𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐌𝐞

Chapter 10

I thought about my journal. I needed my journal. It was where I kept all my pain and told all my secrets and it spoke of only two things—my parents and him.

I haven't thought about that journal since last year when he went away and I no longer had anything to write about. The journal was old and something I kept to deal with the pain of losing my parents. I started it a year after they disappeared and Keiran's bullying got worse.

The first entry about him was in the fourth grade after he got some girls to stick used gum in my hair and had everyone call me spit head at lunch. I locked myself inside the bathroom and immediately pulled out my journal to write. It was mistake but it soon became my salvation and way of coping.

Starting out, whenever a memory of my parents surfaced I would write that memory down and how I felt about them. It was something my aunt suggested I do when she couldn't get me to talk about it. She said she would rather I tell a piece a paper than no one at all. I think that was the writer in her speaking.

Keiran had given me a new pain to focus on. So when I begin to write only about Keiran, the journal became a vessel and now holds every thought and emotion that I ever had for Keiran inside of it. It even expressed the confusion I often would feel from being attracted to him as we got older. I finally admitted to my journal of having a crush on him a couple of days before I turned sixteen.

The school year had just begun and I saw him for the first time in three months. He'd gone to some basketball camp that was sponsored by the NBA and NCAA for the best talent. The look he gave me as he swaggered down the hallway toward me was hot. I remember his grey eyes trailing slowly up and down my body as we grew closer from opposite ends of the hallway. Our gazes were locked the entire time and I couldn't help but to admire the light stubble he'd grown. It made him look older and sexier, if that was even possible and just as I was passing by him, thinking he would spare me his normal dose of public humiliation, he knocked my books out of my hand and sent them flying along with the few sheets of paper I had laying on top. I didn't react. I never did. I picked up my books and continued to my first class with my head held high and the anguish my heart felt buried in secret.

Keiran's torments came more frequently and grew crueler that year. For whatever reason he seemed to despise me even more. I remember always being confused about the strange looks he would give me followed by a vicious, verbal attack. But we were on an entirely different playing field now. Keiran was menacing enough when unprovoked but now he actually has a reason to hate me.

I tried to look at it from his point of view. He lost a year of his life to the system. It was a year he would never get back, while the drug conviction threatened his future because nothing stayed completely buried. Add in the humiliation of a public arrest it would be enough to piss off a nun. I understood why he wanted revenge, but threatening the life of my aunt was unforgivable. She was innocent in all this.

When his car stopped, it snapped me out of my thoughts and I realized that we were in my driveway. He didn't shut off the engine and I was relieved. I couldn't handle anymore of Keiran today. After his party came to a screeching, violent halt, he had come back upstairs and untied me. He then ordered me to "get the fuck out" and I would have went running for the door but I had to remind him that he drove me here and I couldn't call Willow because he sabotaged our friendship. So here we were.

I touched the door handle to get out but stopped and stared out the windshield instead. I took a deep breath and made a decision.

"It was wrong," I began. He turned to face me, with his eyebrows raised. "You had a good thing going. You just made captain of the basketball team – rumor was that scouts were already looking at you pretty heavy. It was the end of junior year, and you were supposed to graduate last year. You should be in college now surrounded by an endless supply of hot girls. You wanted a future. You hoped for a future."