Only Mostly Devastated

by Sophie Gonzales

smirk. Here walks Ollie Di Fiore. Master of his feelings, expert detacher, only mostly devastated.

It’s funny how you can spend weeks, or months, or sometimes even years preparing yourself for a nightmare that’s more “when” than “if.” Then just when you’re fooling yourself that you’ve accepted the world’s end, and you’ll roll with the impact when it hits … suddenly, it might be hitting, and you’re not rolling.

You’re collapsing, sitting where you stood, totally overwhelmed by a loss you were never really ready for.

Because a boy’s role was to play the game, and it was the girls who were meant to cheer them on. Right? Mr. Tavares held a finger to his lips. “He’s just a kid,” he hissed. “He’ll grow out of it.” And what if he didn’t? I wondered. Would he still be as much of a man in their eyes? Or, what if Kane didn’t identify as a guy at all? What then?

Why didn’t he try harder? If he really cared about me, why didn’t he find a way around the rules, even if it was only to let me know why he’d be AWOL?

Why didn’t he care enough to find a way to reach me? That was the point. He didn’t care enough. Because he didn’t love me then. And he didn’t love me now.

But I got the feeling that, for these guys, the humor lay in the femininity, not in the drama. And the difference mattered, if you asked me.

“Sometimes I think I don’t like him very much.” Lara shrugged. “Hate away. I’ve hated Renee for over a year now, I think. Doesn’t mean I don’t love her.” “Isn’t that a contradiction?” “Nope. Apathy is incompatible with hate. Love works okay.”

But it made me even angrier to know that I’d let him. I’d let him. He’d made it perfectly clear that he couldn’t give me what I wanted. So why had I stuck around? Why was I so willing to accept whatever scraps he handed out? All this time, I’d been wondering when my needs would start to really matter to him. Maybe I hadn’t spent enough time wondering when my needs would start to really matter to me.

Even if it was for me, and I didn’t give a shit what those guys thought, wasn’t I still basically reinforcing the idea that my sexuality is just there to get a guy off? I mean, think of the crap people say about bi girls only wanting attention.”

“Besides, the problem isn’t the city. If he got a job offer there I bet you he’d move in a heartbeat. He’s just intimidated by the thought of following around a strong woman while she chases her career instead of the other way around.”

But they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t have done any of that, because in stories guys fight. They fight for the person they care about, and they don’t give up, ever. In real life, though, sometimes you beg for them to care, and they just don’t. And then they go quiet. And they let you walk away without much of a fight at all.

It totally went against my personal philosophy of overanalyzing everything and only taking risks when there was a 5 percent or less chance of failure.

And life was too short to play chicken with something as important as the person you loved.

He cut my sentence in half by grabbing me by the shoulders and kissing me.

He broke away, and didn’t even check to see who was looking. He just locked his eyes on me. “I love you,” he said.

I missed Ryan and Hayley, they weren’t really my group anymore. They didn’t know what I did with my days, and I knew barely anything about theirs. We’d kind of grown apart. And maybe that was okay. Sayid,

Maybe our Happily Ever After hadn’t worked on the first shot. And maybe Happily Ever Afters weren’t a singular event. Maybe they were something you had to work at, and build, and never give up on, as long as they were something you still wanted.