about a boy,
who was lost,
and thought he was found,
until he meets a girl,
the same girl,
who makes him wonder
if there's more to life
than just getting by.
-
[a Jem-centered novella/sequel to The Girl Who Saw Through Jem]
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Chapter Ten
Second Semester Blues
Ellis
Freshman year of college breezed through me exceedingly fast and the summer that followed after was even more so.
In between enjoying the wedding craziness of Paige and my father, summering in the Hamptons with Jared and his East Coast parents, and visiting my mother in Shanghai, the months between May and August slipped by me so painfully fast that I barely had the time to truly enjoy my time away from school only to find myself redecorating my dorm room again.
"This year has to be different," I muttered myself as I reshuffled my coloured binders into stacked, neat piles on my white desk after writing down their allocated subjects in Sharpie: blue folder for Microbiology and Immunology, green for Biochemistry, orange for The Physiology of Human Organ Systems and so on and so forth.
During the first semester of freshman year, my half of the dorm was terribly barren with unopen boxes stacked upon each in my closet, hidden. Frankie had hers covered in polaroids and disposables, taken with her film camera at parties, raves, and festivals, filled with college memories I never got to make because I was still too reeling from the fallout of the breakup with Jem. All that time wasted, mourning, grieving.
Janis, my other roommate, used to say my dorm had a sort of "penitentiary charm". In the second semester of my freshmen year, I started to put a little more effort in but not by much. By then, Jared was actively pursuing me- fresh flowers brought in every Sunday, invites to dinners at exclusive restaurants and I had started to accept Jem wasn't coming back. By Spring Break, Paige and my father got married in Singapore, and Jared and I started seriously dating.
Our lives were so transient. Life goes on and yet my swollen, broken heart was still right where he left it.
Stop, I told myself, heaving a deep breath. I needed to focus this semester, especially since I bombed so spectacularly in first-year pre-med. Much to my embarrassment, my stellar 4.0 GPA dipped to an abysmal 2.7. When I saw my report card at the start of last summer, I cried for two days about it. By the third day, I realized there was no point in moping around over my underachievements and told myself that the oncoming school year had to be different.
What made it so hard to accept was that my bad grades weren't a result of skipping classes or partying or slacking off. The worst part about last year was that I actually tried. I really had.
But I might as well have been partying, given how exhausted I was all the time. It didn't matter if I got twelve hours of sleep the night before—once I set foot in the lecture hall and the professor started droning on about wave motion, writing up equations on the monitor, the numbers would start dancing before my eyes and then I'd feel my eyelids grow heavy, and I'd wake to other students tripping over my legs to get to their next class.
