Go Around

“Who are you?” Zack asked. Lisa and all of her friends remained quiet, watching Alex and Jack to see their reactions to know how to proceed.
Rian turned to Zack, “That’s Kennedy,” he whispered to him in a not-so-quiet voice. Rian had always hated Kennedy and he was kind of glad that she was back so that he could tell Jack and Alex I-told-you-so about her.
Alex was completely speechless for one of the first times in his entire life. He didn’t know what to say to Kennedy, but she was standing there, being Kennedy and cute and all he wanted to do was throw his arms around her and kiss her like he’d daydreamed about so many times, but he knew that that was not a reasonable way to do things.
Kennedy had had a smile across her face, but the longer and longer Alex remained quiet the more her smile faded. She got shaky and she started bouncing her leg up and down. Tears swelled in the tear ducts in her eyes and she was about to break down and cry. She didn’t want to, but seeing Alex staring at her made her want to convert back to her old ways.
She knew that it had been a mistake to come here.
It wasn’t just Alex she was waiting for to talk, but Jack, too. They’d been so close once and she thought that he would be happy that she was back, but she should have guessed that this would be how they reacted – she did leave them without so much as a call or a note almost a year back.
“What are you doing here?” Alex finally croaked out in a whisper. He let go of Lisa’s waist and everybody in the room noticed and read into what it meant. Lisa, her friends, and Alex’s friends all thought that it meant that now that Kennedy was back he was going to completely forget about Lisa, the girl he’d been dating for almost six months. Kennedy and Alex took it as, even though he still loved Lisa, he wanted to hold Kennedy.
Kennedy looked down at the ground and gave a half hearted half smile, “My mom moved us back. I decided to come see my old friends, but I can see that you’re busy so I guess I’ll go,” she said and pointed her thumb toward her car.
When she started walking away Jack yelled, “No! Don’t go.” and Kennedy stopped dead in her tracks and turned around to look at him. She swallowed the lump in her throat and looked around at all the people standing in Alex’s living room. Finally her eyes landed on Lisa for the first time and she was instantly jealous; she was tall, Kennedy was short, Lisa was thin, Kennedy was voluptuous, Lisa was adorable and cute, Kennedy was just a whore. “Everybody, I think you should go. Alex and I need to talk to Kennedy… by ourselves,” Jack told everybody and Lisa’s eyes widened.
She turned to Alex, “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” she told him and glued herself to his chest.
“I think I should, Lis, I’ll call you later though, alright?” he told her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders and kissed her. Kennedy had to look away because it still killed her to watch Alex be with another girl after all that time that had gone by.
Alex and Lisa separated, “Alright. I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” Alex said and that made Kennedy want to die. She had no idea why she had decided to come here, she hadn’t even thought that Alex might have gotten a girlfriend, but apparently the thought should have crossed her mind.
Lisa, her friends, and Alex’s friends all left except for Jack. They shut the door quietly behind them and all of a sudden Kennedy, Alex, and Jack were all alone like they had been the previous year. “So you moved back?” Jack was the first one to break the ice.
“Yeah, my mom’s fiancé wasn’t such a great guy after all – shocker that,” Kennedy told them, refusing to look at them. She all of a sudden thought that she should have gone with the other option – she should have just let them see her at school if they needed to see her at all, but of course they would hear around that she was back because she was always the topic of conversation. “How’s the past little while been for you guys?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“You mean after you left?” Alex asked in a bitter voice. Kennedy tried to catch his eye, but apparently he was having a hard time looking at her.
“I guess so,” she whispered. “Looks like you got yourself a really pretty girlfriend,” Kennedy observed and the minute she said it she realized that she shouldn’t have. That was the last straw for Alex; he looked up at her with fire in his eyes.
“Are you seriously going to be this way? You’re going to get jealous because I have a girlfriend when you’re the one who left me? That’s not fair, Kennedy, that’s not fair at all. You are all I thought about for a long time and then Lisa came and she helped me get over you, she helped me know what love is like when you can actually rely on the other person, I don’t expect her to leave in the middle of the night after we had sex and she tells me that she loves me – but then again, I didn’t expect that from you, either,” Alex yelled at her. “It’s not my fault that I moved on from you, Kennedy. I was yours and you knew that, you were the one who gave me up,” he told her and she couldn’t look at him.
Her throat got dry, the lump in her throat got bigger, her eyes were so filled with tears that she couldn’t see anything and she tried to hold it all it, but eventually it just was all too much and she let the tears flow over and they fell down, not one by one, but five by five. “You’re right, I have no reason to be jealous,” she told him, trying to keep her voice even, but having a rather difficult time with it.
She wiped the tears quickly off her cheek and looked up at Alex for the first time since she came into the house. She walked toward him until she was no less than two inches away from him, “If you got over me then why do you still wear this?” she asked him and pulled her necklace out from underneath his shirt then yanked it off of him. She started to walk away.
“Hey, don’t take that!” Alex yelled at her.
“Why not? If you’re over me than it obviously shouldn’t matter whether I take this back or not – it is mine after all,” she told him turning around and showing him the necklace.
“Kennedy, that’s not fair – give it back to me,” he said and he looked like he wanted to cry as much as she did. It made her feel bad. She threw the necklace at him.
“What is your problem?” Jack asked, now getting upset and Kennedy remembered his presence because it had been forgotten while Alex and she had been talking.
“What do you mean?” she whispered to him.
“I mean, you couldn’t have possibly thought that you could come back here and things would be the same – that Alex would still be in love with you because he’s not,” Jack said and it was the meanest Kennedy had ever heard him be before. She looked down at the ground again and for the fifteenth thousandth time in the past ten minutes she wished that she hadn’t come to Alex’s and hadn’t moved back to Maryland.
“I realize that,” she told him.
“Kennedy, as much as I love you, I think that you’d better leave. We really don’t need all the drama that you bring to the table right now because we’re seniors and we have other important things to worry about. We don’t need you here to fuck up all of our hard work,” Jack snapped at her.
She looked up at him, “You’re right. Unfortunately it’s too late for me to move back to New York so you’ll have to settle for me being stuck in Maryland, but you don’t have to worry about talking to me again – I won’t bother you or your girlfriends or your friends or anything closely related to you,” she told him, doing a better job at keeping herself level headed when she just wanted to stick her head in a bowl and throw up.
“Kennedy that’s not what I –,” Jack started but she cut him off.
“Really? Are you sure?” she asked him in a completely sarcastic tone.
“Kennedy, stop it,” Alex told her and he grabbed her attention yet again. “You know that this has nothing to do with Jack and everything to do with you and me,” he told her.
“I disagree, I think that Jack plays some part in it, no matter how minor,” she told him.
“Kennedy, stop, just stop. You’re doing nothing but hurting the people you claimed you once cared about so why don’t you just stop with whatever it was you wanted to say and just grow up. Jack and I do not want you here and you don’t even want to be here so just leave us alone. It’s not our fault that you left the most horrible way possible,” Alex told her.
“I know that I left in the most horrible way possible, that’s why I came here. I wanted to apologize to you both because, even though I left that way and you guys thought that I didn’t care about you, I do. I just didn’t know how to make it all work because I’ve never been good at goodbyes. I went to ten different schools before I moved to Maryland and I hadn’t gotten attached to anybody so it was just easier to run away,” she told them, trying to explain her train of thought.
“Kennedy,” Alex starting, moving toward her, “you could have told me that you were leaving. Maybe we could have set something up so that we could still have a relationship,” he offered.
“Alex, you know that that is so unrealistic. We both know that you wouldn’t have let me go and if I told you I wouldn’t have let myself go,” she told him, staring straight into his eyes, “because I loved you… love you.”
She looked down at the ground because she couldn’t be here anymore. As much as she thought she wanted to see her friends this was hurting her worse than she had been prepared for. Next time she decided to talk to them she would be more prepared to be hurt like this instead.
“I’m going to go. I’ll see you guys probably next at school,” she told them and, before anyone could object, she turned and ran out of the house. She got in her car and drove for a few hours aimlessly. She didn’t want to go home because the last person she wanted to see was her mother and she had nowhere else to go. If it had been before she moved she would have gone to Jack’s house most likely because he always knew just what to say to make her feel good but now that she had lost both him and Alex she had nowhere to go but driving.
She had been expecting to lose Alex, or at least have to work to get him back, but she didn’t expect that from Jack. Jack was always the one who forgave her easiest without an explanation from her and she could be a murderer and he would have still forgiven her. But that was before. Apparently that wasn’t true now.

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

Later that night, after he had talked Jack into leaving and that he was indeed fine with the reappearance of his ex, Alex sat in his room and laid on his bed. He had promised to call Lisa, but he didn’t know what he would say to her so when he picked up his phone he prayed that when he called it would go to voicemail.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
“Hello?” Damn.
“Hey, Lisa, it’s me,” Alex said, trying to sound chipper.
“Hi, honey,” she said sounding happy. “What are you doing?” she asked. He knew what she was really asking, ‘Who are you with?’
“I’m just hanging out in my bedroom,” he told her.
“Are you with anybody?” she asked him and again he knew what she was asking, ‘Are you with that girl?’.
“No, Jack left earlier right after Kennedy did,” he told her.
“Oh, I see. So did you want me to come over to spend the night tonight?” she asked and he could tell that she sounded so hopeful and if he told her no than she would most likely guess as to why, or more who, that was because of but he really didn’t want to be around her. He wanted to stay in his room all night and not have to worry about faking anything.
“I don’t think so. I’m not feeling very well, that’s why Jack and Kennedy left earlier,” he told her and rolled over onto his side.
“Oh, alright,” she said and he could hear the disappointment in her voice, “Will you still pick me up in the morning?” she asked him.
“Of course I will,” he told her as though it were obvious.
“Alright, I’ll see you tomorrow,”
“Okay,”
“I love you,”
“I love you, too,”
“Bye,”
“Bye,” then the line dropped. Alex was glad that he had gotten that out of the way while he could.
He reached onto his nightstand and grabbed the necklace of Kennedy’s that she had ripped off his neck earlier. He knew that he shouldn’t put it back on, but he did. He clasped it around his neck and tucked it under his shirt just like it had been earlier.
He didn’t want to go to school the next day because it would just be so hard to see Kennedy all day. He was still in love with her because she made it so hard not to love her but at the same time she made it so easy.
He got off his bed and walked over to his dresser and grabbed his wallet off the top it and walked back over to lie on his bed. He got into his wallet and do something that he hadn’t done in a long time.
He reached inside and grabbed the note that Kennedy had left him. I love you. – K. He hadn’t read it in months because it killed him to think about it but now that she was back it didn’t seem so bad because now she wasn’t so distant.
She had come back to him even after all this time.