When Jeremy first moved to Jasper, he didn't have many friends. He'd always been kind of shy, but now he was in a completely new place with total strangers, feeling out of place and more alone than he'd ever been. The guy sitting across from him in math wasn't a friend of a friend that he met at a party. The girl in front of him in English wasn't the insanely gorgeous sister of his cousin's chemistry partner. He didn't have any connection to these people, and these people only liked people they had connections with. Fitting in at a new school is hard. Switching schools halfway through grade 11 was even harder. Jeremy had a couple friends, but they always knew more people than he did. He wasn't jealous exactly, but he knew that his friends here had more friends they could spend time with, and he was only an option. It was disheartening. He figured it would take the rest of the semester to really be thought of as more than just the new guy by the people that avoided talking to him like he was carrying the black plague, which happened to be a lot of people. When Jeremy first moved to Jasper, he also wasn't expecting to fall in love so quickly.



Jeremy laid eyes on Elliot Andrews on April 16th. It was morning, he was tired from doing homework late the night before and not really in the mood for going to school that day, but then again, nobody is ever really in the mood to go to school. There's always something funner to be done elsewhere. She was sitting on a bench with her friends by the school's main doors when he walked in, laughing about something. Jeremy didn't know what they were laughing about, he just knew that the girl in the middle had the most amazing laugh he'd ever heard. She had that perfect kind of smile on her face too, she was the definition of happiness and beauty to him in that instant. The morning sunlight shone into her green eyes and made them look even more vibrant than usual. Her red-brown hair was pulled up into a perfect sock bun. They all seemed unaware of his staring, but the people walking past weren't.

“Man, are you coming to class?”

Leon, a guy from Jeremy's first period class, was standing in front of him, looking confused. Jeremy wasn't quite sure what to say at first.

“Uh, yeah.” he finally said. With a final glance in the direction of the mystery girl, he followed Leon to Ms. Orly's physics class.



Now, Jeremy had exhausted every method of courting a girl he knew, and he was running out of ideas. Elliot was stubborn, the most stubborn girl he'd ever met. It drove him crazy, the way she talked to him like he wasn't even a consideration to her. That should have drove him away, but somehow it made him more determined to get her. He thought back to that first day, the first time he'd talked to her. He analyzed the content of their conversation, the body language she had used. He needed some thing, anything else to try.


“Hi.” Jeremy took a seat at Elliot's usual table in the cafeteria with a goofy looking grin and kind eyes. He hadn't been invited.

“Can I help you?” Those gorgeous green eyes glared at him. She looked annoyed. He noticed, but ignored it.

“I'm Jeremy.”

“I didn't ask.”

“Can I ask your name?”

“Elliot.”

“That's a pretty name. You're really pretty.”

“I'm aware.” No one else was saying anything. They probably wanted him to leave too.

“I'm new here.”

“Clearly.”

“Do you think you could show me around town or something?”

“I could. I'm not going to, but I could.”

“Oh. Well, if you change your mind...”

“I won't.”

“Can I take you to dinner then?”

“No.”

“Oh. I'll see you around, I guess.” Elliot didn't say anything else as he stood and walked away.



With his muscular body, sandy brown hair and wolfy grey eyes, Jeremy had never had trouble getting a girl's attention before. At his old school, girls practically swooned watching him shoot hoops, warming up for his basketball game. They could never keep up to him during the games, dancing in and around all the other bodies court, so they watched him for as long as they could before then. He didn't know most of the girls that were so crazy about him there, and yet here the one girl he knew that he wanted to notice him didn't even look twice. Am I missing something here? Jeremy pondered, elbow resting on his knee and chin resting in his oversized palm. Jeremy thought back to his past attempts of grabbing Elliot's attention for more than a nanosecond and holding onto it long enough to make an impression on her. He had sent her a different kind of flower every day for two weeks, he had got one of her favourite movies to be projected onto a building in the park at the end of her street and timed it just right so she'd walk right into what he thought was an ingenious setup, he had tried so many things he was completely out of ideas. His curious eyes stared back at him from the mirror on the opposite wall. His old girlfriends used to say his eyes looked just like a wolf's eyes, like he had photoshopped a wolf's eyes on top of his own. He wondered if that's what Elliot thought of his eyes. He wondered what thought of him as a whole. He wondered if Elliot ever thought of him at all.


Now, Jeremy had to think of something. Quick. Two months later, nothing had changed. He had tried anything and everything he could think of, but Elliot was still unimpressed. Laying on his bed now, though, one more thing popped up. School was ending soon and prom was coming up. This would be his final attempt. It just had to work; being without her might just kill him.



It was lunch hour. The bell had just rang, students were beginning to file into the cafeteria like prisoners into a courtyard; obediently and like there was no other choice. The ones that left the school at lunch were the runaways, metaphorically saying screw you, law! And going on their way. Just like prisoners, the runaways were in larger numbers than the authority would like, but unlike a prison, the school couldn't do anything about it. Jeremy stood alone in front of the doors now that they had fled from the school grounds, a whole hour between now and their return.



The flowers in his hand felt heavy as he scanned the crowd for Elliot, smiling her perfect smile and laughing her perfect laugh. All he knew was that she was perfect, and that he had to have her. He didn't care if she hated him or that he had probably already made a fool of himself, he had to try. The awful macaroni and cheese odour wafting through a bland looking cafeteria consisting mostly of tables and chairs with a serving counter against one wall white enough to belong in an asylum didn't make for the most romantic setting, but he just had to try.



As soon as Jeremy saw her, everything else became a blur. Elliot was sitting at a brown table with blue stools around it, looking perfect with a salad and a vitamin water on a faded red plastic tray in front of her. She always looked perfect. He had no idea she did it, but it drove him crazy. Elliot took the items off her tray and handed it to the teacher who was supervising that day. He couldn't see who it was, he was too enthralled with Elliot batting her big green eyes in that adorable way to focus on anyone or anything else in the room. Jeremy's grip tightened around the flowers in his hand, an extravagant bouquet consisting of a combination of every type of flower he'd ever bought for Elliot put together. He wondered if she would catch onto it. Well, he thought with a deep inhale of the repulsive macaroni and cheese special that no one ever bought, here it goes.



There was no other choice. He loved her too much to sit back and watch her live a life without him. She'd never even been his and he was losing his mind over her. He reached for the lengthy letter he'd written, addressed to everyone who might have loved him. Jeremy wasn't sure if they really did anymore, but if they did love him, it was nothing compared to how much he loved Elliot. His mind was clouded with juvenile thoughts you'd expect a teenager to have in his head until he saw her. Then all he thought of was her, how she smelled, how she smiled, how she looked like an angel on the worst of days. She had never even given it a chance. And now, holding the letter in his hands, he scribbled down one last thing. Well, he thought with a sigh of sadness and rejection, I guess I'm really done now.







*****


Two weeks later, Elliot stood in the graveyard parking lot. Jeremy's family had decided on an outdoor ceremony and burial directly after. It seemed almost wrong for her to be there, the cause of all this coming to offer sympathy and comfort to those who had been close to him. She was the reason for the scar across his throat that she hoped would be covered up by his clothing, she was the reason he'd gone mad enough to put it there. Now he was just a soulless body in a casket, and it was her fault. Elliot felt a lump in her throat forming as she thought about why she was here. She had pushed him away until he couldn't take it anymore, and only now could she see how perfect they would've been. Now she had to go listen to his friends and family talk about how wonderful he was, how special and unique and how proud they were of the person he had become. She would never know how wonderful he was, and it was her own fault. She might as well be called the murderer. Elliot spotted Leon there. They had some classes together; she knew he'd been close to Jeremy. Does he know this is her fault? Will he ever look at her like she was just a harmless, carefree kid like him again? Elliot blinked away the tears before they could fall like sad little angels down her unmade face covered in pale little specks of freckles and straightened her lacy black dress. Well, she thought with a deep inhale of the fresh air and misery, here it goes.