Never Set In Stone

chapter eleven

I wouldn't see him for a long time. Maybe I won't see him ever again.

He graduated and I became a senior in high school. The last time I actually saw him was on his last day of school. Then again, in my dreams, the week of his senior week. The dream was so vivid and I thought it was real until I woke up and realized that it wasn't. My heart showed me how I really felt about him compared to how I wanted to feel about him. But whether I have feelings or not, they're all irrelevant now because he's gone.

This was going to be my year. No boys, no awful friends, no distractions. I'm ready for a fantastic year. One that focuses on me and not anyone else, especially not JD.

When I was with Ryan, he took all of my dreams with him to the point where I thought I had no hope for my future. My parents forced me over the summer to go on a college tour of a school that I've never heard of before. We stayed the weekend out-of-state, all for me to visit a college. But then we walked up to the school.

The school was so incredibly small that wherever you stood, whether low point or high point, you could see everything. You could walk to anything. Colors of blues and golds painted the light poles on several paths leading you in different directions. Directions directed by tour guides specialized in the career path you want to take and telling you everything you need to hear. The simplicity of the entire thing being right next to the town. The vintage flare consists of historic buildings while also having new renovated dorms that looked almost like a newly built Best Western.

When the tour was over and our exhausted feet took a sigh of relief as we sat back into the car, my eyes widened trying to look at things I may have missed, because I was eager to see everything. I watched a girl with a backpack and hair that matched mine walking down one of the college paths. For a second I thought I was looking into the future, but I wasn't. I literally saw myself coming there, I wanted to come here. I wanted to be here. I loved it here. I didn't want to leave, I wanted to come back and go to school here. Everyone has a dream school that is somewhere they have wanted to go to since they were little but I just found my dream school during this 2-hour tour that I was forced to go on. My dreams were no longer anyone else's dreams, for a second, they felt like my own dreams.

While my mind traveled with thoughts about my own future, I couldn't help but think about where JD had been. If he went to college and which one or if he didn't go to college then where did he go. I stopped myself from thinking at all. I stopped. Because he was no longer worth my thoughts.

Since it was my senior year, I had to do absolutely everything that I could to finish out the year strong. I was going to go full out for every single event and thing that the school had. Football games, spirit days, homecoming, festivals, everything. I was going to do everything. And I did. I started to.

Though we didn't have the greatest football team ever, they had a lot of improvement from last year in my opinion. I knew a lot about football because of how much my dad watched football. Sometimes when he explained things, I actually understood the information, other times it would go in through one ear and out the other. But it was fine, I knew enough to understand what was going on in the games.

The homecoming game was not as crazy as it had been at my high school when I was a freshman. I remember having a really good team and a senior section that would dump buckets and bottles of water on all of us freshmen whenever we scored a touchdown. By the end of the breezy October night I was absolutely freezing because of my soaking wet clothes.

However, homecoming in Massachusetts was much more bland. A football game that sucked. A quiet student section. But at least they were winning the game. I sat with Gianna who was accompanied by her friends from other schools. They were really nice compared to all of the girls from my school. Surprisingly, I became friends with all of them. They were all a lot younger than me, like one of them, Bailey, was a freshman who was actually really chill. She understood a lot of the things I was going through with moving and boys and drama and so on and so forth. Only the age gap was the major difference between us which I thought was fine.