Chapter 28

I remember when I was new, bright eyed. I was in the MARB, waiting for some biology class I hated to start, sitting cross legged on the floor. You see, the MARB was built during the reign of President Wilkinson. The man who planted students to find people breaking the archaic honor code. He thought it innappropriate that students would be fraternizing between classes, so it is one of the few buildings on campus that was built with no benches, no chairs or tables. Just hallways. I remember listening absentmidedly to the strange conversations around me; the ones that would soon become mundane, common in this most uncommon of societies.

“We’ve only been dating for three weeks,but I know he’s the one. I know I want to marry him.”

“It was the first time I had smelled alcohol – how was I supposed to know what it is?”

And I noticed something different.

Silence.

There were two girls sitting facing each other, and their conversation had reached a lull. They had turned to their own particular tasks, one scribbling furiously in her University issued planner, the other opening some obscure textbook. And I remember feeling something I had hardly felt in my life; uncomfortable. They just sat there, not saying a word, silently acknowledging each other’s company, oblivious to the fact that their comfort was disquieting a nosy neighbor.

With Kathryn, there are no uncomfortable silences.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of silences. Kathryn doesn’t just talk for the sake of talking. She actually says things. So when there is silence, it is usually that her mind has moved on, or that I haven’t found the next mindless banter to throw out there.

With her, there is too much history. Its fascinating to see who she has become, because she is who she was when I first met her, 10 years ago. Slight and thin, Kathryn never follows fads or trends. She looks how she looks and she acts how she acts and she likes what she likes simply because she looks like that., acts as such, and likes those things. It has nothing to do with the fact that the pre-teen figure is all the rage, or that tan is the new red lipstick. She is herself, completely and totally. Blue eyes, dyed red hair, a birthmark where a dimple should be. She recently stopped wearing bras. Just because she wanted to.

She was there when Stooph almost left. She was a newlywed. Her husband, Jake, was the one who was joking around so much before we realized what had actually happened. Jake, for all intents and purposes, is the male version of me. He and drama have a high correlation, not necessarily causation. He is dramatic and overbearing and ridiculous, and has had a history as peppered as mine with experiences way beyond his maturity level. He is single minded to the point of recklessness, deciding what he wants and not stopping EVER until he gets it. At their rehearsal dinner, his mother was giving a toast. She seemed to think she was alone, reminiscing on how he was as a younger child, a teenager, and trying to reconcile that with the 22 year old groom sitting in front of her. She said he would get these moods, these…. things, where he would decide he wanted something, and he was relentless until he got it. He would make an excellent torturer. She became concerned, then progressively more worried until her stress reached a boiling point on the subject of Kathryn. You see, he met her and decided that she, someday, would belong to him. And he was relentless. First he tried to date her. Failed. Then, he decided to try to be her best friend. After about 4 months, he succeeded. At the end of that school year, as spring was stealing winter’s spotlight, they started to date. And they never stopped. Of course, he did what every young 19 year old mormon boy should do, he went on a mission. And the 2 years couldn’t have passed more slowly. Every time he got a chance, he would draw and think of Kathryn.

When I first met Jake, I hated him. Which makes it okay for me to think of people despising me when they meet me. It’s because the idea that someone like me or Jake exists in their world is too much for them at first. We’re caricatures, characters that only come out in comic books or tragic stories, people who things happen to. All the times you’ve sat in a movie, thinking “that never happens in real life”, let me just assure you…. It does. And Jake and I are the kind of people to which it happens. We are the tragic heroes and heroines, the heartwrenching victims and victors of stories, living life as a series of movie clips and sitcom episodes. We are the movers and shakers of our time, drawing attention to ourselves by simply existing.

Three years later, I can barely seperate the one from the other. Kathryn and Jake. Jake and Kathryn. Their identities have become one.