and then you left // cth

chapter 12: dreamer

calum

We were sitting in my room, about a month into our friendship. We had taken to hanging out every single day after school, and whether it was at a cafe or in my basement. We were always together, it didn't matter where.

Our English essay had been due two weeks after we met, but we continued to have lunch together in the library every day. It turned out we had a lot in common. She was funny and smart. And beautiful.

She was suddenly my best friend, and my days were booked full going on adventures with her.

Luke was still my best friend too, and we had kept in touch. But he was in California, and I was in Washington. I needed someone here. He understood that. But was sure that we would always remain close.

"Lex?" I asked her on that particular day. We were just hanging out, talking about nothing in particular. She paused what she was doing to look up at me. She was using a sharpie to doodle on my arm. She was drawing a rose.

"Yeah?" She asked me, her big green eyes looking at me expectantly.

"What do you want to accomplish in life?" She blushed and looked down at her drawing.

"I don't know," she admitted and put the cap on the pen and throwing it across the room. She scooted closer to me and leaned back on her wrists. I could see her scars, some fresher than others, but I decided to wait until we were closer to mention it. I didn't want her to shut herself off.

Something about Lex made me look at everything from a new perspective. Her presence was refreshing, and I had never enjoyed being around someone as much as I loved being with Lex. She questioned things, things that I had never thought to think twice about. And so we often had deeper discussions about big things, bigger issues.

I'd only known her a few weeks, and she already was changing me for the better.

"Like, what do you want to do for the rest of your life? What is your passion?" I clarified. She stared at me quizzically, probably wondering if I was born without a filter; I tended to say whatever came to mind, even if it wasn't the best idea. But this question had been bothering me for a while and Lex seemed like the type of person to have big plans for her life.

"What do you mean?" She repeated, fiddling with a bracelet. But she knew what I meant. I think she was just trying to think of how to best word her answer.

"You know what I mean. What's your talent? What is it about you that makes you different from anyone else? What do you expect from the world that no one else does?"

"You have a lot of free time don't you?" She asked me, smiling a smile that lit up her eyes, and the whole room.

"Don't change the subject. I know you have one, I just want know what it is." I told her, and she sighed and looked up at me a distant look on her face.

"You know what, Calum? I have no fucking clue what I want to do with my life. But I do know what I don't want. I don't want to waste all of my free time in high school studying so that I can get into a good college and get a good job and have a nice house, all to just die in a hospital bed alone. People think that having kids and a job and stuff automatically means that you lived a good life. But that, Calum, that is what I don't want. I want to accomplish something more than that." She blurted out all in one breath.

That was when I knew she was different from everyone else. Her eyes were glassy as they swept across my face, searching for a reaction.

"You know what I think?" I asked her softly. She looked up at me.

"I think that you sit in the back of the room in all of our classes and don't pay attention. It's not that you're trying to sass the teachers or disobey or something fucking stupid like that. When you daydream, you're not thinking about what's for dinner, or who hooked up with who at what party." She stared into my eyes with disbelief as I spoke.

"You know the truth. You know that we don't actually need to know how to solve X in the real world. High school is literally just daycare for teenagers, it's all just so that was occupied in these final years before adulthood. So that we know what we don't want the world, so we can figure out who we want to be: A mathematician or a surgeon or a journalist.

But you, you don't want any of those things. You want what you want. And you, you sit in the back of these toxic classrooms and you just get lost in your own world, thinking and hoping that the real world is better than this. You're the only person that I've ever come across in my entire life who is not obsessed with winning a sports game or getting an A in that class that we all know we're not going to use in our real life. You're looking for inspiration.

You're a dreamer.

You're looking for examples of what you don't want so that when school gets out and you're free and you're an adult you know what you want.

You try to be invisible, but you know what? You're not invisible to me. I see you."

She looks shocked, and I can see why. That was deep. She looks up at me, just as a tear falls from her eyes. She knows I'm right. That I've figured her out. She takes a deep breath and smiles, looking up at the ceiling before meeting my eye.

"I'm a writer."

And that was the exact moment that I began to fall in love.

...
thank you so much for one thousand reads holy shit i appreciate you guys so much.

this chapter was hella cheesy but i'm also not mad at it?