The Innocents

Chapter Three

Faye announced her acceptance into college with a video chat to me at one in the morning.

A week before, I had received the same letter. I didn't video chat her. Instead, I mentioned it in passing on our way to the movies. She gave a toothy grin and hugged me and told me that she was jealous that I was getting out and she wasn't. I assured her that her time would come. This was a time when she had given up all prospects of marrying into money and furthering her education. This is was my influence. Not that I want to take credit for changing people, but I like to think I had a small part in it.

A month later we had settled in our dorms, dull cinder-blocked holes with nothing but a bed and a desk with a small leather chair. The bed was one of those storage ones with drawers underneath so there wasn't really a need for a dresser. I got a single which was unheard for a freshman, but I certainly wasn't about to ask why even though Faye and I had requested to room together. I emptied my many boxes of books into the tiny shelves attached to the particle board desk wondering how I got so lucky.

This was right after high school. I was still seventeen, but Faye had turned eighteen two weeks after graduation. She could now buy cigarettes on her own, which was momentous. Through all of urgings for her to quit, she decided not to. My influences could only get so far, I saw. People are going to do what they want despite your best efforts. My best effort ended in a declaration that she was incredibly stupid.

Which I take back now. I take back every bad thing I ever said to her.

This was the time in our history when power was a necessity to get anywhere in life. You didn't even have to have money to get that power. Association alone would do. That being said, there were groups in my college that clearly set apart the different social classes, meaning while some of us toiled in the pheasant category and people like Crawford Sills stood high as the gentry atop a pyramid.

His name bugged me. In my day, last names were commonly employed as first names and just as they sounded, brought pretentiousness to them.

Ass-backwards, I used to say.

I suppose that I can't really talk. I have a boy's name after-all.

He was pre-law, handsome and salacious. Why he took to me, I'll never know. I like to think of myself as pretty, plain but not ugly. I never grew into my nose which was long and bumped, but attention almost always diverted to my eyes which were large and green. I suppose I could thank God for not giving me small, beady eyes and a uni-brow. I'd be on my way to casting spells in a dark basement at that rate.

His father bought land and built houses on said land. I wasn't too familiar with the whole thing other than he owned the housing community called Pristine Peak which was more pristine than it was on an actual peak. Needless to say, he was pretty well off, but it goes to show that money does not equal smarts. His son was going to a state college after all. I'm not clear on why he didn't attend the private institution boys like him usually go to, but I tried not to think too much about him.

I denied him for more reasons than one. Firstly, he was older, me just a seventeen-year-old wet behind the ears.

"Drew," he would say in our English Literature class. He sat behind me. I could always feel his stare on the back of my skull. "You look nice today. You always do."

This was always followed by a digital rose that swept across the monitor my desk.

Second, I was dating a boy named Jackson Bifar. I called him Jack and so did everyone else. He wasn't like the others who had come from money. He was more like me. Sometimes I got the impression that he tried too hard to be humble and I'd have to tell him so. He was doing it for my sake. If he hadn't loved a girl from a poor family, he'd be just like Crawford with his pungent smell of affluence and taking and taking. Never giving and never expecting to. Jack was different because he was mine.