Excerpt: Not Sure Yet

I realized a fatal mistake I had made, one that countless teen magazines warn about and countless teen girls ignore the warnings of. Don’t ever ditch your friends for your boyfriend. Well, I had. Of course, most of the girls at Forks High were snobs who made fun of me behind my back for not having as much money as them, (my family was literally “as poor as church mice”,) but there had been a few that I had forsaken to spend more time with Ben.

Well, there was Bella, but she was at Dartmouth with Edward, having the time of her life with her perfect relationship. I cringed. I couldn’t believe the venom in my thoughts. I was normally a very nice person. That’s what getting dumped does to you. Even though it had pretty much been mutual, I still couldn’t help assigning the blame to Ben. A human failing, I guess. My father talked about those a lot.

I hadn’t really bothered to make friends at University of Washington either. I had just shown up to class and thrown myself into the work. I loved literature, and felt that that was what I truly wanted to do with my life- teach literature, whether to second-graders, sophomores, or grad students. I had immersed myself in my work and Ben. And now that I no longer had Ben, what was left? School? Funny, because my scholarship money was dwindling away (why is education so expensive?)

So without school, and without Ben, I didn’t have much to fall back on. My father would say that I always had Jesus, but I wanted something concrete to cling to.