Alex’s POV:

I knew that I was never going to forget Valentine’s Day 2006. It was supposed to be a romantic day and the day my future began. But, instead, it left me with a broken heart.

I was stupid. It was my fault, but I did it for the right reasons. I just never thought it would end like this. We had only been together for a short few months, but I was madly in love with Mickey. In just the span of five minutes, it all ended. It was bizarre and it confused me, only making it worse. How could it end in just a few minutes?

The next Wednesday morning, I felt the worst I had in a while. I went to school and I tried to push through. I wanted to seem like I was strong.

But it wasn’t that easy.

As soon as I walked through those double doors of the school’s main entrance with Jack, my heart dropped. Right in my line of sight, I could see Mickey. Her hair was in a ponytail and I could see that she wasn’t wearing any eyeliner, but she didn’t particularly look bad or anything. All she was wearing was black jeans and a blue flannel shirt. She didn’t even notice me, but she stood out.

She was walking through the hallway with principal Adkins. Everything in me was already preparing to ask her about it later and get a whole rant out of her. But that wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t like that anymore.

My heart ached just as much as it did the day before.

The necklace I clenched tightly in my fist was still radiating her heat. It almost felt like it was leaving a burn mark etched into my skin. But there was no way I was letting go, I couldn’t just let go. I stood there in defeat for a few more breaths long after Mickey’s car had disappeared down the road.

It didn’t feel real. Part of me expected for everything to be okay, but that wasn’t how it was going to work. Still, I did not know just how to feel as I turned around and headed back into Jack’s house. If anything, the best thing to describe how I was feeling was numb.

All my thoughts felt distant and clouded over, yet my feet still carried me inside.

I gently closed the door behind myself and floated up the stairs back to Jack’s bedroom. Jack was sitting on the floor playing video games, the controller I had been using just laying there next to him. If this were any other case, I would have run up to join him again. This time, I calmly walked up to my bag and picked up the bouquet of flowers.

I was going to surprise Mickey later. Although I promised her I wouldn’t do anything special for Valentine’s Day, I still wanted to give her some simple flowers. She may always credit herself for not liking flowery things, I knew better than that.

Now the flowers had just been a waste of money.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, dude,” I gave him the best smile I could put on and dropped the flowers in his lap before sitting down next to him again.

Jack frowned and briefly looked down at the red petals, keeping his attention on the game. “Umm, thanks?”

“Share it with your mom and dad or something, I don’t really mind.” I pressed the button to make my controller respond again.

“I thought you bought these for Mickey.”

I hummed in response, carefully letting the necklace drop from my clutch and onto the floor. I didn’t want to say it outloud. Saying it outloud would make it real. Now I could still hope that I could go back in time and change it all. But as soon as Jack knew, there was nothing I could even hope to do. Then the words would become definite reality.

I knew better. To be truthful, I already knew that this was it. This wasn’t just Mickey getting mad at me. I couldn’t hope for her to realise that she was going about it wrong or I couldn’t apologise for going a bit too far. This was it.

“Yo, dude,” Jack nudged me.

I looked at him to realise everything was blurry in my right eye and that a single tear had dropped without my permission.

“You okay?” He pushed, noticing the exact same thing.

And that’s when it all hit me in one go, as if she had run me over with her red truck. I completely broke down and couldn’t get a word out.

It was only the morning and I had already thought about Mickey every minute of the day. Our first period English used to be a class I always looked forward to. This is where we had met. She sat in front of me. I could watch her. I witnessed her becoming less and less cold towards me.

But now the chair was empty.

Part of me felt a little better, knowing that Mickey was probably having a hard time as well, that she didn’t want to face me in class. Her pain didn’t make me happy in any way, but the thought that she didn’t just break up with me and feel nothing did help. It made me feel better that I wasn’t the only one hurting, that our break up hurt her deeply as well.

She hadn’t skipped this class in a while. And apparently she wasn’t planning on doing so today either.

Granted, she came in a few minutes late, but she still came in. Right as the teacher was saying something, she came barging in. But it didn’t look like she had been crying or had even been remotely upset. She looked like it was just another day. There was just one thing that was strange. She was carrying a large pile of textbooks.

“I’m so sorry,” Mickey immediately apologised as she started towards her seat in front of me, “I’ve just been a bit swamped.”

“I don’t suppose you happen to have your copy of the text in there?” the teacher raised her eyebrow as Mickey managed to put the entire pile on her desk.

“Umm…” Mickey started looking through the pile and pulled out a book with sticky notes in one section. “I do actually!”

“Did you do the reading for today?”

“Believe it or not, I have,” she nodded and sat down.

“So you wouldn’t mind starting off our discussion about the theme of mortality?” the teacher continued to interrogate in a way, really trying to see if Mickey was lying. I couldn't even tell if she was lying or not right now. Either she was telling the truth or this was one great lie.

“Yeah, um, just hang on a second,” Mickey put down her book and grabbed for the backpack she had placed on the floor. She pulled out a few notebooks, making the tower of books on her desk get even higher. Eventually she happened to pull out the right one and opened it up to a page.

And then she actually started to discuss the pages we had to read and how it related to things earlier and the themes we kept coming back to. I was confused. Did our break up suddenly motivate her? Had I been holding her back? It was all so strange, like she was a different person. A better person.

Then twenty minutes later Principle Adkins interrupted the class and asked for Mickey. Only this time she wasn’t being removed and given a warning or even given a punishment. No, he just told everybody to disregard him and went up to her. He was crouched down next to her and they were going over a list of what I guessed were chapters in a math textbook. Mickey was circling numbers in her copy while Principle Adkins was adding short instructions to each one.

Yet that wasn’t even the strangest part of the day. It got weirder.

During lunch I saw Mickey looking lost. Part of me wanted to go up to her and tell her that it was okay to sit with us despite our break up. Or at least send Rian or Jack to do it, you know. But I wasn’t ready for that. The cut was way too fresh. I did feel bad for her, though. Breaking up with me meant losing all her friends.

Part of me expected her to go to her empty table in the back corner again, just like at the beginning of the school year. But she didn’t. She just stood there at the entrance to the cafeteria, looking out over the crowd of students. When some scrawny freshman went up to her, I wanted to warn him. Although she had given a few sex-ed classes, she wasn’t the coolest around the young awkward kids.

Instead she smiled and they walked back out into the halls together.

I felt discontereted. I tried to ignore it, act like everything she wasn’t doing didn’t interest me anymore. Her life wasn’t my business anymore. But I couldn’t help but wonder.

“Hey, I’m going to go to the bathroom,” I announced to Jack and Rian, “I’ll be right back.”

Rian gave me a concerned look. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m good, I’ve just gotta pee,” I brushed it off and sped away before they could ask me more questions.

Of course they could see Mickey was constantly on my mind. Of course they knew it pained me deeply. And of course they wanted to help me. But I couldn't just get over her.

As I was rushing to the bathroom, hoping to bump into her on my way, I happened to look through the window in the door to the library. And there she was, sitting at the table that I had a view of. She was there with that weird freshman kid. They had books open all around them. I recognised the math textbook from earlier as the textbook Mickey was currently leaning over, trying her best to explain a math problem.

Watching her from afar made me want to cry. She seemed so passionate and interested. Her hair kept falling into her eyes as she leaned further over the work and she would quickly brush it back so she could continue uninterrupted. There was this slight tingle of a smile as she listened to the questions this boy had, happy to go over it again or clarify it in a different way. All she was doing was tutoring him, yet I still wished it was me. It wasn’t jealousy. I just missed her.

But she didn’t need me. She was perfectly fine without me. I had been so delusional.

Notes

I'm back for now. I've been super busy the past few months. I'm expecting to get super busy again, so I don't know when the next chapter will come out. Just know that I will finish the story.