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CRITICIZE ME!!
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When I enter the library through the side entrance, Shane is already there, sitting at a small wooden table with his hands folded. I pull out the chair across from him and sit down.“This better be good,” I mutter.
“How come you don’t have your lunch?”
“I already ate. Plus, I figured it would be best not to have anything particularly throwable within my reach while talking to you. For your sake.”
“Right.” he nods in understanding. After a beat, he says, “I just feel like I need to let you know that I really am sorry for what I did. It was stupid and ignorant and I hurt you, and I want you to understand that that was not at all what I intended.” He looks genuinely sorry.
I ponder for a moment what to say because honestly, it was a good apology. I forgive you or It’s okay seems like a stretch though, since I’m not entirely sure if either of those statements is true. He led me on when he knew I really liked him, and that was going to be something that I felt would always be hard to see past, no matter how much he made up for it.
I settle on, “I know.”
“The truth is,” he continues. “I really did like you. Like, a lot. I’d never felt that way before, and things were just moving so fast, and I was so scared I was going to do something to screw it up. So I backed off first.”
Um. What?
I must be imagining this.
Ever since our fling ended in May, I had assumed that this was regular for him, that I was just another one of his flavor-of-the-months. It didn’t make our breakup (for lack of a better word – can I even call it that?) any easier on me, but at least I knew, or thought I knew, that it probably wasn’t the first time he’d done something like that to a girl. That it wasn’t me, it was him.
His confession leaves me speechless. It takes me a while to realize that my jaw is practically on the floor before closing my mouth and attempting to do something with my face that doesn’t resemble a frown.
“Sorry, did I say something wrong?” he asks.
“No, no. Sorry. I just… I’m not sure what to say. I just always thought you ended it because you didn’t like me.” I avoid his eyes when I say this.
“I didn’t want you to know the real reason I broke it off… that I chickened out. I figured it would be best for both of us if I just told you that I wasn’t ready for a relationship, but I realize now that I was wrong.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? That you were scared of jumping into things too quickly? We could’ve worked it out, Shane.”
“I don’t know. This is gonna sound super cheesy, but I changed a lot during the summer. Not speaking with you for so long really gave me some perspective.”
I quirk a brow at him.
He takes a breath. “I realized I let an amazing thing slip away. I don’t want to lose you again, Olivia.”
I always hated those rom-com movies where the male love interest would do something so unimaginably horrible to the heroine that she leaves him, just for him to “realize that it was all a big mistake”, show up at the heroine’s door with some grand gesture and half-ass apology, and then all is forgiven and they make love on the sofa thirty minutes later in the film. When I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven years old, I would get so angry at the heroine for giving the guy a second chance that I got in trouble with my mom for cussing at the TV on multiple occasions. I, I’m just now realizing, am that rom-com heroine. No matter how many times I told myself that it was over, that I was done chasing after something I knew I couldn't have, I couldn't help feeling that maybe I was wrong. Shane has a good heart, and he made an effort to have a real conversation with me about something he did wrong. And he didn’t just give me some half-ass apology – he gave me a whole-ass apology.
I am so utterly at war with myself right now. Shane is still looking at me like I hung the moon, something I never thought would happen again in a million years, waiting for a response. I have no idea what to say or do, and before I can think better of it, a laugh escapes my lips. “This is…” I say, shaking my head, “A lot.”
“I spent the whole summer regretting what I had done,” he says. “It must’ve been pretty awkward with everyone else in the friend group, huh?”
“Oh,” I say. “I wouldn’t know. I didn’t really see much of them at all.”
He gives me a quizzical look. “You mean you weren’t with them when they went to the pier a few weeks ago?”
“No? I thought you were there. That's why I didn't go…” It's also why I didn't go to that horror movie with them, or the escape room at St. Pete, or anywhere else.
“And I didn’t go because I thought you would be there,” he says. We laugh, but my stomach dips. He was avoiding me, too. I mean, I guess I couldn’t expect him not to. It was weird for both of us, I know, especially because he still had feelings for me, too.
I’m stuck in an endless loop here. On the one hand, I’m still lingering on the fact that Shane broke my heart and ruined my summer. On the other hand, he’s sweet and considerate and painfully cute. And it’s not every day that a man actually apologizes to you for something that he did. Doesn’t that deserve some kind of… I don’t know, recognition?
Suddenly, his face turns serious. His sharp green eyes are calming and intimidating at the same time. I’ve spent years admiring those eyes – how they turn golden in the light and a deep shade of green in the shade, how they light up when he’s around his friends and grow cold when he’s around people he doesn’t particularly know or like – yet I feel like this is the first time I’m really seeing them.
“Olivia,” he says my name like a question, one that I would willingly give him the answer to. “Can we start over? I know I messed up, but I want to prove to you that I’ve changed. We can take things as slow as you want.”
Remember when I mentioned that I often think with my heart instead of my head? Well, this is one of those times.
“I’d like that,” I say. Because honestly, I would. I miss being friends with him; even when we weren’t romantically involved, I always liked spending time with him in our group.
He gives a sigh of relief. “Good,” he says. “Oh, and one more thing,”
“Yeah?”
“Does Jane still hate me?”
I all but bust out laughing in the middle of the library. A boy sitting at a table a few feet away from us gives me a peeved look.
“Uh, yeah, she kind of hates your guts,” I snort. After I told her everything that happened with Shane, she was even angrier than I was. She rage-texted him in the middle of the night, saying something along the lines I hope you get hit by a car. But far, far more detailed.
“Oh, God,” he buries his face in his hands. “She scares me.”
“I don’t blame you,” I say.
We talk like that for a while, exchanging stories and memories from when we were younger. He tells me the real reason he and his seventh-grade girlfriend, Savannah, broke up – she caught him looking at another girl (not checking her out, he insisted) – and I admitted that all throughout our freshman and sophomore years, I would cheat off of him in math.
It feels good to be talking like this again, and for a while, I forget why we ever stopped.
A few minutes before the bell rings, I gather my stuff and meander towards the exit with Shane. We’re about to go our separate ways when I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. I pull it out and frown.
An email from the school.
“What’s wrong?” Shane asks.
“I have detention for a week,” I say.
“Already? What for?”
I roll my eyes as I read the all-too-familiar message on my screen.
“‘Insubordination.’”
ahhhhhhh, I absolutely love it!
“Olivia Pratt to the principal’s office, please.”
Everyone turns in their seats to look at me. I try my best to ignore the chorus of oohs as I exit the classroom. Mrs. Ortiz, my precalc teacher, rolled her eyes so far back that I thought they might fall out of their sockets.
I stride down the hallway, out the door of the 11th-grade building, and down the stairs. I keep walking straight until I get to the front office building. As I enter, a freshman girl with a slicked-back ponytail walks out of the building crying, holding a dirty tissue under her eyes to keep her makeup from running. I guess I’m not the only one having a rough first day.
I make my way to the principal’s office at the end of the hallway and swing open the door. “Yes?” I ask as I plaster on my sweet, innocent, perfect smile that has always seemed to get me out of trouble somehow.
“Miss Pratt, how lovely it is seeing you here in my office. Again,” Principal Wagner says, matching my falsely cheery smile. “We both know why you’re here.”
Right. My outfit.
I give myself a once-over as if I had forgotten what I was wearing. A black lace corset top with nothing over it, a plaid black-and-white mini skirt, black stockings, and matching gogo boots. Not exactly high school dress code-friendly.
“Olivia, this has to stop happening. You know it doesn’t change a thing,” he tells me.
“Well, maybe it should.”
“Maybe it’s time to get another hobby aside from pissing off figures of authority.” He folds his arms in front of him. I do the same. We stare at each other for what feels like an eternity before I break the silence.
“I really don’t see why this is such a problem,” I wave my arm in a circular motion around my body.
“I think you do. It’s distracting,” he says.
I actually laugh. “Trust me, I don’t have nearly as many boys lined up at my doorstep as you think I do, sir.”
“This,” he gestures at my body in a similar circular motion, “does not necessarily affect just… students.”
How did I know he was gonna go there? Typical man.
I heave a sigh before going on the same rant for the gazillionth time. “I know it doesn’t, Principal Wagner. I know that my cleavage is so incredibly distracting to all of the male teachers at this school whom you hired. I know that you think you’re better off criticizing girls for having exposed shoulders rather than shaming the figures of authority who feel aroused by them. I know that creating more and more additions to the dress code every school year is the only thing you can think to do so that you don’t have to tell these grown men to KEEP IT IN THEIR PANTS!”
Principal Wagner says nothing, just gives me this look that is somewhere between disgusted and defeated.
I quickly decide that I don’t want to look at this man’s I-make-kids-cry face any longer. I whip around, make a beeline for the door, and exit Principal Wagner’s office before I say something that will get me suspended.
When I get back to class, I don’t even bother trying to copy down all the numbers and letters and equations written on the board. What the hell even is a function, anyway?
Instead, I pull out my sketchbook and start drawing. I hold each pen stroke and shadow and shape far more valuable than my ability to do math at 8 o’clock in the morning. I get so into the feel of it that I don’t realize that the bell has rung for second period until I am the last one in the classroom.
In the hallway, I spot Jane, my best friend, and go to her so we can walk to our next class together.
“Survived another day of Principal Wagner’s wrath,” I tell her.
“Oh my God, Liv,” she says. “You have to stop getting dress-coded all of the time. Especially on the first day of school.”
“I’ll stop getting dress-coded when they make the same rules apply to the girls and boys,” I say. “I guarantee you that if one of the jocks on the football team wore a tank top to school, nobody would even bat an eye. This is the issue with our society, Jane.”
She gives me a look, like I agree, but you’re looking too much into this. We walk like that all the way to class, me rambling on about all the injustices of our school system and her listening attentively. This is one of the things I love most about my best friend. I can say literally anything, and she will not judge me. Once, in seventh grade, I told her that I hoped our science teacher, Mr. Smith, drove himself off a cliff, and Jane just nodded and said, “Too bad there aren’t many cliffs in Florida”.
When we get to our English lit class, we take seats close enough to the board so that we can at least look like we’re paying a little bit of attention to the lesson, but far enough away so that we don’t seem like kissasses (a method I learned the hard way during my first week of freshman year). Jane sits to my right, and in the row in front of me is a girl I recognize from my first period, Rianna. She smiles at me, and we make quiet conversation about how much we both hate Wagner until the late bell rings.
English is my worst subject, and Jane keeps telling me that I should at least put somewhat of an effort into my education, so when the teacher hands out a syllabus, I do something I have never done before — I read it.
As soon as I get to the part of the syllabus about group work (ugh), I hear the classroom door jolt open.
My stomach does a backflip. This cannot be happening.
It’s him.
All six-foot-one of him, dressed in baggy jeans and a band tee, running a hand through his blond curtain bangs. I hear him mumble an apology to Mr. Jakowski for being late, then he scans the rows of desks for an empty seat. His green eyes snag on mine.
Shit, shit, shit.
I feel all of the blood in my body rush to my cheeks. Whhhyyyyyy?!?!?!
Shane Brooks is the absolute last person I wanted to see today. Of course, I knew I would see him at some point, but I had not mentally prepared myself. Clearly.
I avert my gaze from him because I know that if I stare too long, all of those old feelings will surface; I’ll want to scream at him and slap him and then kiss him and hold him all at once.
Be still my heart.
I glance over at Jane, and we share a look of understanding of what we both know is about to happen. I am going to – in classic Olivia fashion – blatantly embarrass myself in front of the guy who blatantly told me that he “wasn’t ready for a relationship”. What is my life???
“Hey, Olivia,” he says.
“Oh. Hi,” I mumble.
“How was your summer?”
“Absolutely fantastic.” My voice raises an octave or two at the word fantastic. What I really meant by that was, My summer was absolute shit, Shane, because I spent the whole three months regretting every single word I ever spoke to you.
You see, prior to this April, I had had the biggest, whopping, earth-shattering crush on Shane. As in, I had liked him since the seventh grade. During my sophomore year, we got to know each other well and built a friendship. We had most classes together, and all of our friends got along. My life was going amazing.
Cut to: the spring fair in April. Shane, his friends Lucas and Dan, Jane, my friend Melanie, and I went as a group. We rode every ride twice and Jane puked her guts out after the Ferris wheel. Right about the time the sun started to set over the lake, the group decided to get funnel cakes. One moment I was breaking off from the group to use the bathroom, and the next I was making out with Shane in the port-a-potty.
Was I crushed that I wasted my first kiss on such a douchebag? Yes.
Was I humiliated that my first kiss took place in a rancid-smelling, four-foot-wide, bug-infested port-a-potty? Also yes.
Granted, I didn’t feel that way in the moment. I was so caught up in the smelly, dim, scummy magic of it all that all logic went out the window. Reasonable thoughts like, this could ruin the dynamic of our friend group or I’m probably going to get my heart broken were completely out of the picture. I guess I’ve always been the type of person who thinks with her heart instead of her head.
The guy I’d practically been in love with for years was one of the closest people in my life, and now I had proof that he liked me back. And it didn’t just stop at the port-a-potty kiss; every time we hung out in our friend group, he would find some excuse to sneak off with me into a guest bedroom or a mall changing room or behind the public restroom at the park. We tried to be as discreet about it as we could, but all of our friends knew. Jane was probably even more excited about it than I was – she had been planning the wedding for years.
It was too good to be true, which is why, after being in this situationship with Shane for about a month, he broke it off. He told me he wasn’t looking for anything serious and just wanted to stay friends. Stay friends, my ass.
I was stupid to think that I had a chance with him. I mean, what are the odds that my high school crush would like me back? Has that ever even happened to anyone?
The week after he ditched me, he tried calling me several times. I was so busy wallowing that I didn’t even hear my phone ring. After that, he kind of just left me alone. Actually, now that I think about it, I was the one avoiding him. Jane and Melanie tried to get me to come with the group to the movies more than once, and every time, I declined. I couldn’t stand to see his face. I was that pathetic.
I knew he didn’t mean to hurt me, but that somehow just made me feel even worse. How could he be so careless? How could he not think about how his actions would affect me? How could he be such a dick?
This is what’s going through my head as I look at Shane. I decide not to give him the satisfaction of talking to me, so I make a show of turning my head back towards the whiteboard.
For the rest of the class period, I kept getting a weird feeling that he was looking at me. I tried my best to ignore him and pay attention to the lesson, but everything Mr. Jakowski said went in one ear and out the other. Shane was screwing with my focus, and I wasn’t having it.
After class – and what felt like the longest lecture on Elizabethan literature ever – I decided to confront him.
“Shane,” I call from behind him.
He turns around to face me. He looks… worried? Scared? Sad? I don’t know, and I don’t have time to figure it out.
I look him in the eyes. “If you have something to say to me, just say it.”
He lets out a deep breath. “Actually, I do,” he says. I look at him, like go on.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“I am.”
“Listen, Shane, I really don’t need you to bullshit me right now –” I start.
“I’m not,” he says. “Can we talk about this somewhere else?”
Can we talk about this somewhere else. I’m not sure why, but it totally throws me for a loop when he says this. I know what I should do – say screw you and walk away – but something about the sincerity in his voice makes me want to say yes.
“Fine.”
“Can you meet me in the library during lunch?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say. He nods once and walks away.
Half of me is kicking myself for agreeing to meet with him, and the other half is dying to hear what he has to say.