The Best Days

Chapter 6

When I was growing up, I never really considered myself to be a social outcast. Sure, I wasn't the most popular kid in school and yes, I could count the amount of people I could remotely call my friends on one hand... Okay, well, two fingers. But I was never picked last for dodge ball, and during softball time in P.E., I was always the second or even sometimes the first girl picked to be on a team.

I wouldn't call myself an athlete because that would require me to have participated in an athletic sport of some kind. On my co-curricular transcript I'd turned in for college acceptance, the only thing I could list was my half-hearted participation in Student Council and the few articles I'd written for the school newspaper.

However, sometimes when I get all whimsical I like to think that if I hadn't dated Derek then I would have been an athlete. Derek hated the fact that I had to stay after school once a week for Student Council and he would have gone nuts if I'd had to stay after school every day to play some sport that he couldn't be a part of as well. But in a life sans my ex I would have been physically inclined to play some kind of sport. I liked watching volleyball and soccer and I always was up to tabs on what was going on in the football world. I liked to run and I enjoyed a bit of competition so it was perfect.

Yep, I would have been an athlete.

I often wonder at nighttime what my life would be like right at that moment if I had just not given him my number. Would I have gone to SFSU? Maybe I would have made a lot of friends in high school and decided to stay in Texas and attend a state school. Maybe I would have met a guy who was nothing like my Derek and I would be happy right at that moment in relationship bliss.

Who knows, right?

Those were the questions that kept me up at night. And it was those same questions that kept me up the night before my first class as well.

After I'd gotten in from the pool party, I'd once again gone over my schedule for the week. I had Composition I on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Calculus I on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'd decided to learn a language so I had 3 hours of French on Tuesdays. And then finally an Intro to Psychology class on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well.

As a result, pretty much Tuesdays would be my suck day of classes ALL day and Mondays and Friday's were my easy days where I had only one class. And that class was Composition so that would be a cake walk since I liked to write so much.

So for the first day of my collegiate career I only had one class. How lucky was I? Sure it was at the ungodly hour of 9:30 a.m. but it could honestly be worse. Kendra had a class that started at 7:30 a.m. called Intro to Medieval Art.

Who in their right mind would want to be lectured about Medieval Art at 7 something in the morning? Certainly not I. I felt sorry for the kid.

But as I was saying before I'd been up most of the night pondering the what ifs of my existence. That and listening to Gavin's incessant gaming on the TV he'd set up in our room. I was trying to be lax and not blow a gasket or whatever- though normally I hate having a TV in the room and I find them distracting. After all, this said obstruction of peace was not one of the ground rules. So I tried to suck it up. Even still, the gunshots and trash talk he was spewing into his Xbox earpiece were the absolute worst.

I'd asked him to kindly be quiet but he'd just pretended like he was going to actually listen to me and waited until he thought I'd fallen asleep before getting loud again. This, of course, made no sense to me because as soon as I'd drift off I'd be pulled back to consciousness by exclamations of, "Take that, you effing bitch." Or "You dirty little whore! Where'd you come from?" And "You hate me? Well, that's not what your mom said when I was. Spanking. That. Ass!" (Insert obnoxious laughter here.)