Well, you’re not going to be happy after this.
I attempt to swallow again, my heart and lungs and stomach all doing a conga line inside me. My face is red hot and flushed. Everyone is staring at me, and I can’t stop staring at Alan, who is singing with both so much cheese and sincerity that I just want to melt right down into the floor.
He finishes the song on his knees, down by my feet, and when it’s over and the music turns off and the room comes to a hush, I know he’s not getting back up.
This is happening.
He grabs my hand and I have to fight the urge to pull it away. He stares at me, but I’m not sure if he’s really seeing me at all, if he ever saw me, because my eyes are begging, pleading, for him not to do this.
Don’t make me break your heart. Not here, not now.
Oh, I’ve been such an idiot.
“Amanda Rose Newland,” he says to me into the microphone, so I guess he’s saying it to everyone else too. “When I first met you, you were this strange, strange girl with your glasses and your nose in a book, always reading on the sidelines or spending hours in the library.” There are a few titters in the crowd, everyone clearly picturing that girl. “You had this ability to talk about characters in books and TV shows and movies like they were real, like they were your friends. You could spout random knowledge about trees and animals and countries like your brain housed an encyclopedia. I didn’t know what to do with someone like you, but I was charmed by the beauty beneath your brains.”
Surely he means the brains behind my beauty?
“And all the potential I could see deep inside. The real you. We’ve been together four years and you’ve surprised me day in and day out by turning into this intelligent, poised and proper young woman, the very lady I thought you would become.”
Lady?? Okay, he must be out of his mind tonight because there’s no way he’d ever declare me a lady. Nothing pisses him off more than when I let out a burp, but believe me, I can’t help my acid reflux.
“I believe you’ll make an excellent mother, that we will raise smart and beautiful children, that you’ll be the best wife a dentist could have, by my side and through the thick and thin.”
“Amanda…” He reaches into his pocket.
Our friends sob and gasp.
My stomach contents start moving up my throat.
Alan pulls out a ring with the biggest diamond I’ve ever seen. It catches the light like a disco ball.
“Will you do me the honor of marrying me?”
Everything inside me dies.
My hand flies to my mouth.
It’s not from shock. It’s to keep back the vomit.
“I think she’s going to faint,” I hear someone whisper in the crowd.
“This is so romantic,” someone else says.
“She’s crying,” another person comments.
And I am crying.
My fucking contacts. Now the world is turning into a blur, which you’d think would make things easier since Alan’s eyes are nothing more than blue dots and I don’t have to see any hurt or anguish in them.
But nothing is going to make this easier.
Just say yes. Just say yes and tell him no later. Save him this humiliation. Save yourself the humiliation.
Say yes!
I shake my head, the tears spilling down, bile filling my mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“Amanda,” he hisses back, and I hear the warning in his tone. Don’t do this.
I don’t want to.
But I have to.
“I can’t do this.”
“Can’t what?”
“Alan, I’m sorry,” I manage to get out, trying not to open my mouth too wide. “I can’t, I can’t…I can’t…”
And I can’t finish my sentence.
Up comes the vomit.
My hand tries to hold it back, to hold my mouth shut, but it comes spraying out anyway, like a garden hose with a kink in it.
It lands all over Alan—his head, his face, his shoulders, even his shaking hand with the ring in it. The room seems to gasp as a whole.
And yet, somehow, somehow my mouth is still moving.
“I can’t marry you,” I say weakly, pulling my dripping hand away from my mouth.
The gasps grow deeper.
Someone whispers, “Sir Pukes-a-Lot.”
I’m blinking back real tears now.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell him, voice quavering. “I love you, but just not enough to say yes.”
It’s the most honest I’ve been in a long time. But it’s too little, too late.
And though the last thing I want to do is be a coward, I turn away from the shocked whispers and Alan on his knees covered in puke, and the disapproving eyes of his parents, knowing I’ve disappointed my own parents as well, and I run.
I run through blurred vision.
Right into a table.
I cry out, the round side cutting into my hips, and the table tips over, drinks and food crashing into people’s laps.
Some people are laughing, some are crying out in disgust. I think I hear Alan’s mother full-on sobbing. It all fills my head, swirling around and around until it has a stranglehold on my heart.
Somehow I pull myself away from the table, from the wreckage, and make it to the giant glass doors before hurting anyone else.
I fling them open, the rain and salt-soaked wind pelting me in the face, and run outside.
It’s cold. Dark. Wet. I am in the throes of this wicked winter storm.
But even as my heels slip and slide on the wood deck, as I grip the railing for dear life and run down the steps and onto the beach, where I plan to just run, run, run, I push all the feelings of humiliation and duty and shame aside.
I feel nothing but free.
CHAPTER ONE
Amanda
Three Months Later
Running is therapy.
At least that’s what I tell myself. Over and over and over again.
This is good for you.
Don’t quit.
Keep going.
This is hell.
I’m literally going to die.
Why am I doing this to myself?
Can I stop now?
I’m going to stop.
And I often do stop and try and catch my breath until some other jogger blasts past me and then my ultra-competitiveness kicks in and I end up running after them. Sometimes I can’t catch up but at least it gets my legs moving again. Other times I run past them with a nonchalant look on my face, ponytail swinging behind me like running is super fun, super cool, totally no big deal for this girl, only to collapse around the corner in a heaving mess minutes later.
But somehow I keep doing it, every day. At first I started running because it was the only way I could shake out my frustration. I tried taking kickboxing classes, but they kept conflicting with my class schedule and I accidently punched my instructor in the face, so that was a sign to move on. Running seems to be a better fit. I can go at my own pace, pick my times, and best of all for my inner hermit, I don’t have to see or talk to anyone. It’s just me and the ground beneath my feet. Well, and my stupid brain that constantly reminds me what hell running is.
And even though it clears my head—believe me, I’ve done a lot of thinking ever since Alan and I broke up—it just never seems to get easier. I’m waiting for that moment where it’s painless, easy, and fun, and that just hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it never will. Maybe that’s why people run. They’re chasing something they’ll never get, the dangling carrot of promises that all hard things eventually get easy.
Today’s run isn’t easy, but at least it’s beautiful. It’s early March, and chartreuse buds are just starting to make their appearance on the tips of barren limbs. The ocean, slate grey and churning, foams against the rocky shoreline. In the far distance, Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is hidden, shrouded by low, dense clouds that like to sit in Haro Strait between the two countries like
some sort of tribunal council. It’s still cold and damp, and the sun can barely penetrate the cloud cover, but I know in a few months, hell even a few weeks, our daylight hours will be long, the air will turn warm, and my usual jogging path along Oak Bay will start to swarm with the elderly out for their daily walk or happy couples making out on park benches. Hopefully by then I’ll be able to handle couples, or just happy people in general.
After I turned down Alan’s proposal, puked on him, and made a general mess of things, we both decided we couldn’t work it out. Alan was beyond humiliated, changing from the easygoing boy I loved to a stranger who hated the sight of my face. I hadn’t been quite prepared for the split in his personality, especially as I only saw the nice guy over the last four years. I guess he’d been hoarding a whole lot of negative emotion toward me, and it all started coming out. Like vomit. But meaner and less gross.
(I promise I’ll stop talking about puke, it’s just so fitting right now.)
I can’t blame him for being angry with me, because I was angry with myself. If only I’d confronted those feelings, the whole thing could have been avoided. But he was my first real relationship, my first love, the guy I lost my virginity to, all those big things, and I thought the feeling of boredom and complacency was normal. What I didn’t think was that we would be in a pressure cooker. Even though we’d been together for so long, I was still in university for two more years, and we were young. I mean, Alan still had four years of dental school left. I really didn’t think marriage was on his radar.
Of course there were all the clues. Asking about ring sizes and where we’d go on our honeymoon and how many children I wanted. Okay, so they weren’t even clues, more like obvious signs that he was going to ask me. But I skirted around those questions and laughed them off, and well, no one is laughing now.
Naturally, after I publicly rejected him, I had to move out of the apartment we were sharing. But instead of moving back home like my parents wanted me to, I decided to find a roommate and get the hell out of Dodge.
It was the right choice. Not only is my current place super close to the University of Victoria, it has put some much needed distance between me and my parents (you can only hear about what a horrible choice you’ve made so many times). And I have a pretty awesome roommate.
Okay, maybe awesome isn’t the right word. But she provides me with distraction and entertainment, and half the shit she says is slowly ending up in my novel in the guise of a hilarious sidekick.
When I first saw the ad for a female roommate on Craigslist, I somehow assumed that it would be another U-Vic student. The location was in Oak Bay, it was a two-bedroom basement suite…I assumed it was another twenty-something needing a roommate to save a buck. But Ana Vainola ended up being a forty-four-year-old Estonian woman who was as tall as an Amazonian with fake boobs that could poke your eyes out, Juvéderm-filled lips, a tan that looked like she was doused in Orange Crush even under the best light, and the loudest, rapid-fire laugh I’d ever heard. She was also a recent divorcée, and even though we’re two decades apart and were raised in two totally different worlds, our transition from “taken” to the single life made us bond like nothing else. I’ve only been with her a few months, and even though she uses me as a guinea pig every night while she practices makeup for her beauty schooling, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
I suppose I could live by myself, but the thing is, even though I’ve been a self-proclaimed hermit my whole life, being alone right now scares me. Living with Ana lets me concentrate on my studies and my novel, yet whenever I need a break and a chance to escape from my head, she’s right there, ready for a laugh or a lecture on how to prepare for the apocalypse.
At the moment though, she’s at her beauty school and I have to shower and change and get ready for my writing class. When she’s not here, I can usually get out the door in ten minutes. If she’s here, I usually end up being sucked into a random conversation about pickles or rifles or uncircumcised penises (all of which came up over breakfast this morning).
When I’m done in the shower, I pull on some leggings, a long grey sweater that covers my ass (which hasn’t shrunk from my running like I thought it would), and slick on just enough makeup to say I tried, then pull my wet hair back into a bun, put on my glasses, and head out the door.
I have a car, a Mini Cooper (a high school graduation present from my parents), and though I don’t drive to school often because I feel like a douche, today I’m running late so I’m zipping over, hoping I’ll be able to find a parking spot near the classroom. That’s one of the reasons I don’t drive—the time it takes to find a spot is about the same amount of time to take the bus, plus on the bus you’re staying green, and it’s a great excuse to listen to music and people watch. I think most of my best characters have come from dealing with Victoria’s public transportation system.
Thankfully, I find a parking spot right by the building. My teacher, Professor Marie Dumas, may be carefree and encouraging and all sorts of weird (which I personally love), but she’s a stickler for tardiness and academic excellence. When you’re late, or you half-ass an assignment, she takes it personally. I’ve seen her tear up over giving a low grade before. But Writing Fiction 200 is one of my favorite classes and I give it everything I’ve got. After all, the writing program is my future, and a way to still get an education and my parents off my back while doing what I love. It’s like a piggy bank for my dreams, ensuring that no matter what happens in my future, I’ll always have this to back me up. It’s a reminder that I’ve fought to stay true to myself, even if my life doesn’t go to plan.
After I park and run into the building, I pass my classmate Ali on the stairs, though she’s running away from class instead of going to it.
“Where are you going?” I ask her.
She pauses on the stairwell and gives me a sharp look under her razor-cut bangs. “I’m not feeling well,” she says, even though she sounds more pissed off than sick.
I watch her go and then shrug to myself before reaching the top of the stairs. My friend Rio is hanging outside the door to class texting someone, leaning against the wall and twirling her curly dark hair around her finger like someone out of a John Hughes film.
“Thought you weren’t going to show,” she says as I approach, snapping her gum between her teeth. “I just texted you.”
I pull my phone out of my suede saddle bag and glance at the text blazing on it.
Where you at? We’re getting our final assignment today. Also, I lost my bra last night so I’m wearing Saran Wrap instead.
You’d think I’d be shocked by a text like this but not when it comes to Rio. I glance up at her, my gaze going directly to her boobs. “Uh, what?”
“She’s giving us our final assignment.”
“Yeah, but more about the Saran Wrap in place of a bra…” I point out.
“Long story,” she says, then leans in closer, her dark eyes dancing. “But it works. Just in case you end up sleeping with some guy who keeps comparing your vagina to the Rio Grande. I don’t think he realized he was being insulting, especially after we finished off a bottle of Crown Royal while playing a Game of Thrones drinking game, but needless to say, I got out of his place and didn’t think about the bra until now.”
I frown, trying hard not to laugh. “But you have other bras, I’m sure.”
“Oh, I didn’t go home after that,” she says, and I don’t press her on it. If she wants to share the details, she’ll share. “Anyway, I hope Marie gives us something more exciting than our last assignment.”
“No kidding,” I tell her, even though I’m lying. Honestly, I liked our last assignment, which was to write a short nonfiction story about ourselves without embellishing a word. My description of high school was like a less entertaining (and less murderous) version of Heathers. And even though this last project is the equivalent of our final exam, I can’t wait to tackle it. I’m a total nerd, I know, but every assignment Marie has given us has reall
y challenged me and keeps improving my prose. Plus, not to toot my own horn, but I have aced every project so far. Her edits and notes on my writing are like a drug, validation that I desperately crave, especially when no one else in my life seems to take my writing seriously.
I look around. “Hey, I saw Ali run off. Is she okay?”
Rio shrugs, adjusting her laptop bag on her shoulder. “I don’t know. She stepped in the class, said something to Blake, and then ran off.”
Ugh. Blake Crawford. Pretty much the worst human to ever grace this earth. No exaggeration needed.
“Were they dating?” I ask. Ali wears a permanent scowl, is super intelligent, and is pretty much the last person I’d imagine going after the fuckboy, manwhore, jackass that is Blake.
She rolls her eyes. “Fucking, Amanda, not dating. What else is new? He probably broke her heart and her vagina. Or vice versa.”
“I wasn’t aware Ali had a heart to break.” I don’t comment on her vagina.
“Guess she does. Serves her right. You can’t play the player without getting played.” She says this gravely, even though when it comes to Rio I’m not sure whether she’s the ultimate player she seems to be or she’s been screwed over once or twice. She has this bright, bubbly personality that masks anything that gets too close to heart. It’s probably why, when I first met her in our writing program, we hit it off right away. She lightens me up and forces me to see the glass half full. At least, she’s trying.
We take our usual seats near the front as I scan the room. Sure enough, Blake is in his corner, headphones on, and grinning at his phone. Probably watching a YouTube video on how to be a douchebag.
I can’t stand his grin. In fact, I hate everything about him. I know, I don’t really know him and hate’s a strong word, but I have my reasons. He’s the type of guy who would have made my high school years a living hell, only now I get to deal with his immaturity in university. Thank god I only have one class with him, otherwise all my time would be spent thinking of witty comebacks to his insults and insinuations.
I don’t even know why he’s in the class at all, mind you. He’s a third year student and transferred from England last year, getting his business degree. Not sure how writing plays into any of it, but however it does, he doesn’t take anything seriously. It’s like writing and books and literature are one big joke to him, and I’m not the kind of person to take that lightly. Sure, maybe I get a bit too serious at times, whether it comes to writing or school, but that’s because, well…I need to.