One of the Guys

Chapter 1

Chapter 1.0: Cullen

Strawberries.  Cullen’s favorite fruit.  His mom had almost forgotten, until I reminded her.  Of course, she was too busy helping my mom out, preparing for my graduation party.  Cullen's mom and I were in the kitchen, where Cullen's mom was mixing together a huge pasta salad.  I tried to tell her I wasn’t expecting too many guests, but she ignored me, assuring me that I had to be more popular than I made out.  Apparently she didn’t realize I hadn’t exactly been homecoming queen.

I sat at the breakfast counter, picking out the good strawberries from the bad and plopping them into a large glass bowl.  My graduation invite sat off to the right of me, the senior picture I had taken late last summer smiling at me from the glossy paper.  Behind that sat a framed picture of Cullen and his little sister Jennifer.  That picture was taken last summer too, just before he left.

“So are you excited for your big party?” Cullen’s mom, Mrs. Matthew, asked me, looking over her shoulder at me with an excited grin on her face.

“Um, sure,” I said, as I focused back on the strawberries.  “I mean, I guess so.”

“I can’t believe you graduated,” Mrs. Matthew said, looking out the window and giving her head a little shake.  “It seems like just yesterday Cullen was graduating.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, shaking my head too.  “This year went by really fast.”  That was a lie.  I even let out a dramatic sigh despite myself, and was glad Mrs. Matthew was facing the opposite way and hadn’t seen that. 

The past year had been torturous.  Worse than I could have even imagined!

Well, the first half hadn’t been terrible.  I was busy playing soccer and working for the school newspaper, and Cullen visited fairly frequently, first during Labor Day weekend, then over Halloween, and then Thanksgiving, and of course over Christmas.  But that was it.  He didn’t even come back over spring break.  Well, that wasn’t his fault exactly, being that his family and he always went to Florida in the spring, and thusly scheduled their trip over his spring break.  So they drove down to get him, got him, went to Florida, drove back up and dropped him off, and then came home, Cullen-less.

Cullen-less.  That’s exactly how my winter had been.  Cullen-less and miserable.  During Cullen's winter break, we had taken our dads’ snow-blowers out to the frozen canal we lived on and cleared off a huge patch of ice like we did every winter.  Despite the frigid temperatures, we dawned hockey skates, grabbed our dads’ old sticks from our garages, and played one-on-one hockey, just like we always did.

But when Cullen had to go back, it was just me.  Pretty soon our freshly dusted off patch of ice was covered with snow, my skates rusting, and the old hockey sticks collecting dust in the garage.  Actually, we usually left our sticks on our docks, which were still sticking up through the snow.  Normally, we had no problem doing this, since we used them every day.  But it wasn’t long before mine was covered with snow, nowhere to be found.

No snow-forts were made, no epic snowball fights were held, no wintery pranks on the kids across the lake were played.  Instead, I spent my winter inside, sitting on the couch, reading book after book after book, counting down the days until summer.  Summer, when Cullen would finally return.

May 14th, the exact day Cullen would finally return.

Even though I didn’t have to, I glanced at the calendar that was hanging on the Matthews’ fridge.  The date was May 14th.

Finally, Cullen was coming home.

I fought the urge to ask Mrs. Matthew the exact time Cullen’s father would be pulling in the driveway, Cullen riding in the front seat, a small trailer being pulled behind the family’s SUV carrying the items from his dorm room.