on them and a pair of blue slippers that looked like Uggs, but were slippers instead with a black tank top. She grabbed her backpack and put it on her bed. She glanced at her phone and saw that she had 13 missed calls and 7 voicemails. She sighed and flipped open her phone and listened to the messages.
One: “I’m really sorry about being such an ass to you before you dropped me off. You didn’t deserve it. I just feel so connected to you and I just feel compelled to be protective of you, like your mine, but I know that you’re not, so if you could just call me back, that’d be great. I think we really need to talk.” Alex.
Two: “I don’t know why you’re avoiding me; I just said that I wanted to talk to you. Please. Call me back. I miss you and I’ve missed you all the days that I’ve been gone and I just wanted to be with you.” Alex.
Three: “This is Justine from Harvard, I’m a representative. I was sent a letter of recommendation about you from quite a few of your teachers and we’ve been considering you for early admissions next fall, so if you’re interested in doing that and learning how to graduate 12th grade early then give me a call back. Thank you.” College.
Four: “I forgot to give you my number, its 555-0879.” Justine.
Five: “Is this Kennedy? My name’s Don and I think it’s time that we talked.” Someone named Don.
Six: “I miss you.” Alex.
Seven: “Okay, I’m going to come to your house at 1 am and if you leave your bedroom window open then I’ll know you want me to come in and if you leave it closed, I’ll leave you alone about this whole ‘us’ thing. Permanently. If you need time to think then just… leave it… half open, I guess.” Alex.
Kennedy let out a sigh as she erased all the messages except from Justine. She was kind of confused about the guy named Don, though. She’d never met someone with the name Don and why did he think that they ought to talk? She looked at the clock and it was just past 5. She had eight hours until Alex was supposedly going to be there. She pulled out her homework and started working and this weeks and next week’s homework and started working on a few final essays for some of her classes. It’s not like she didn’t already know the material anyway.
Someone knocked on her door around 9 and she told them to come in. It was her mom. “I made some dinner, do you want some?” she asked in an obviously exhausted voice.
“Sure, I’ll be right down,” Kennedy told her and just finished her last sentence that she’d been writing. She walked out of her room and down to the kitchen. She looked to see what her mom had made and it was some mac n’ cheese with rice crispys and m&m’s in it, grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a gigantic tub of ice cream put into a gigantic bowl and it had cookie dough, brownie bits, more m&m’s, fudge sauce, oreo’s and butter fingers on it. Everybody thought that it was disgusting, but she’d grown up eating this food when her mom was depressed and it actually tasted very good.
She and her mom sat at the table and ate everything, barely saying a word to one another until, “How’s your love life?” her mom asked.
“You know I don’t date,” Kennedy told her, taking a scoop of ice cream and shoving it in her mouth.
“No, but you have sex. Are you having sex with anyone monogamously?” her mom asked.
“Define monogamously,”
“He’s the only one you’ve had sex with since you and he started having sex,” her mother said.
Kennedy begrudgingly said, “Then yes, I’m monogamous.”
“With who?”
“You wouldn’t know him,”
“So? You can tell me about him,” Lorelei said with a shrug of her shoulders. Kennedy saw what she was doing. She was trying to live vicariously through Kennedy.
“Do you really want to know who it is, mom?” Kennedy asked to which her mother nodded, “Fine, it’s Alex,” she said then got up from the table and put her mac n’ cheese bowl in the sink.
“What? You’ve having sex with Alex? Your best friend Alex?”
“Yes, that very one,” Kennedy said, regretting telling her mother.
“Kennedy, you know that that is going to blow up in your face,” This is why Kennedy hadn’t wanted to tell her mother. She knew that she would make it into a big deal that it wasn’t.
“I’ll be fine, mom,”
“Kennedy, do you want to know what I think?” her mom asked.
No. “Sure, mom. Tell me what you think,” Kennedy said.
“I think this can end a few ways. Either you or he is going to have sex with somebody else and the other person is going to get jealous, you guys are going to stop having sex and everything is going to be awkward, or you guys are going end up falling in love with each other and neither of you are going to know what to do,” Lorelei finished.
“Well, thank you for your input, but both Alex and I know what we’re doing,” she told her then left the kitchen and walked up stairs and back into her room. It was already 11 o’clock. She decided to finish the one piece of homework she had left unfinished. It only took her about a half an hour and it was 11:30. She stared at her window and tapped her foot and did a pro and con list in her head. The con outweighed the pro.
She took off her clothes entirely, turned off her lights, and got into her bed, under the covers. She couldn’t fall asleep and eventually at midnight she reached up and slid her window open then she felt better and more at ease. She fell straight to sleep.