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Maybe she wants someone to try and save her, after all. Save her with violence and threats and cruel words.

Someone tonot accept her for the fucked-up mess that she is.

If that’s what she fucking wants, I can give her that, too.

37

Zara

September fades into October.

I see Alex sometimes around campus, laughing and joking with his friends. I see him at lunch when I meet Kylie. He looks my way sometimes, but he doesn’t speak. Doesn’t wave.

We haven’t spoken since he left the beach house.

Dwight drove me home. Asked me about Alex. I didn’t tell him anything.

I hear about Eli, but I guess our schedules don’t line up because thankfully, I don’t see him. I hear he’s done really well at all of his matches. It’s all I hear of him.

Praise.

He doesn’t try to contact me.

I guess the game the three of us played really is over.

No one won after all.

Sometimes, I’ll rub my thumb over my hip, and I’ll remember it.

I remember his words from that time he came to my apartment, “Those scars are beautiful, baby girl. “

I guess I really was just a distraction for him. A game for him to play.

Now, Jax and Kylie and my professors are the extent of my social interactions, and I avoid the latter as much as possible. I go to class, slink out, do my work in an Adderall-induced haze, glug down cough syrup and go to sleep.

I’m responsible though. Wednesdays I don’t take anything. Wednesdays are to reset.

Wednesdays are fucking trash.

I also try to get to the little park that edges campus every day. The weather is turning cool, and it’s nice being outside for it.

A few of my old friends from ECU text me sometimes, asking me to come down for parties. I still don’t have a car. Or a job. I still don’t want to get one.

I’m doing a paper on Epictetus, a slave-turned-philosopher who said, “You cannot learn that which you think you already know,” but I kind of wish I could hold a séance and ask him what happens when you don’t think you know shit and you still don’t learn a damn thing.

I don’t know shit.

I’m not learning.

Seems like a good Stoic philosophy, always being open to wisdom because you know nothing. Turns out, though, it’s not helpful in my everyday life. I don’t think I’ll ever learn.

Two Fridays before Halloween, I shoulder my bag after leaving a seminar on ancient Greek philosophy, hands jammed in the pockets of my black and white zebra-striped hoodie. A gift from my mother that I actually really love.

We’re talking again, and she seems happy.

That’s good, I guess. But I kind of just don’t care about much of anything. The high I felt after that night with Eli and Alex before it all went to shit, it’s long gone. And not even the drugs can get it back. But I keep doing them anyway, hopeful they’ll spark something in me.

I’ve got my hood over my head as a light mist descends upon campus, and I’m not really paying any attention to where I’m going, just staring at my black wedged boots, when I almost walk right into a fucking light pole.