Give Me Love | 2 | ✓

Chapter 18: You Are Like, Scarily Pessimistic

Chapter 18: You Are Like, Scarily Pessimistic

“Sydney, are you coming with us?” Bradley asks, looking over his shoulder at me as he pulls his green polo t-shirt on over his head.

“No, I’m not coming golfing with you guys,” I assure my boyfriend, shaking my head as I flick through a Seventeen Magazine.

“Oh, come on,” He pleads, proceeding to pull a pair of khaki shorts up over his plaid boxers. “It’ll be fun, I promise,” Bradley ads.

“What’s so fun about hitting a bunch of tiny balls with a weird stick of iron?” I ask my boyfriend quizzically, briefly looking up from the magazine article that I am reading. It’s not a very interesting one—something about One Direction and how they’re starting the European leg of their world tour next week or something like that—but I have this weird thing where I buy a magazine, I’m so adamant about reading the entire thing. It makes me feel like I was my money if I don’t read the whole thing and I don’t like wasting money because I’m very cheap and very poor, considering the fact that I don’t have a job or really any source of income besides my parents and my sister. That being said, whenever I get something, I feel an intense need to us it all up or whatever.

Luckily though, everything in Italy is not Italian, believe it or not. I mean, there’s like McDonalds and Subways and all that kind of stuff like that here, but there’s also this one really cool place a few minutes down the street from Francesca’s place. It’s basically a smaller, not-as-convenient Wal-Mart. There’s a lot of stuff there, sure, but I don’t think that anyone can really compete with or beat out Wal-Mart. That’s like saying that Buffy the Vampire Slayer or whatever it’s called is better than Supernatural, which is—obviously—not true at all. Not that I’ve ever seen more than thirty minutes of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but still, I’m sure it’s not better because I mean, that’s just not possible.

Anyway though, like I was saying, the shopping center place is a nice enough substitute for me while we’re here in Italy. We won’t be here much longer though, seeing as how tomorrow’s the first day of August and we’ll all by flying back out to Michigan two weeks after tomorrow. Today’s date is July 31st, which means that my friends and I have been in Italy for a tiny bit over a month now, which is hard for me to believe because the time really has gone by so quickly. Granted, I did spend a lot of the time here stuffing my face with gelato and crying my lungs out into Walker’s (Tanner and Mikey too, but mostly Walker) shoulders, but still.

The fact that I’m actually going to be a college student this time next month is completely and totally mind-blowing. Nevertheless, it’s true. Apparently my response letters from a few different universities have been mailed to my dad’s lake house these past few weeks that I’ve been out of the states. Even though I don’t really live with my father, his address is the one that I put as my own on every single one of my college applications so that they would send them there to his house. I only did that because I know that my dad would actually let me open them on my own, whereas my mother would probably be standing by the mailbox, waiting on them and then rip them open in anticipation, which would totally ruin the magic in it for me. So, they’re all at his house and they’re just waiting on me to get there because he said that he’d be sure to leave them un-opened and un-tampered with until I got home.

Honestly though, I’m not expecting all of the letters to be acceptances—I didn’t try all that hard in high school and especially not in my junior year, which is when I had to first start really thinking about colleges and the SAT and the ACT and college visits and all of that wonderfully fun (not) stuff. I didn’t even apply to too many place, really though. Where I go to college just doesn’t much matter to me, as long as I get accepted at one. I applied at the University of Pennsylvania (it’s an Ivy League, so I’m not expecting an acceptance letter there, but whatever), Lake Superior State University and Lake Michigan College (both in Michigan) and lastly, Florida State University and Washington State. I’m almost positive that at least one of those five places accepted me though and I’ll just pick the one that’s closest to wherever Bradley decides that he’ll go.