To love is to destroy.
~ Cassandra Clare
***
I feel alive when I'm around her, like a fire burning deep in my heart - and no, it's not a sex drive. I've never met anyone like her. She's different and I know people have told her this, just not always in a good way. I'm drawn to her in ways I've never been drawn to anyone.
The moment I met her face to face was a moment of clarity. As if someone turned on a light in my brain and I finally realized that wow... this was what it felt like. I'd seen her around school for the past four and a half years, she had been the girlfriend of one of my teammates, Jason Barnes. Though I never was able to talk to her, I found myself looking for her in the hallways, my heart racing whenever I thought I'd caught a lucky glimpse. In time I was able to pick her distinctly out of a crowd, going by the way she walked and the rare variations of blonde and brown in her hair.
Curiosity haunted me whenever I saw her in Honors English, which she's shared with me since freshman year. I wanted so badly to talk to her, to know her but I knew how lovestruck she was with Jason and I didn't want to ruin anything. But I couldn't shake the feeling that someday she was going to mean something more to me than she ever had before.
The summer before junior year was an odd one. Baseball season was over and football conditioning would begin in July. My weekly visits to therapy had been reduced to monthly appointments. My mom who had been working at Minnie's for my whole high school career so far had recovered enough to the point she became the manager and was able to pull me out of foster care. After the harsh events that had happened to us when I was little, my therapist thought it too rash to move back into the house on Olive Court, so my mom purchased our current residence on Shanghai. Everything in my life was fixed, and though the memories of the past came in brutal attacks ever so often, I was feeling better than I had in a long time.
When I went back to school in junior year, the news was everywhere. The Jason and Colby fling had died over the summer and it apparently hadn't ended peacefully. I heard many versions of the story, one being that Colby cheated on Jason, another saying that they had hooked up over the summer and Colby had been disgusted at his poor experience. But no matter what, no matter which story had been told, they all said it was Cole's fault. I've never been one for drama, I knew how badly the stories could be twisted, and though I hardly even knew Colby that well, I knew that she would have never cheated on Jason or done any of those awful things people believed about her. I knew how much she loved Jason and I refused to believe the rumors.
A year and a half it was until that fateful day in February when her locker contents went kaput. This was it. I was finally going to talk to her.
She seemed surprised when I spoke to her and she turned around abruptly, but I had already leaned down to help her. Amongst the many many books that had fallen out of the locker was one of my favorites, City of Lost Souls from the Mortal Instruments. I smiled, remembering when she was reading those for the first time. She'd always sneakily read the books in third period English class when we were supposed to be reading Romeo and Juliet, hiding it under the desk or inside the textbook. I often found myself watching her, waiting for the times when she'd get excited and her knees would start bouncing underneath the desk, wondering what it must be like inside her mind at the moment. That's when I decided to read them for myself.
I would be lying if I said they didn't change my life. But if I did, it'd sound cheesy as hell so I'm just going to leave it. I never liked to read until sophomore year, and since then I haven't been able to stop. It's an escape. Words have power and I hadn't found that out until later than I wished I had.
