4

fame - asking alexandria

"how far will you go to outrun your pain?"

Jeremy Ruffalo was the first man I ever loved. It was the summer before senior year, six months after I started using the pills I bought from Nate. By this point, I was repeat customer. I'd just turned seventeen, Jeremy was a lonely eighteen, just starting at Harvard.

We'd all gone down to the beach: Alexia, Janae, Maeve, Simon and I. Sometimes Alexia and I thought it was strange that all of Simon's friends since he cut off Jake Riordan were female. Usually we just brushed it off. Maeve and Simon and vanished, disappearing somewhere like they tended to do. Janae was almost certain they were a couple.

Our group was beginning to fracture, at that point. Maeve and Simon were spending less time with us, and Alexia was starting to find her footing with the rest of the girls' volleyball team. We didn't feel like a crew anymore.

Janae, Alexia and I had been playing a game of keep-up with an inflatable beach ball, diving over the sand and into the water to stop the inflatable from hitting the ground. Alexia and I were in our swimsuits, but Janae was in as many layers as ever, "refusing to appeal to the patriarchy", she had decided.

Alexia had hit the ball over my head, and the inflatable plastic sailed far behind me, and then Janae, into the saltwater beyond, spurred on the by the wind.

"Fucking hell, Lexia!" Janae complained. "How are we supposed to get the damn thing?"

Alexia shrugged. "Swim?" She suggested

Janae gawked. "Out that far? Bitch, you have to be joking."
I rolled my eyes at the bickering. Sometimes I wondered if they argued that way because they secretly wanted to kiss. I wouldn't be surprised: Janae and Alexia definitely casually flirted with each other more often than not.

"Do you want me to get it?"

"Can you swim that far, Charis?"

"None of us are exactly lifeguard certified, are we?"

Resigning myself to my fate, I turned in the direction of the crashing waves and the hordes of surfers who claimed this section of Bayview as their break. At the center of the pack was Jeremy Ruffalo, who always reminded me of Patrick Swayze's character Bodhi from 'Point Break'. It was like Jeremy owned the waterfront, like some sort of god.

I winced as the ice cold saltwater crept up my legs, seeping into the cuffs of my denim cutoff shorts as I tried to reach for the ball without submerging too much more of my body. Bayview summers were scorchers, but that didn't mean I wanted to hang around with wet clothes all day.

"Is this yours?"

The voice that spoke was rich, calming. Something straight out of a John Hughes movie. My teenage Breakfast Club dream boy.

I looked up from where I had been watching my progress through the water, only to meet the prettiest baby blues I had ever seen, coming eye-to-eye with Jeremy.

My face went pink. "Yeah, me and my friends were playing some serious keep away. thank you." I managed to get out before taking the beach ball back from Jeremy. "You're Jeremy Ruffalo, right?"

Stupid question, Charis. Of course he is.

Jeremy grinned. "And you are?"

"Charis." My cheeks were red, far rosier than usual. "Charis Forrester."

"Are you related to T.J Forrester?"

"He's my brother. Irish twins." I said sheepishly, hugging the plastic beach ball to my chest. "I'm the less talented sibling."

Jeremy grinned, and I felt my insides turn to mush. "Now, I'm sure that's not true."

That was the night it all started. Simon and Maeve never came back, so Jeremy invited the three of us to hang out with all of his surfer dude-bro friends around a towering bonfire that his best mate Flynn had made. That was the night I drank  for the first time, taking a singular shot of strawberry cream tequila before I felt like I was going to be sick. We listened to  Third Eye Blind and the Spin Doctors and all the other great nineties alternative acts as the sun sank behind the horizon line. 

Simon had the car, so Jeremy ended up driving me home in his vintage lime green Beetle, foam surfboard tacked to the top. He kissed me that night on my doorstep, a simple action that spiralled into a summer of sneaking around, stolen kisses and self-discovery. And a little but of sex, because Jeremy Ruffalo was too attractive not to bang.

"When we met," I started, wrapping up the story back in the stale washroom, with Nate Macauley sitting across from me "we were both trying to figure out who we were, what defined us as individuals. He didn't know who he was outside of Bayview, where his macho reputation didn't carry over. I didn't know who I was because so much in my life was changing on me. We were terrible for each other, looking back. But at the time, I thought Jeremy was the best thing that had ever happened to me."

Nate's voice was soft when he spoke, head resting against the white brick bathroom wall behind his head. "It sounds like he really swept you off your feet."

I grinned. "Yeah. Yeah, he did."

"So what happened?"

I sighed, lying on the grimy floor. My clothes were covered in blood now so a gross bathroom floor wouldn't do any more harm. If I survived, I intended to take a three-hour-long steaming-hot shower. "Eventually, Simon found out. And when it comes to keeping secrets, Simon is the shittiest friend there is. The reaction from the rest of the school was the first hit. Eventually, word trickled back to Coach, who was naturally quite furious."

"Oh, naturally." Nate said in a sarcastic tone, agreeing with me. Jokingly, I kicked him in the side of the leg. 

"It was a bigger deal for Jeremy, since he was seen as a legal adult and I was technically jailbait. Why am I saying technically?" I shook my head, still lying on the cold floor. Something about it was grounding, no matter how gross it was. "I was jailbait. Jeremy could have lost everything. I'm just glad that he didn't go to my parents. But we agreed it was better to call it off. He was going back to Harvard anyways, and I was stuck in little old Bayview."

"I'm sorry you had to go through that." The sincerity in Nate's tone shocked me. I had never heard him so serious. There was always that devil-may-care attitude that he carried with him wherever he went. I sat up in surprise, attention piqued. Then he continued. "You deserve better, Forrester."

Something about that statement shocked me. Quite frankly, I was shocked that those words had even come out of Nate's mouth. I was sitting in a shitty washroom in a shitty Vietnamese chain restaurant to hide from people who wanted to kill me, and my stomach still did backflips listening to something Nate Macauley said.

I call it the Dallas Winston effect: ladies love a bad boy, and there's something about Nate, the resident Bayview bad guy, that the ladies find irresistible. But I had always been able to resist most of his charms.

"Thanks, jackass. You aren't too bad yourself." I smirked, staring back down at my phone. Low and behold, Simon was wondering if we could talk. He wanted to know what had been up with me since the school year had started. "They can't track our phones, can they?"

Nate shook his head. "Not if they don't know our numbers."

"Good." I said solemnly, turning on my phone's Do Not Disturb setting.  "Because that's the last thing I need right now." My eyes were still puffy, the salt from my tears still on my lips. I don't even know if I noticed I was crying, but a silent tear fell, falling to the collar of my Hawaiian shirt.

"We'll find a way through this, Charis." Nate was back to being serious, taking my hand and lacing his clean, calloused fingers through my bloody ones.

I was about to open my mouth when we heard the shouting, the sharp sound of tables tumbling over, a sharp-tongued language that sounded vaguely European, but what the fuck did know. 

"They're here."

NOTES!

hi im not dead