Wrong (3 page)

Caelyn had finally spilled her guts, and it had been a relief to just say it all, to tell the truth and not hold back for once. Somehow, even though she knew Alicia couldn’t fully be trusted, it had been impossible not to tell her everything.

It was like she’d been ready to burst and Alicia had stuck the pin in and pierced the balloon that was holding it all inside.

Alicia had hardly asked a single question, but had seemed to hang on every word just the same.

When it was over, and Caelyn had cried a little, Alicia patted her shoulder.

“Thanks for trusting me, Caelyn. It means a lot that you told me all of that.”

Caelyn sighed, wiping her eyes. She was sitting on her bed and Alicia was next to her.

“I needed to tell somebody. It was killing me, all of that…just sitting inside me.”

She pushed a hand against her own stomach, pressing hard. “It was like a lead ball, growing and growing, expanding until I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“It’s out now,” Alicia said. “I wish you’d told me about Jayson when it happened. He should be in jail right now.”

“I know. But I was scared. And then everything got out of control with Elijah and...” she trailed off, not knowing what else to say.

Alicia got off the bed and paced a little bit. “I’m glad you got away from Elijah, too.”

Hearing those words hurt.

Caelyn felt it like a punch to the gut. “I don’t know. Being away from Elijah is hard. I just want to hear his voice. That’s all.”

“But you know that he’s bad news, right?”

“I mean…I know he’s got a lot of issues.”

“Issues? The guy is way beyond just having issues. He’s a criminal. He did you a favor when he broke up with you this morning.”

“I know that he sounds bad, but if you knew him—“

“Oh come on,” Alicia scoffed. “Now you sound like every other battered woman who keeps looking to find the next man who can victimize her all over again.”

“Elijah never hurt me.”

“Didn’t he? Didn’t he put you in danger when he lied to a police officer right in front of you, and carried a gun, and assaulted his neighbor, and beat up Jayson, and all the other crazy things you told me about?”

Caelyn nodded sheepishly. “I guess so.”

“I know so.” Alicia pointed down at Caelyn. “And now you’re back where you belong, at school, with your friends who care about you. That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah, I know,” Caelyn sniffed.

“And I’m not going to let Jayson or Elijah get within ten feet of you again. You need to get back to looking after yourself and building up your self esteem so no creepy guys think they can prey on you ever again.”

Caelyn nodded, but inside she resisted the notion that Elijah and Jayson could ever be mentioned in the same breath. Still, she understood why Alicia believed that, and she knew that Alicia wouldn’t understand the difference even if Caelyn could somehow explain how wonderful and caring Elijah had been throughout their time together.

Besides, it didn’t matter. Elijah had sent her away and so it was probably better to write him off. If she glamorized him, if she continued to tell herself that she’d lost her chance at the love of her life, than she would only feel worse.

Instead, she would try to put Elijah in the past and not think of him.

Eventually, the pain would fade. The memory of him would fade.

“Someday you won’t even be able to remember what Elijah looked like,” Alicia said, as if she’d been reading Caelyn’s mind. “Someday you’ll just look back on him and wonder what the hell you were thinking. You’ll be a mom, and you’ll have some amazing husband and kids, and you’ll just thank God that you weren’t dumb enough to get knocked up by that loser.”

“He’s not a loser,” Caelyn said.

“Don’t defend him. Don’t defend either of them.”

“He’s not a loser, Alicia.” Caelyn met her friend’s gaze unwaveringly.

Finally, Alicia relented. “Fine. He’s not a loser. The point is, you need to move on.”

“I agree. I get it, I really do. Can we just stop talking about it now? Or do you just want to see me cry again? I don’t think I have any tears left.”

Alicia laughed. “Come here. Let me hug you, silly.”

And then they hugged.

“Thanks,” Caelyn told her.

“No worries,” Alicia replied.

No worries, Caelyn thought. Wouldn’t that be nice? Would there ever come a day when she could be worry free again? Or was this to be her new life—full of pain and loss and friends who she wanted to trust, but couldn’t be certain of. Everyone seemed to have agendas and plans and none of those agendas took into account what Caelyn wanted or needed.

Only Elijah had ever seemed to care about her and her alone.

But he’s gone. He’s gone, and that’s that.

***

Professor Tull was a tall, thin man with a receding hairline and a birdlike nose.

His eyes were light blue and impossibly smart. He was her philosophy teacher, and he’d always liked her a great deal.

She’d come to find him during office hours the next morning to see about retaking the test she’d missed the previous week.

“So you weren’t ill, then?” Professor Tull said, putting on his glasses and sitting up straighter in his chair.

“No, I wasn’t ill. I had…a kind of freak out, I guess.”

“A freak out?” he asked, cocking his head. Around him, stacks of books and papers leaned lazily to and fro. His desk looked exactly like what you’d picture the desk of an intellectual professor with little regard for the mundane tasks of daily life to look like. “Please do explain this freak out, Caelyn. Because, you see—I’ve had this happen before, where a student begins to miss class without giving any notice or providing any compelling evidence for said absences. And in the past, I’ve made the mistake of being too lenient with such students. I find that leniency doesn’t help them or me.”

“I’m not looking for leniency,” she said, surprised that Professor Tull wasn’t just accepting her explanation and telling her how she could make up the work.

“Aren’t you, though?” His blue eyes pierced hers. “You missed a major test and failed to hand in a two-page essay. You don’t have a doctor’s note or any other strong reason for your absences.”

“I know, but I was hoping that based upon my previous work in your class—“

“Your work was excellent, but I’m concerned that by allowing you to simply make up the test and essay you missed, you’ll possibly fail to learn an important lesson.”

“I’ve learned a lot of lessons lately, Professor Tull,” Caelyn said, gripping her purse strap tightly as she sat in the creaky leather chair across from him. “I really hope you don’t force me to learn another one—especially when it’s one I already know. I know that I can’t miss any more work. I know that I’m dangerously close to failing your class.”

Professor Tull sat back, took off his glasses and wiped them with a white handkerchief. “Please tell me more about this existential crisis you had. Why did you leave school?”

“I sort of ran away,” Caelyn said. “Something happened—something I can’t really discuss. And this thing that happened upset me to where I didn’t think I could continue with school here.”

“And what brought you back?”

She thought about whether to lie or tell the truth. The lie sounded better, but she liked Professor Tull and wanted to show him the respect of the truth.

“What brought me back was that I realized I had nowhere else to go.”

He put his glasses on again and fixed her with his bright blue eyes. His long nose twitched a little. “So essentially you’re here because you have no better ideas.”

“I’m here because I can do the work, and I want to do it. I want to prove that I can succeed here.”

“Miss Murphy, I think you’ll find that as you get older, one thing keeps getting clearer.”

“What’s that?”

“The one thing that keeps getting clearer is that the biggest failure you can have is failure of imagination. It disturbs me that you had no better ideas than to simply come back to school here, if you truly would rather be somewhere else.” He sighed. “That being said, you’re a talented mind and I can’t bring myself to fail you. So let’s figure out when to retake the test, and I’ll allow you to turn in your essay late.”

Relief flooded through Caelyn’s body. “Thank you so, so much, Professor.”

“I will be docking you a full letter grade on both the test and the essay, Miss Murphy.”

“That’s fine.”

“No, it’s really not. But it will have to do, just the same.”

After thanking Professor Tull and scurrying out before he changed his mind and flunked her anyway, she went to her other teachers and had similar (but easier) conversations. All of them agreed to allow her to make up for the missed work.

They tended to give her the benefit of the doubt that something pretty awful had happened to her. Maybe they could see the truth of it in her face.

A few suggested counseling through the school’s health program. Her psych professor had said that perhaps she needed to take a semester off to go backpacking in Europe.

Caelyn had assured all of them, whatever their concerns, that she was going to get her act together and was doing all the right things to make strides in that direction.

But the truth was something else altogether.

Maybe she did need therapy, but Caelyn wasn’t getting any. Instead, she threw herself into her schoolwork. And she tried her best not to think about Elijah.

Unfortunately, her heart wasn’t so cooperative.

It seemed like every few seconds she would be compelled to check her cell phone, hoping against hope for a missed call from him, a text, anything. Anything.

Sometimes, when she was walking in the quad or on the streets of Cambridge, she would think she saw him. It was as if he was a ghost.

But all of the men who seemed to be him at first glance, turned out to be nothing like him. They were just temporary figments of her imagination.

So mostly she was either at class, or in the library, or in her dorm room, working, trying her best to forget.

She’d just finished up her essay for Professor Tull, and was tucking it away in her backpack to bring to class the next morning, when Nellie and Alicia knocked on her bedroom door.

She opened it to find both of them laughing in the common area of the suite, as if they were in on some giant conspiracy. “What?” she said suspiciously.

Nellie and Alicia didn’t usually get along this well.

“Come on, Caelyn,” Alicia said, walking past her into the bedroom and making a beeline for her closet. “We need to find you a nice little outfit.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Nellie said, “we’re taking you on a girls’ night out.”

“I don’t think so. I’m tired and I just finished writing this essay. I’ve got a headache.”

“After a few drinks, it’ll go away,” Alicia told her. Then she threw a pair of jeans and a top onto the bed. “That’ll do.”

Caelyn looked to Nellie for help. “Come on. You know I’m not up for this.”

Nellie shook her head. “You need to go and have some fun. You were away for so long and then you’ve been holed up in your cave ever since you got back. I think it’s time for a change, Caelyn.”

Caelyn’s shoulders slumped as she realized they wouldn’t be talked out of their decision. So she shrugged. “Do I have time for a shower, at least?”

“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Alicia said, checking her phone.

“Why? Are we meeting someone?”

“No, but the longer you take, the better the chance that you’ll get cold feet and try and back out. So get moving.”

Caelyn laughed, a little bit pleased that her roommates cared enough about her to try and help her this way.

She took a quick shower.

I wonder what Elijah’s doing right now
, she thought for the millionth time that day.

She got out of the tub, changed into her outfit, put her hair back, and was soon ready as she would ever be.

“Where are we even going?” she asked, when she was done and the others had remarked on how nice she looked in her outfit.

“Someplace where alcohol is served.”

“But not a Cambridge hangout, right?”

Alicia sensed her concern about seeing Jayson and shook her head no. “Of course not. We’re going into Boston.”

Nellie looked at them. “Something wrong with Cambridge?”

“No,” Alicia said. “It’s just fun to see new places and new people. Cambridge is too small. Same old, same old.”

But Nellie’s expression told Caelyn that she knew she’d been shut out again.

***

One cab ride and two beers later, and Caelyn was actually glad that she’d let them force her into going out.

For the first time in days, she actually felt a little bit human again. Sure, she was still thinking about Elijah, but it hadn’t stopped her from having some fun.

Maybe, just maybe, I won’t always feel this horrible
, Caelyn told herself.

“Ready for shots?” Alicia said.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Nellie said. “We don’t want to make her throw up.”

“Why would I be the one to throw up?” Caelyn replied, offended. “Look, I just had a bad few days, I didn’t turn into a total basket case.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Alicia giggled.

“Okay, you’re on,” she said. Caelyn raised her hand to get the bartender’s attention. The bartender glanced over at Caelyn while pouring a beer for another customer.

“What do you need?”

“Three Alabama Slammers, please,” Caelyn told him.

The bartender turned and started preparing the shots, while Alicia and Nellie continued cracking jokes about Caelyn’s new hard drinking attitude.

Caelyn was starting to almost feel good again. The bar was getting progressively crowded, but the music was good and not too loud, the people friendly. She was experiencing that pleasant mixture of warmth and fuzziness that she normally experienced when she first started getting a little buzzed.

Her friends were here with her, and for a brief moment, Caelyn thought that it was almost as if the last dark chapter of her life had never happened.

Jayson and the assault felt like something of a dream, as did the trip to Florida with Elijah. But the second she thought of Elijah again, the warm beer buzz immediately receded and she was cold all over again.