The Lucky One

Chapter Three: The End

 For beauty starved with her severity

Cuts beauty off from all posterity.

She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair

To merit bliss by making me despair:

She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow

Do I live dead that live to tell in now.

     ~ Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Chapter Three:

The End

He was clutching the bronze locket on his hand tightly, flicking it open and looking at the two happy pictures facing each other. For a moment, the thought flushed into him: He had Clarisse, but how much longer? He was not expecting or looking forward to the revelation of everything . . . the revelation of their relationship. It must take the greatest pressure to shatter everything they made for a very long time. . . .

As he gently looked over the window towards the darkening evening, he knew that it must be him, and him alone, who ought to do what was necessary. Part of him suggested that he would keep it a secret from her until the time would come. . . . He only had a day to keep it; there was intensely no point hiding things. She would know for sure, and when she did, the impact would slap her at its best.

Mark does not want things to happen that way. Another lobe of his brain suggested that they should secure a long-distance relationship but it would not be something healthy. In that case, he was just delaying their breakup. So another cell of his brain had suggested that maybe he should finish everything the way it was meant to be. . . .

He groped for his phone beneath the throw pillows and texted the following words, holding up his Adam’s Apple in pain and regret:

Hi! Are you still up? What about some dinner tomorrow? Beep me back, OK? Good night! I love you always.

But as the night crept on colder and emptier, Mark received no confirmation reply that doomed him to feel awkward asking a hopeless girl to a date. Maybe she was asleep now; he remembered that he had forgotten the time. It was less helpful, anyway. Perhaps it was now midnight judging at how silent the surrounding had become.

He struggled standing, and collapsed on his own bed then shoved the earphones on. A beaming and mirthful photograph of three teenagers flashed blaringly on the iPod screen. It was showing how joyous they were back then, but Mark felt too angry about it so he changed the display. The choices for replacement bubbled out countless ones they took the last time he visited Clarisse’s house, probably to convince him about talking to Hunter and settling the kerfuffle. Mark didn’t keel. He was just otherwise exasperated.

He cursed plucking the earphones out of his earlobes in reproachful demeanor. No slightest cue had ever occurred to him about placing a word to that evil grass so as to start a conversation once again. And with the display reminding him, he belched out inner anger just with the thought.

He slept with his continuously increasing anger.

In his dream, he was ready for training and stepped out of the apartment into the dim alleyways when he caught sight of Boo the Chihuahua barking at him. As he dissolved further down the landing, the Chihuahua’s squeaks turned bass; its bark suddenly became concerning.

He stirred, and right on the top of the stair was an enormous Rottweiler snarling with its thick strands of grey saliva dripping and oozing down the steps. Mark immediately froze. Boo’s glinting red pupils were aimed at Mark, but somewhere on his back. He followed its stare and was jolted when what was supposed to be his pack of gears was a heavy piece of bone strapped on his shoulder.