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There was crying. There was anger. It was like a bad lifetime movie. Frame by frame, the next twelve hours clicking away until I found myself in my own room at home surrounded by garbage bags and toiletries and bed linens and dorm room clutter. My grandparents were even crying when they came to see the wreckage. They took the pink chair I'd once kissed Mark on and took it to their basement. I didn't tell anyone but Ellie and somehow the entire campus ended up finding out. Maybe it was because I was the only female news anchor for the morning announcements. Everyone knew my face.
Now they could all smirk to themselves and wonder where it had been.
An hour after my deans office meeting I had gone up to the production set to let my co-anchor know I wouldn't be coming anymore. I spotted him in the hall before I got to the door.
"Hey, what happened to you? Why did they send Amelia?"
Amelia was the girl I'd beaten for the anchor bit. Broadcast was her life and her southern belle perfection had been a little ruffled when I'd won it. After all, I was only a lowly English major with a background in speech and debate.
"Amelia's here?"
"Yeah, she's in there right now putting her mic on like nothing's wrong."
"You didn't send for her? Dr. P didn't send for her?"
"No she just showed up and was like, 'well I guess I'm back, huh.'"
"Dean McDonald must have sent her."
"What? Why?"
I looked at the ceiling, and then back at him. "I got kicked out today."
"Woooah." He laughed a little. "You're serious?! What happened?"
"Its a long story. I hope Amelia hasn't heard it though because the whole campus is going to start buzzing."
"Yeah. I hadn't heard anything." He made a face. "I'm sorry that happened. Whatever it is. I really am. You're cool, you know."
"Well..." I failed at holding back the tears behind my eyes. "I didn't really belong here anyway."
Where did I belong? Isn't that what you're supposed to ask yourself in college? The truth was that I'd known I hadn't belonged there from day one. My entire life I'd been looking through the window at Lavery kids, and I'd never been able to touch them. Lavery was a private religious school for grades K through 12. The university offered a hefty scholarship for undergrad students because their enrollment was down. They were strict COC kids, Church of Christers. And they ran in packs like wolves tearing at things they didn't agree with. It always seemed to me that their numbers afforded them the comfort to say whatever they thought, which was sometimes something nice and other times something completely self righteous, bigotted, or closeminded. Sure, those times were few and far between, but I felt so outside from them. They looked at me like a disease.
Frankly I don't blame them now. My level of anger about life in general was driving me toward seclusion. I wanted to be OTHER. I wanted to be DIFFERENT. I just didn't always expect them to react so violently toward that.
Had Lavery never happened at all, I would no doubt be a different person. I might feel less guilt. I might feel better about myself. I might define myself in a different way. I might never have been able to be comfortable with kids who had made the kind of mistakes I made there. I might have some day gained the ability to look at my misfortunes and not be angry. Maybe I would have come at God, even, from an angle other than hating myself more than mud. No one likes a broken girl, I would say, so I'll be the angry girl instead. She's more fun.
And she was, but she was self destructive.
Thats when the cognitive dissonance started. Thats when I started trying to pretend I OWNED what happened at Lavery.
"I'm not as good as you think, you know."
"Really?""Yeah." Insert sly grin. "I got kicked out of school once."
"You?" Insert suprised laughter. "For what?!"
I was damn good at fitting in with the wrong crowd from that day forward. They ate me alive in ways that Lavery never dreamed of. I secretly hated myself for every move I made. I don't even think I was aware it was happening, but the self worth barometer went so low it was underground.
Six years later, I know better. Mark got married two years ago. We talked for a while after, but got frustrated with each other. Eventually he called me, high, one day and told me that he didn't know what I wanted from him now. I wanted a friend. I wanted acceptance. It all stung so hard, and it stings a little still. I scoff, too, sometimes, at the religious shut out that Dean McDaniel gave me when he 'immediately suspended me from the university.'
I felt for a long time like he was immediately suspending me from whoever I'd thought I was before. Like he was defining me: YOU ARE BAD. YOU ARE NOT LIKE US. YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE WHERE YOU CAN INFECT US WITH YOUR BADNESS. Maybe I was diseased with free thought, I don't know. All I know now is that I shouldn't have let him define me so easily. I shouldn't have sunk into the palm of his hand.
Mark had kicked a trashcan over in the Dean's office. Mark had told him that he wished he'd gotten really hammered instead of what happened, because they'd keep him for that. And it was true, a kid named Toby Bannister had gotten a slap on the wrist for having beer cans in his trash at the dorm. I didn't need to be quite as dramatic as Mark, but I should have resisted internalizing the labels.
"We actually own nothing in this world. We don't even own our bodies, or ourselves. It belongs to God. The only thing we own is what we do in this life."
Zyan said that last week and I cringed. But there is so much good I can do. He's right, we do all make mistakes. I guarantee you Lavery kids end up coming to God on their hands and knees just like I did eventually. Circumstances might have been different. But, we'd both have made it.
I guess I don't think about what would have been because it doesn't matter any more. Zyan is right. I hold my future in the palm of my hand, and I shouldn't let anyone else manipulate it but me. The past is the past. And if someone won't let me move on, they don't care about me enough to be worth my time.
Remember that, kids. You can't let things like Lavery get you down.
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