The Best Days

Chapter 1

A/N 2021: Heyy there! Lemme know if you see any typos or awkward sentences. Thank you! Happy Reading!





Life is so bizarre.

Life is so bizarre. And it just keeps happening. And happening. And happening. I mean, one day you're blowing out the candles at your fifth birthday party and then suddenly it's your college graduation day and you're having one of those out of body experiences where it's commotion and chaos all around. But then time starts moving super slow and the world becomes still. Kinda like in the movies. Except this wasn't a movie, but real, actual life, happening and happening.

I looked around at each of my friends, Kool-Aid grins spread across every face. This was a good day, a great day, really. It was the great beginning of the rest of my life. Even still I felt tiny and insignificant, lost in a sea of graduates, surrounded by an even bigger ocean of misty-eyed parents. Kool-Aid grins left and right.

So why was I sad?

Why did I feel a melancholy mood settling over me? I tried to shake myself out of it. It even worked for a few seconds.

What if this is it? I asked myself. What if this is the best it will ever be?

Everything means so much in the here and now but would they matter in the there and later? I don't know. I just wanted to live in the moment like everyone else. I squeezed my eyes shut. Someone smarter than me once said that today is the youngest you'll ever be again. I'd thought to myself snootily, yeah, so what? Not understanding in the slightest...

I think I get it now.

High School

I could not wait for college. If I could just make it out of high school everything in my life would be better. I'd go somewhere far, far away, somewhere foreign and exotic but not too unfamiliar—maybe Florida or Hawaii.

At the start of high school, I hardly had any friends. I'd weighed the possibilities. I could have high school friends now, who'd easily be forgotten in the wake by a tedious uphill battle through student loan debt. Or I could worry about friendship later and focus on something of actual consequence: earning a scholarship. So I worked hard and put my social life on the backburner. I busied myself with homework and, when I was done with that, my extra credit assignments. I spent the little free time I allowed myself on calligraphy (my ninth grade hobby of choice) because nothing says I have my life together like visually satisfying handwriting.

Honestly, even if I'd had friends, I wouldn't have known what to do with them. I was Jenny Jameson (not Jenna Jameson, the porn star), that girl at school who was pretty cute but seemed to never speak, except to say something weird. I think I was probably considered a nerd.

I did have one 'sort of' friend during my freshman year named Tiffany Evans who I'd sit with at lunch. But it wasn't like we ever hung out on the weekend or called each other to talk about boys or movies or whatever it is girlfriends talk about. Come to think of it, I don't even think I had her number.

Not that it mattered one way or the other to me. I had my good grades and the prospect of going away to school was getting brighter and brighter every day. Things were going well for me the first semester. And then in the spring you could say that things got even better.

Derek Somers happened.

It was January 13. I remember it because it was a Friday the 13th and my day had been turning out to be pretty shitty before he stepped into my fourth period class. (I'd gotten an abysmal B because my teacher had assigned a 5 paragraph essay and I'd written 5 pages. It's really a travesty what this education system has come to...)