The Battle For Her Heart

In life, when a person wants to ignore something or not think about it, the thing has a tendency to pop up almost everywhere. For Jim, the day after he found out that Lauren and Dan Anderson were going out, there seemed to be no escape from it. The initial blow of the news came bright and early. He thought it was going to be a routine Monday, but Jim Harrison had no idea what was coming. He woke up at seven, just like every morning. He went to his laptop to check his instant messenger, just like every morning. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t any messages, which was not unexpected. Next came the Facebook check and there it was in plain sight—the relationship status of Lauren Jenkins’ changed from single to ‘in a relationship’, and to make it even worse, there was a “with”, which symbolized that there was a specific person she wanted everyone to know who it was exactly.
Jim stopped at the word with. Part of him already knew who it was, another part of him prayed that it was one of those stupid girl things that had them married to their best friend. But Jim knew Lauren too well to know that wasn’t the case at all. She hated those things so much. She thought it was stupid for all the girls to act as if they were in fact, lesbians.
So Jim, defeated, and already depressed, pressed on to read the name of Dan Anderson after the word with. The battle for Lauren’s heart was over, and Jim Harrison had lost.
To add insult to injury, Jim scrolled down to see comments not only from a few of Lauren’s friends who excitedly uttered their congratulations, but also from Dan himself, who at preciously 11:37 P.M. the previous night, wrote “hey babe”. Jim moved his mouse over to the red box and closed out of his internet browser. He did this in complete fury, and ridicious strength that made his mouse hop in the air by the sudden force he applied. That bastard! Jim stood up from his chair, so close from anger hypervbenilitation, and stared at his laptop as if his own laptop had been his own demise. He was lost, and he highly doubted anyone was going to care to save him.
Jim wanted desperately to attempt to persuade his parents that he felt sick, but the idea soon fell moot. For starters, Jim Harrison was never sick—it just didn’t happen, and even if he was sick, the chances of his parents letting him say home were slim as thy of course would be suspicious. He couldn’t just tell thenm the truth either. They obviously wouldn’t understand what he had been through for weeks—the battle for Lauren was exhausting all of his time and energy. How would they respond to that if he told them? His mother would of course blow it off as it was nothing, and Jim at the current moment was in no mood have her even think that Lauren wasn’t worth all the heartache. So he decvided to go against the idea of faking sick.
**************

There she was at her locker. Jim made it out of the stairwell doors and saw her, her beautiful brown hair straightened. She looked gorgeous and that was when Jim’s stomach turned violently, she wasn’t his anymore. In fact, she was never his, and he was fairly certain at the moment that she would never be his.
She saw him as he stood there. There was no doubt she didn’t miss him. Their eyes met for a millisecond, if that, and she looked away just as swiftly—her face buried in her locker. It appeared that she wouldn’t even look at Jim. “Fuck this,” he muttered to himself. He couldn’t believe that she had just done that. After all they’ve been through, she wasn’t even going to look him in the eye? The thought angered Jim very much so to the point that he walked over to her slowly. He knew he was going to regret what he was about to do but he didn’t care anymore since Lauren was no longer single. It was Dan Anderson’s job now to care for her.
“Hey,” he said in his normal tone. He didn’t want to lead her on into thinking that he already knew about the relationship status change.
“Hi,” Lauren replied but her face was still in her locker. He knew she ws too afraid to look at him. She couldn’t handle it, which wasn’t surprising to him—he knew she couldn’t handle a lot of things—it seemed impossible for her.
“I just wanted to say,” said Jim. But he stopped. He took a deep breath as though it really was that hard for him to finish the rest of the sentence. Although, he was fairly certain that it could of also looked like, or sounded as if he struggled to accept the truth. “Congratulations on your new relationship—I’m happy for you.” Jim said. There, he had said it, and his voice didn’t even crack once due to the amount of bullshit that spewed out of his mouth. He finished the sentence with a smile, and he tried to his best to make it look convincing, but he was unsure if he had succeeded or not. Lauren could tell the times he was serious, and when he wasn’t at all.
However, on the inside, Jim was using very colorful language indeed to describe Lauren’s new boyfriend. The thoughts made Jim cringe so much that it nearly broke his concentration on the smile.
Lauren stopped what she did in her locker. Jim could tell it was nothing but busy work so that she didn’t have to look at him. But her face truned so slowly and she looked quizzically as if she was studying to see if he was serious.
“Thank you, Jim—“
Jim smiled. She had believed him. He had succeeded, and because he did, he could now through his counter-strike at her—a blow that could only match Pearl Harbor on the epic scale. “But don’t expect me to come back to comfort you when he fucks you over, and believe me—he will.”
He didn’t even have to look for her reaction. Jim Harrison’s adreline went up so much that the sheer momentum of it carried him down the hall. He might have lost the war, but he did make sure that he got the last word in—and that’s all that mattered to him. He did this because he knew it would stick in her mind. She wouldn’t forget about it, and that’s what Jim wanted all along. Certainly it was an asshole move on his part. Jim wasn’t stupid, he knew what kind of an effect it would have ion her. But what did it matter to him anymore if he looked like an asshole? He had spent months being the comforting nice guy—months actually giving a shit about her thoughts and feelings—rather like others who just perceived to do so that they had a chance to get in her pants. The thought sickened Jim.