She sat back, and everyone seemed to quiet down. “I fell madly in love with my boyfriend, and he asked me to marry him and move upstate. We were married on August fourth, and it’ll be six months or so before we get a place up there. I’m not pregnant and I never was and I never once said I was. We got married because we’re soul mates, and that’s it.”
Ms. Randal nodded her reassurance as the bell rang. She got up and grabbed her bag and said, “Thank you.”
“You needed to set this straight. There are tons of rumors flying around,” her teacher replied as she headed out to her car.
Hannah was waiting for her, and she just got in quietly, not needing more gossip. Hannah, on the other hand, was excited and chatty. Hannah had been the center of attention as “she defended her sister-in-law” from the vicious rumors. Cally didn’t care what people said or did. She wasn’t going to be here long enough for any of it to matter, and the only thing that did matter was the one thing she didn’t have right now—Dakota.
When they pulled up, Hannah asked her to come in, but she wasn’t in the mood after the day she had, so she offered softly, “Next time.”
The whole day had been a reminder that she didn’t have Dakota here with her. Every couple holding hands or whispering down the hall made her think of him, and every time someone said something about him, it made her want to cry. That’s why she was so thankful when she got home and Annalise wasn’t there. She just fell on her bed and started crying.
It was late when Dakota called, and by then, there were no tears left in her. “So how was your first day?”
She just lay there and gave that answer that always worked with parents: “Fine.”
But he saw through it. “What happened?”
“Seth is in my first class, and I told him off in front of everyone. The whole school is in an uproar because I got married. Your sister is the center of attention, because she’s the sister to the guy I married. And half the school thinks I’m pregnant.” It came out sounding like she was reading a dull list of facts.
He just started laughing. “And what did you do?”
“I just walked around telling people I’m not pregnant and I am married. And my name is Cally Hunter, not Cally Marson,” she explained blandly.
“And yet you were ready to cry when you left school,” he nudged.
She just shook her head. “Your sister has a big mouth.”
He laughed. “She was worried about you. She said a lot of people are angry at you over the whole ‘Seth thing.’”
She really didn’t want to bring up the whole “Seth thing,” so she went for, “I was fine until your sister pulled out the wedding pictures at lunch. That’s when I started missing you the most.”
“So all this is because you miss me?” he asked with a little more hope in his voice.
But she couldn’t help it as she reached over and took the pictures out of her bag as she answered, “Yes, I miss you, and I know you can’t be here every day, but it still hurts to know you’re not here.”
“Would it be easier if you weren’t there alone?”
She started flipping through the pictures. “No, I could be at my mom’s and I would still miss you. I could be at your parents’ and I would still miss you. So no, the whole where I live thing doesn’t matter. It’s the being without you that I miss.”
“It won’t be this way for long. As soon as we get a place, we’ll be together so much that you’re going to want to kill me,” he joked.
She knew he was right, but she still missed him. She changed the subject to him and was thankful he didn’t remember to bring up Seth again.
The rest of the week was pretty much the same. She was the talk of the school, and she just ignored it all. She worked each night and came home to make dinner, do homework, and went to bed, then repeated. She knew she shouldn’t have wasted the money, but she bought a frame for every single picture from their wedding and put them all over the apartment one night. Annalise had told her that it was too much, so she hung a drape up over the half wall and put the majority of them in there.
When she got home Friday night, the world seemed to change. He was home, waiting for her, and she ran as fast as she could up the stairs. When she opened the door, he was on the sofa, watching T.V. with Annalise and she froze. He looked so perfectly content while her world seemed to be falling in around her. She dropped her bag and sat next to him, and it took everything she had left not to attack him with kisses. Yeah, the world was finally right for a few minutes. But as with all good things, their time together was limited.
“Where did you get the picture?” he asked.
She looked above the T.V. at the picture. She loved that one the most out of all the pictures she had of that day. So at work, when it was slow, she decided to use the picture maker and blew it up. It was just the two of them standing in front of the old brick courthouse, but with those double-size wood doors and the antique lights, the picture came out beautiful. It was just the two of them standing there, but they were looking at each other, and you could see the love glowing around them. She didn’t know if it was a reflection or fluke, but there was actually a pink and gold halo surrounding them. It was the perfect wedding picture.
“Your sister brought them to school, and I stole a copy. That was one of my favorites, so I blew it up and framed it.”
“You did a good job altering it.” He seemed impressed.
She couldn’t take her eyes off of it. “I enlarged it, I didn’t change it. I wish I could have hung the rest up.”
Annalise shook her head. “You got three, and that’s good enough.”
She rolled her eyes, and Dakota asked, “What did I miss?”
Annalise turned to him. “She tried to hang every single picture up. I told her it looked trashy. It’s bad enough she hung the sheet up.”
He gave her a look that she couldn’t read. “What’s with the sheet?”
She couldn’t hide the red heat that hit her cheeks and couldn’t look at him, so she focused on her hands twisting her shirt. “I missed you and it hurt a lot, so I decided that I wanted to surround myself with pictures of you. Annalise didn’t like them all over, so I put up the sheet so she didn’t have to see them.”
She curled into a ball as he got up and walked in the bedroom area. “Oh my goodness.”
Her arms were around her knees and her head was resting on them. She couldn’t look at them or say anything.
“That’s what I said. The whole place was like that when I got home Wednesday night. I told her that there was no way we were going to have that. When I got home Thursday, she had the sheet up and those three pictures,” Annalise told him, still disapproving of what she had done.
She felt him sit back down next to her. “I will deal with this in my own way, and that is my way,” she mumbled in her arms.
“Why did you put them all up?” He didn’t sound angry as much as surprised.
“I missed you, and they give me a piece of you when you’re not here,” she mumbled into her lap.
There was a knock on the door that saved her from anything else he could have said in that moment. Annalise must have opened the door to let in Savannah and Jay who were now starting up a conversation with them. Savannah was saying that she should stay the night with her because her parents had gone out of town. She looked up to see Savannah looking at the picture and smiling. “We got a few like that too. I thought it was just the camera.” Savannah looked at her. “What’s