Free Sophomoric by Rebecca Paine Lucas Page A

parents and Erin didn’t stay much longer. Erin had a volleyball tournament on Sunday and my mom had work. We also didn’t have anything to say to each other. When I closed the door to my parents’ car just after lunch on Saturday, I felt only a little guilt. Mostly, watching the beige four-door drive away just made me feel relieved.
    Freedom, sweet freedom. No parents until Thanksgiving.
    Things fell back into a routine of minimal work, less sleep and more fun than I had had in a long time. Caffeine became my new best friend. The Wednesday we took the PSATs, Josie’s test prep kept me up until two the morning before, and I downed a can of Mountain Dew and a low-carb energy drink before sitting for the test. As if nerves didn’t have me jittery enough. Even with all of that caffeine, I was usually exhausted by the time I got to first period. Fun was not enough to break through the stress imposed by classes and the ubiquitous college drone. Not like I even knew what I thought about it. Every time the word “midterms” was mentioned, everyone in hearing distance convulsed.
    My intentions were always good, but thanks to lots of friends with severe senioritis (namely Cleo and Dev), my priority list found itself swiftly rearranged, only to be remembered five minutes before a test. I didn’t really worry whether I’d regret it. I had never had friends like this before. Besides, I’d do fine and I knew it.
    I was practically living in Cleo’s room, in which Amie and Nic were semipermanent fixtures and a definite step up from my actual roommate. At almost every lunch, every dinner, there was someone to talk to over unidentifiable meat and soggy vegetables. Every night, I had people to watch movies with, I always knew the latest gossip and whatever this thing was with Dev, it felt like it had been going on for months plural, rather than singular. The good got better and the bad faded into the periphery, only to appear when Josie had her music turned up and in the midst of math class.
    But even then, two Fridays later, the first thing I saw walking into the dining hall were the uplifted faces of adoring freshman groupies. Dev was surrounded and flirting with all of them. Innocently. In a friendly way. At least that’s what I told myself.
    Pushing down impulses to walk out or drag him out, I made a PB&J instead and sat down with Amie and Scott. They didn’t seem to notice. I pretended not to. He joined us a few minutes later, minus the fans. His arm slung around the back of my chair, his hand resting on my shoulder. Just habit? I wondered sometimes.
    Wondered? Hah. I worried. But he didn’t have to know that either.
    My foot slipped out of my shoe three times between the dining hall and the post office. It had been four days since I had checked my mailbox and Amie had to pick up Netflix from her P.O. box. It then took me three tries to get the combination right. When I finally opened it, I found myself staring into a deluge of brochures printed with identical trees and aged brick buildings. Happy students wearing ugly backpacks smiled at me from their wonderful lives at the many colleges advertising in my mailbox. I realized, sorting through them and tossing them in the trash, that half of them I had never heard of. The other half were supposed to be the be-all, end-all of my high school existence. Harvard. Princeton. Stanford. Yale.
    I tried to find the enthusiasm.
    “Bizza, we can go. I got my movies.”
    Somehow, that sounded more exciting. I shoved the rest of the letters into the trash.
    Clichés tell you that trouble comes in threes. They also say the third time’s the charm. Combine the two, and you have serious issues. Under parental pressure and still worried about and angry at Dev and his groupies, I wasn’t exactly looking for new things to worry about. Talk all the crap you want about how smiling makes you less anxious. Conscious flexing of facial muscles doesn’t count. So I didn’t see the third coming