"Let's see, I was born on a cold winter morning on February 21st. My mom died shortly after and my dad remarried pretty quickly to my now my step-mom who likes to go vacationing to the sketchy, or 'exotic', places my dad goes to for his business deals. Which means I got left at home being bumped from nanny to nanny as each one realized their truest potentials were above watching the children of parents who didn't even want to raise themselves. My last nanny is in flight school now I think," Naya started.
Dante scoffed, "So what, you were neglected as a child and now you're all emo teenager? Because after that long speech you gave, that's hardly enough."
Naya laughed, "You'd think right? Nope, I was actually a pretty cheery kid, if not a bit naive. I even had a large group of girl friends. The only thing was that there were mini groups within the group, meaning most of the girls were closer with each other than they were to others, leaving me as an outsider without being a loner. But I was fine with it, at least, I thought I was."
Naya paused before continuing. "Then came sophomore year. It was the last period of the first day of school and we were in Honors Algebra II. The teacher was droning on about the syllabus, something about the quadratic equation or something, and I accidentally rolled my eyes. That's when he first saw me, Zach. I remember giggling like a little girl when he pretended to fall asleep. That's how I got yelled at on my first day."
"Our teacher assigned us homework, but we had a couple minutes to work on it before the bell rang. Zach came up to me and asked me how to solve the easiest question on the worksheet. I was suspicious, but I didn't want to assume in case he really needed the help. So I worked it out for him, except I could barely pay attention because he was standing so close over my shoulder. He wasn't the type to bathe in cologne, but it was just subtle enough for me to want to lean closer to him. After I was done, he took the assignment back to his desk and packed up his stuff for the end of the day."
"He asked me again the next day. And the next. And the next. I thought he was just using me for answers, but I didn't really care because it meant he was talking to me. It was around the third week when the cologne finally won and I slipped up on a problem, which Zach immediately pointed out. I said with a smirk, 'If you already know how to work it out, then why bother asking me?' He looked me dead in the eye and told me he liked me, and I told him I liked him. We walked out of that classroom hand-in-hand like preschoolers who just got pretend married."
"It was great at first. We'd always go out for late night coffee runs on school nights. He had me text him when I got home, and I thought it was cute how protective he got when his friends tried to talk to me."
"But some of the girls from my group didn't agree with me and basically staged an intervention, which was led by Nora, one of my friends. They told me he was becoming obsessed. That he was controlling and jealous. Obviously, I ignored them. Zach was the first person ever to make the center of his world. To me, he couldn't have ever been more perfect."
"However, in the weeks following the talk, Zach's imperfections became more and more visible. His texts became more demanding and urgent. He became more demanding and urgent. When he found out my friends talked to me about me dating him, he tried to stop me from seeing them. I realized my fairytale first relationship had run its course, and I broke up with him."
"Zach was so mad. He kept telling me I would regret it, that I would come crawling back to him.That he'd make me regret. I just didn't know how mad he was."
Dante resisted the urge to hold Naya's hand as she continued her hand. "Then came junior year. It was after the first wave of college testing and my friend had begged me to go with her and her boyfriend to the movies. Her mom wouldn't approve of her having a boyfriend, so she used me to make it look like a group thing."
"When we got there, we saw her boyfriend had brought a friend of his own, Benji, We ended up sitting together during the movie, and we spent the entire time making fun of our friend, who were sucking each other's faces off and laughing at the corny dialogues from the cheesy rom com our friends picked out. I felt a spark again, but it felt different from the one I had with Zach."
"A week later, Benji found me at school and asked me out to dinner and a movie. I suggested we watch a horror flick this time. I didn't know he hated horror until we were at the theater and he was hiding behind my sweater the entire time. I asked him about it after, and he said he wanted to do whatever I wanted to do on our first date. I knew he was different from Zach right then."
"We fell in love pretty soon after, and Benji always talked about getting married after college. I didn't think our relationship would last that long, but it was nice to imagine."
Naya let out a shaky breath, and Dante took her hand in his own. She gripped his fingers tightly before finishing her story. "March 14th: it was the last normal day of our lives. It was the day I destroyed the lives of eight people and their families. We heard the first shots at 3:29."
."