apologies // hemmings

eleven

Two months.

It had been two whole months since Alexis had talked to Luke.

For the first week, she had to block his number on her phone because he would not stop texting and calling. She had clung to Casey's side at school so that Luke would not try to confront her. She got to school late and left practice as soon as it ended in attempts to avoid him.

By the second week, he had begun to back off. Eventually, the calls stopped coming, they took different paths to class and avoided each other in math.

Thanksgiving break was torture for the both of them, wanting nothing more than to spend all of their free time together. Alexis would never admit it, but she missed Luke. She missed spending time with him and she missed the playful banter they had and the peaceful environment she felt when she was with him; however, she just could not forgive him for what he had done to her. She poured herself into softball, homework, and - in her free time - reading just to keep her mind away from Luke, but to no avail.

Christmas break rolled around and Luke's gift to her had been tucked away in the bottom of his nightstand drawer, knowing she would never want to open it. On New Year's Eve, he resorted to throwing his phone at the wall in anger to stop himself from calling her. If she wanted to talk to him, she would have called, right? Luke was driving himself mad with thought, and Michael had started to give up on trying to cheer up his friend - after all, there really is no cure for a broken heart.

Meanwhile, Alexis' health was increasingly getting worse. After multiple doctor's visits, she had been informed that her body had thrown itself into another flare (which explained the excruciating pain in her stomach that crept up at the worst times, licking her sides with flames before slowly disappearing until its next visit). She had been put on more medication and was forced to be taught how to give herself a shot. Every Friday after school, she had argued with her mother for an hour before locking herself in her bathroom and injecting the medicine into her arms and legs, before proceeding to cry for twenty minutes in the shower. It had become a routine for her, and despite the pain that she put herself through for her well-being, she still was not getting better.

Her mother blamed the stress of school, and the drop of her grade in math, but Alexis knew what it was.

Heartbreak.

After living with a disease like hers for years, she learned the in's and out's of what her boundaries were to stay healthy. Surprisingly enough, her mood drastically affected the inflammation in her stomach, and being deliberately used by Luke threw her into an unhealthy sadness.

Alexis attempted to fill the hole in her heart that Luke had left. When Ashton Irwin, the school's kicker for the football team, asked her to homecoming, she politely accepted. After five dates ensuing the first, Ashton asked her to be his girlfriend.

It was quite the show; he took her roller skating (after discovering that they were the only two in the building over the age of 8 that were neither working nor a parent of the children in the rink), and the two skated for hours, criticizing the music that they played and trying not to run over any of the little ones that they shared the rink with. Then, he requested the DJ to play Alexis' favorite song (Drops of Jupiter by Train), and was granted permission to use the microphone and ask Alexis to be his girlfriend. All the parents clapped and "awe'd" when she agreed and kissed him, while the children stood disgusted and annoyed that the music had stopped.

Ashton was always a gentleman - holding the door open, paying on dates, buying her flowers. He was every teenage girl's dream. Ashton was perfect, just not for Alexis.

When school returned after Winter Break (continuing to call it "Christmas Break" was politically incorrect, and therefore frowned upon at her school), classes changed and Alexis found herself in Driver's Training - one lousy traffic ticket and she was sentenced to a semester of torture.