Secrets & Lies

Chapter Five

Soon it was time for Gia to go back to school and she quickly got back into that routine.  Gia completely forgot about the fellowship.  She was busy hanging out and having fun with her two friends and doing school work which more than occupied her thoughts and time.

    In May a few weeks before school was about to get out Gia checked her mail and saw that her mother had forwarded several letters from home in her weekly care package.  In it she had received a letter from Oxford stating that she had won the fellowship and that she would need to report to Oxford University in September.  Gia sat and read the letter over and over.  The information finally began to take hold in her brain after the tenth time. Her life was finally going to start!  She was going to live in a foreign country and study what she had always wanted to study.  She was going to get to finish her schooling in one of the oldest schools in the world.  Holy Fuck!!!!!!!, was all that came into her head as she reread the letter.  Gia was sitting on the floor with a dazed look on her face when Mallory and Marcy entered her room.

"You okay?" Marcy asked concerned.

Gia only nodded.

"Did you get some bad fucking news?  Who is the fucking letter from?" asked Mallory running her sentences together as she had a tendency to ask a million questions very quickly.

She held out the letter so they could read it.

"What the fuck! You never told me this!" Mallory bellowed, she loved the word fuck and said it in almost every sentence.

"Are you going to accept this fellowship?" Marcy asked more calmly.

"I know, right?! I applied on a whim.  I never thought I would get it.  I am still in shock."

"I can tell!  Explain to me what the fuck you were thinking.  Why the fuck you never mentioned it to me.  Is this what the fuck you want?" Mallory continued her tirade.

"I think so, yeah." Gia stuttered and started explaining what had happened and how she had talked to her grandmother about the whole thing and that she had just decided to try it and see what happened not really expecting to get it, but hoping for the best.  Now that she had the fellowship she was definitely going to take it and move to England.  It was her destiny she tried to explain.

"Nothing is ever going to change our friendship.  We will always be best friends.  We will just be apart for a few years."

"A few years, this letter says five!" Marcy exclaimed.

"I know it gives me a PHD in English Literature in five short years." Gia agreed.

"What the fuck are you going to do with a PHD in English Lit?" asked Mallory.

"Hopefully write a great piece of literature, if not maybe a crappy piece." Gia joked.

"You are not funny.  I still don't understand why you think you need to do this when things are great here." Mallory said.

"I want to study English, and yes I can study that here, but what do I have to look forward to.  I can be a teacher and that is about it.  You both want to be teachers and I respect that, but I don't.  I want something else." Gia tried to explain.

"But you don't even know what you want." Marcy exclaimed.

"You're right I don't know what I want exactly, but I know I want something else, something that Adams can't give me." Gia said with some finality in her voice.

"But you will be leaving us for fucking good." Mallory whined.

"It isn't for good, there are vacations and I will be home for those and once I finish I will come back home and we can continue our adventures." Gia said hopefully.

"You won't come back; you will meet new friends in England and want to spend your time with them, not with us poor folk back here in the sticks." Marcy stated like a petulant child.

"No one will ever replace either of you." Gia stated with all of her heart, because she truly believe it to be true.

Events seemed to go by pretty quickly after that.  The three girls studied for finals and continued to celebrate their weekends with huge parties.  It seemed almost like a dream because time went by so fast.  The only bad part was that Marcy seemed to be holding a grudge.  Their friendship was suffering because Marcy didn't want to see Gia go.  Gia knew it was hard on Marcy but it was also hard on her and she felt Marcy was acting like a selfish child.  Soon enough Gia found herself packing everything up for the last time.  She would never come back to Adams State University.  As she looked around the empty room she also said goodbye to Ted McGinley, the man who had brought her here by mistake.  This was not where she belonged.  Gia had finally found her path, and was ready to start running down it.