Before the Dawn

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

I’ve found that I have unconventional tastes when it comes to literary match-making. Rhett Butler? Ok, so maybe he and Scarlett deserve each other, but I certainly don’t mean that as a compliment.

And Mr. Darcy? Awkward, eccentric introvert? Umm, excuse me, but exactly what does he have going for him? Other than his fortune, I mean. If I wanted to read billionaire love stories, I’d find them a dime a dozen in the erotica section.

And what’s up with Rochester? I don’t mean that rhetorically either. I seriously want to ask Jane Eyre and her myriad fans what’s the deal with him.

I suppose I’m more of the boy-next-door kind of girl. Which is why when I read Little Women, I rooted for Laurie, the quintessential (and literal) boy next door. And Jo turned him down and married the professor. Seriously? I threw the book against the wall. Still refuse to reread it.

I’m not much of a Lord of the Rings fan, but I worked my way through the entire series. I’d read Austen and Bronte and all the others by then but didn’t experience my first literary crush until I met Samwise Gamgee.

Now there’s a boy next door for you.

So I’ve been thinking about Chris a lot. Not Chris, the reason my entire life’s turned into one giant train wreck, or Chris the man who destroyed my faith in happily ever afters. Not Chris, the reason I’ve been spending my nights in and out of different battered women’s shelters. I’m thinking about Chris as he was back then.

In that time in the not-too-distant past when he was everything.

Chris the football kicker, because he was destined to be a star in our small town, but he wasn’t big enough for defense or fast enough for offense. Chris the homecoming king, because he and I were on court all four years of high school, so it would have been basically an impossibility for us not to get ourselves crowned as seniors.

And maybe you look at all that, you see me with my pom-pons and him in his football uniform, you walk through Orchard Grove High School and see the framed pictures of us in our homecoming crown and sash, and maybe you think we were that shallow, flighty couple you meet in teen romances or whatever.

Maybe you see him as Chris the jock or Chris the kid who probably peaked in high school and wouldn’t ever go on to do anything else of significance in his entire life.

But I see Chris, the boy who sprinted across the street to the gas station in between second and third period to buy me an emergency supply of pads. Chris, the boy who planned a scavenger hunt that stretched across the entire town to celebrate my sixteenth birthday and who graffitied his next-door neighbor’s broken-down shed (with permission) to invite me to our senior prom.

Sure, we were both athletic, but guess what? We worked our butts off on the school newspaper, too. We kept going to youth group, and when he was a senior, Chris even helped out with this junior high Bible study just for boys at his church. When he and I got together Friday nights, it usually wasn’t to party. It was to talk about our AP literature class or to work on layout for the school paper. We even started writing a play together. Never finished it, but that’s not the point. The point is we weren’t just some flaky high school power couple.

That’s why it’s so hard to remember, you know? Remember what we used to have. People say memories are supposed to comfort, but they’re wrong.

Dead wrong.

Chris was my Gilbert Blythe, and I was his Anne Shirley, so convinced, so confident that wherever our future would bring us, we would be together.

He was Count Vrosnky, and I was Anna Karenina, and our love was just as fierce and passionate, except it wasn’t tainted. It wasn’t taboo.

It should have turned out so differently.

Which is what makes it so hard to talk about.

I didn’t just lose a high-school crush. I didn’t just lose my first love.

I lost my stinking soul.