Tomorrow Never Knows

Chapter Two

        There’s no way to describe the feeling, really. You can come close to it, but it’s hard to capture the essence of the immeasurable pain of your only love cheating on you. Although, it may be summed up as the feeling of your insides rotting out at an alarming pace.

        Once I was able to tear my eyes off of the horrors happening right in front of me, I curled up in a little ball on the landing and wept soundlessly.

        ‘What a goddamn fool you are, Cora. What a joke,’  I thought to myself. How naive was I to believe that an older man, a college boy, would be faithful to me? Kevin was smart, he was charming, and he was good-looking. He was going to be a lawyer someday. Of course girls would be all over him, they always had been. Who would he be to refuse women who were older, more beautiful, and more sophisticated than I?

        “I’m gonna make a name for myself, Cora,” he’d told me one day, “People will know who I am, and I’m not gonna let anything get in the way of that.”

        I guess that’s all he really saw me as, then. A bump in the road. An obstacle. To him, I was just a pretty doll he could amuse himself with during the day, someone to keep him entertained when he had some down time. Obviously, though, I wasn’t enough to keep him busy.

        I couldn’t help but replay in my head the night we first met, two years and a month or so ago. Kevin was a senior, two years older than I was, and he made all the girls swoon. I’d heard of him, of course, him being the pride and joy of the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, but I never dreamed I had a chance with him when my all girls school and his had a mixer.

        I’d developed a crush on him from afar, seeing him walking out of school in the afternoons, catching a glimpse here and there of his rugby practices and such. I knew he’d be at the dance and I wanted to make a good impression on him at the very least, so I spent a month making myself a brand new dress. My other efforts included experimenting (struggling) with makeup for the first time, putting my hair in a somewhat complex updo, and practicing dancing both in the mirror and with my best friend Margaret. We also practiced conversing, and she played the role of Kevin.

        Before the dance started I was both overly confident and overly excited, but once I got there, I was frozen. It didn’t matter that I chose exactly the right color eyeshadow to compliment my green eyes, or that I powdered over my freckles, or that my long blonde hair was finally presentable. None of my preparations mattered. I had nothing in common with Kevin, nothing to say, and every girl around me looked thirty times better than I did.

        So, I spent at least two hours standing off to the side by the punch bowl with Margaret and a few other friends. I felt like I was watching a movie about a dance rather than attending it myself. All the cliches were in place: a girl crying in the bathroom because her boyfriend dumped her, the perfect couple making out just outside, and everyone dancing, having a grand old time. And, of course, the popular guy was there too. The tall, dark, handsome, and unattainable boy standing around with his friends. Girls were batting their eyelashes at Kevin as they walked by, some threw themselves at him, and some, like myself, just stared from afar. He seemed bored and entirely disinterested with every bird that came his way. In fact, he seemed to be over the whole dance itself. Who could blame him? He’d just been accepted to Oxford’s law school, he had much bigger and better things to think about than a stupid high school dance.

        Eventually, Margaret must have gotten fed up with my sulking, because she snapped at me like she never had before.

        “Shit, Cora. Are you just gonna stand there all night or are you gonna do something? Huh?” she fumed. I looked down at my feet.