James Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

My first serious boyfriend in high school was a nice guy. He watched cartoons with me when I was sick. He took me to the nice part of the park to make out. My teenage heart had already been broken once by a sexy athlete and by fifteen I was determined not to let that happen again. So I reeled in nerdy, funny, quiet James.

He was two years older so when I was sixteen, a junior, he packed up his Dodge Neon and drove off to college in Boston. We resolved to do the long-distance thing, like all dutiful high-school sweethearts. Every night, I pulled the phone into my room and called him, feeling like a queen as he told me how none of the university girls were as pretty or fun as I was. I traipsed around school each morning with the smugness of a high-school girl who has an older boyfriend.

In October, my mom drove me to Boston to visit James for the weekend. His room had the institutional look of freshman digs: two narrow beds, a sad little desk, some dog-eared Dave Mathews posters. I squeezed onto James’s tiny twin mattress with him and contentedly breathed in his trademark hair gel.

Then the girls started stopping by. Some would poke their shiny-haired heads in to tell us about various parties. Some caught sight of me and offered only a fleeting tight-lipped smile before retreating. One girl said in a sickly sweet voice: “Oh this must be your high-school girlfriend." And then I found a dainty white sock underneath his bed. "It’s my roommate’s girlfriend’s," he claimed with a shrug. 

Paranoid, I started stalking the halls of his dorm with the offending sock, eyeing girls’ feet for a match like some sort of lunatic Cinderella prince. Any girl might be Her, the slut stealing my nice guy. I was out for blood.

“Who is she?” I screamed at James on our second night together. “Tell me! I deserve to know!” I melodramatically pounded his chest, like I’d seen scorned women do in the movies. James stood silent in the face of my fury. He didn’t even have the decency to look guilty.

I knew things were over. I also sensed that there was not one girl, but multiple new women in James’s life – more than a few from the parade of women who had been stopping by all weekend had thrown a knowing look my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s way. On Sunday morning, I packed my things, called my mom to collect me, and walked out on my teenage relationship. But not before taking James’s name tag off his dorm room door. I remember clearly thinking that if I removed his name from the door, then none of those honey-voiced co-eds would be able to find him. He’d be stuck all alone, pining for the swollen-eyed sixteen-year-old girl he’d let slip through his cheating fingers. And then he’d really be sorry.  — Rachel Friedman, Nerve Writer

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