My Imaginary Ex (COMPLETE)

Chapter 2

College, nine years ago

Not many of my high school classmates were in my university. I knew a few people, recognized another dozen faces, but none of my friends were there.

Zack was one of those familiar faces who wasn't really a friend. We were in line for spaghetti carbonara in the cafeteria on the first week of school, and he talked to me first.

"Are you the girl who sang with the little kids at last year's Environment Day?" he asked, unexpectedly.

"Yes," I replied, cringing. "Please, not so loud."

"I thought I recognized you from high school! You were great."

"Do you see me hanging out with people from our school? No."

"Your secret is safe with me," he grinned. "I'm Zack Tomas."

"Jasmine Salazar."

We took our plates of over-sauced pasta and he followed me to an unoccupied table. I hesitated, the instinct to shun people from high school kicking in. It was hard, moving to a new school and not having any of my friends, but I consoled myself by deciding to start fresh. To reinvent myself. It could also be because I was naturally shy (yes, despite the singing—singing to a crowd is easier than talking to a stranger), and found making new friends a challenge.

This reinvention was not going to work if I had Zack (who might remember embarrassing things about me) hanging around. However?

Zack was cute. I figured he wasn't tall enough for basketball varsity, but he was still a few inches taller than me. That day at the cafeteria, his hair was shaved close to his head but was just starting to grow again. He said his hair wasn't normally like that and that he regretted the cut. I had since seen him with probably two other hairstyles and I had to agree.

He did look better with his dark brown hair a little longer. When we met, he looked like he was dressed for a game with the guys—shorts, basketball shoes, white shirt. He looked solid and athletic, not exactly typical of the geek he later proclaimed to be.

Better him than anyone else from the other sort-of familiar faces.

Then I remembered what he did in high school—he was on the basketball team in our senior year. I think he had a remarkable game against the very tall sophomores. For a while, people were talking about him being a "lucky find." Our batch had never won a basketball game, and we ended up taking home the championship in our final year.

"Yeah, my fifteen minutes of fame." Humbly, or dismissively, Zack shrugged it off. "That went by too quickly. I didn't think I'd be good at it."

"What were you doing all those years when we were losing? To freshmen?"

"I didn't think I was good enough," he admitted. "When we were seniors, someone sprained an ankle and they pushed me in at the last minute."

"Well, I had a great time at that game," I said. "Those sophomores were too arrogant. It was nice to see them bite it."

"Glad I helped you with that."

I learned most of what I knew about Zack in college. Even though we named every single member of our respective barkadas, we didn't have any common friends.

We had a nice lunch. Not the best meal, but we both remembered that day. Right before we graduated, we had a last lunch at the cafeteria, recreating that moment. He snapped a photo of me with a forkful of pasta in my mouth to save on his phone.

That photo showed up on his screen whenever I texted or called, years after it was taken. Even when he lost his phone, he reloaded the same pic into the replacement, and even when he became a management trainee at a big consumer goods company, that pic still showed up whenever I rang.