Chapter Six: Learning and Rebuilding
A little bit more before I go to sleep. The sun should be coming up soon, and I need to talk to Andrew about the dreams when he wakes up. It's almost time.
God. Sunnydale. I thought being away would give me perspective, but all it told me was that life is screwed up. I already knew that.
So I graduated high school, or rather, made it out alive. My relatives would all joke with me at family functions. "Hey, you made it out of high school alive!" I would just laugh politely. A few of them went to Sunnydale High though. They would say congratulations and leave it at that. Sort of an unspoken relief that the monsters didn't get another one. They got two of my cousins and a few of my uncle's friends. But that's not important. What's important is that I started college with a new sense of freedom that had nothing to do with finally moving out of my parents' house.
My little stunt with the gun kept me from being able to go away for college, but I did get accepted to the University of California at Sunnydale. Big surprise. UC Sunnydale will take anyone just to keep enrollment from disappearing along with all of its "missing" students. I was still in therapy and dealing with residual high school issues. I'm surprised I didn't see more people from high school in my groups. I guess denial goes a long way in a place like Sunnydale. Anyway, things were going alright and I was dealing, but I wasn't making any friends.
I don't know why I thought that college would be any different from high school. The popular people were still popular. Well, okay, or dead. And Sunnydale was minus one Cordelia Chase. I always knew she wasn't cut out for the college thing. She was meant for something better than a lot of us. Actually, I think all of them were. Even Xander was above the rest of us in a way. He did horribly in school, but in life he was dealing with more important things. That's what matters in the end. It's not the frat parties you go to, it's the lives you save. Not the money you make, but the kind of friends you have. I didn't know that then. Well, I kinda did, but I was still looking for an easy fix.
After spending half the year being as ignored as I'd been in high school, I took matters into my own hands. One of the guys in my group told me about this spell that would make me popular and successful. I'd been dabbling in magick ever since my sophomore year of high school, so I knew I could pull it off.
I didn't know that being successful would mean I'd take Buffy's place. If I had thought about it for a minute, I probably would have realized that in Sunnydale, being successful meant having the most power, and all the power at that time belonged to Buffy. So our paths crossed again. I hadn't seen Buffy in a while, but when I did the spell, I just sort of knew everything that had been going on in her life. I knew about her boyfriend and the whole Faith issue, which still seems a little bizarre. Well, it all seems bizarre to me now. The thing about the spell was, once it was broken, everything went back to normal and everyone just sorta forgot that it ever happened, me included. For a few weeks my head kinda felt too light for my body. It was kinda like that time there was a gas leak in the high school and everyone was kinda dazed for a while. It all seemed a little unreal. I'm not sure why, but I wrote down everything about the experience that I could remember in my journal before it all slipped away.
I know this doesn't make up for a lot, but I do think I was learning. I learned enough to know that this was important. It was important for me to know that it hadn't worked. The quick fix had ended up falling apart after awhile. So I did listen to you, Buffy. I heard everything you said to me and tried to live my life differently. I started looking for more long term solutions, even if they would take hard work.
I threw myself into my classes and tried to start meeting people. I went to some parties on campus, and even had a few dates. It was better than it had been in awhile. The problem was, the people I met I couldn't really relate to. They were all about partying and having a good old college time, while I was concerned about monsters trying to eat me at night and learning some new spells and stuff. Plus, they never really got why Star Wars is one of the defining films of our culture, or why the sci-fi genre in general is so critical, especially in a town like Sunnydale.
And then I met Andrew.