Free The Ignored by Bentley Little - (ebook by Undead) Page B

football, but alone in my bedroom, studying. I stared at the TVs as another
commercial came on. I had not realized until now how solitarily I had spent the
four years I’d attended UC Brea. Those media images of close camaraderie and
lasting friendships had been only that for me—images. Their reality had never
materialized. I had not known my classmates in college the way I’d known my
classmates in grammar school, junior high, and high school. College had been a
much colder, much more impersonal experience.
    I thought back on my college classes, and I suddenly realized that I’d
gone through my entire academic career having had no personal contact with any
of my instructors. I had known them, of course, but I’d known them in the same
way I knew characters on TV, from observation not interaction. I doubted that a
single one would remember me. They’d known me only for a semester and even then
only as a number on a roll sheet. I never asked questions, never stayed after
for extra help, always sat in the middle of the room. I had been completely
anonymous.
    I had been planning to hang around the mall a little longer, check out a
few other stores, but I no longer felt like doing so. I wanted to be home. All
of a sudden I felt strange wandering from shop to shop alone, anonymously, not
noticed or known by anybody. I felt uncomfortable, and I wanted to be with Jane.
She might be busy studying, she might not have time to do anything with me right
now, but at least she knew who I was, and that alone was a comforting thought,
incentive enough to make me leave.
    I found myself thinking about my meeting with Craig as I drove back to
the apartment. I tried to explain it, tried to rationalize it, tried to play it
off, but I couldn’t. He had not been a mere acquaintance, someone I saw only in
class. We had gone places together. We had done things together. Craig was not
stupid, and unless he’d had some sort of brain tumor or mental illness or drug
problem, there was no way he could have forgotten who I was.
    Maybe the problem wasn’t with him. Maybe the problem was with me.
    That seemed the most likely answer, and it frightened me to think about
it. I knew I was not the most interesting person in the world, but was I so
hopelessly boring that even a friend could forget who I was within the space of
a couple months? It was a terrifying idea, and an almost unbearably depressing
one. I was not an egomaniac, and I certainly didn’t harbor any illusions about
my making a significant mark on the world, but it nonetheless unnerved me to
think my existence was so meaningless that it passed entirely unnoticed.
    Jane was on the phone when I arrived home, talking to some girl from
work, but she looked up when I entered, smiled at me, and that made me feel
good.
    Maybe I was reading too much into all this, I thought. Maybe I was
overreacting.
    I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I studied
myself for quite a while, trying to be objective, trying to see myself as others
might see me. I was not good-looking, but neither was I ugly. My hair, light
brown, was neither long nor short, my nose not big and not small.
    I was average-looking. I was of average build, average height. I wore
average clothes.
    I was average.
    It was a weird realization. I cannot say that I was surprised, but I had
not really thought about it before and I felt strange being able to categorize
myself so easily and so completely. I wished it weren’t so, wished there were
something about me that was unique and exceptional and wonderful, but I knew
there wasn’t. I was completely and totally ordinary.
    Perhaps it explained the situation at work.
    I pushed the thought out of my mind and hurried out of the bathroom,
back to the living room where Jane was.
    I was acutely conscious, the next few days, of everything I did,
everything I said, and I was both horrified and discouraged to discover that,
yes, I really