Page 45 of Down My Chimney

I’m just not ready.

I’d never understood him more.

10

Blake

Summer…happened.

At least, I assumed it did. Mostly what I knew was that one minute, it was May, and I had final papers to turn in, and Henry was telling me he wanted to be my friend while I cried in a parking lot, and the next minute, it was the end of August, and he was gone.

It felt like he’d been ripped away from me.

He said he wanted to be my friend, said he thought Ineededa friend, and maybe he was right, but he sure as hell didn’t feel like one.

June, July, and August were a gray haze of summer courses, endless nights in the library, and the growing conviction that majoring in English lit was a Sisyphean task (a phrase I’d learned in one of my classes around the Fourth of July).

Texts from Henry were the only punctuation marks I had in all that malaise, but they grew fewer and fewer as the summer wore on. May 13th. May 29th. June 11th. June 30th. July 21st. August 12th.

That was the last one, two days before he was scheduled to fly to London. He sent me a picture of Mittens curled up in his suitcase.

HENRY: The internet says a cat is 65% water. Do you think that means I should put her in my liquids bag?

Just seeing the picture hurt. The last time I’d been in his bedroom, he’d told me he wouldn’t leave me. And now, he was.

I wanted to tell him I understood how Mittens felt. Wanted to tell him to takemewith him, or better yet, beg him to stay.

Instead, I told him that with her claws, Mittens might count as a weapon, and I wasn’t sure TSA would let her through.

It took him fifteen minutes to reply,Lol, good point.

And that was it. Two days later he was gone.

Had he ever meant it? That he wanted to be my friend? Or had he just been trying to back away from me with the least amount of fuss?

Pre-season training started the first week of August, and this time around, I was grateful for the exhaustion. Every part of me missed Henry, but soccer kept me too tired to think about him. During practice, at least.

My dreams were another matter. The happy ones were the worst. The ones where Henry and I were still together.

There was one I kept having of the two of us waking up on Christmas morning at my family’s cabin, sitting next to each other as we opened presents. Both our families were there, and no one batted an eye as Henry slipped his hand into mine, and I leaned over to kiss him.

It was such a small dream, so simple, and it left me shaking and gasping for air each time I woke up.

I was all cried out, though. No sixty-five percent water for me. I wasn’t even sure I was ten percent water. I felt like a husk. Like I’d been sliced down the middle, and was walking around with my insides hanging out. But no one seemed to notice.

Ironically, the worse I felt, the better my posts seemed to do online. It was grueling, pretending to be happy, coming up with goofy pictures and witty captions, and I was leaning on Marika a lot more, making her take pictures with me when I couldn’t force myself to smile alone.

But my follower count kept growing, and now that the season was in full swing, I was fielding offers to post about everything from energy drinks to herbal supplements to gym socks that supposedly calibrated themselves to your feet. My spreadsheet was getting more and more complex.

Between dreams that felt more like nightmares, and games and practices that left me dead to the world, it was a wonder I was even making it to class, let alone doing any of my work. I was starting to see the wisdom in taking summer classes, though I was still pretty sure I was in the wrong major. But I was a junior now, and I wasn’t sure I had enough time to change again.

I had one open slot in my schedule, and on a whim, I signed up for an Introduction to Digital Marketing class offered by the business school. I’d figured it might help me learn how to manage my Instagram account a little better, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the different projects.

And not just because there was less reading than in my other classes. To be honest, the reading load was almost the same, but Ilikedthe case studies and problems we tackled. They felt like puzzles to solve. There wasn’t one right answer, but I liked tweaking different factors, moving pieces into new slots, trying to refine my strategy and see what results I got.

One assignment bugged me, though. We were supposed to pick a real-world product we disliked and write a letter of complaint about it. I picked my dad’s preferred smoothie blender, which worked great as a blender, but was a bitch to clean. We then submitted the letters to our professor, who shuffled them and handed them back out to the class.

For the second half of the assignment, we had to imagine we were executives who had received those complaints and needed to address them with a new marketing campaign. We were supposed to figure out how to market the flaws as features. To highlight the very thing people were complaining about and market it as a strength.

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