Jesse Teller

It’s my birthday! As my birthday is progressing, I have decided I’m going to talk about that which is my favorite to talk about. I’m gonna tell you all about the love of my life. This is a section of my autobiography. It is the third volume, and the thirteenth book of the autobiography titled Reality of the Unreal Mind. This section is called The King’s Concubine. It’s about the times when me and my wife almost got together spanning from the last day of eighth grade til six years later, when we actually did connect. So today we talk about the near-misses of love. This is the sixth post in this series. I will be releasing them all day.

Now we’re talking about my day, and I live on a 48-hour schedule. So a new one of these will be coming out every two hours and 45 minutes from now until 2 in the morning on the 24th, when I go to sleep.

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“Well, you are single again,” Scarlett said. “Now we need to get you a new boyfriend.”

“I just want to be single for a while. Seriously, I don’t want a new relationship. Me and John were together for a very long time and I want a little, you know a little bit of me,” Bekah said.

See, she and her girlfriends have a very regimented lunch schedule. But today, they veered left of that schedule. They went to the Vo Tech building at the high school, because one of her friends knows she can get a certain kind of chips that are her new obsession. They never walk this route. They never come this way at all, and they are out of the building now. They have only a few minutes to get the rest of the lunches and eat. They have wasted so much time.

For the first time. They will do this so many more times.

“You have to have a boyfriend,” Scarlett says. “Who do you like?”

“Nobody. There is nobody,” Bekah says. She was the only one of her girlfriends to have a boyfriend, and now that she is single, it’s like they are all single again. This won’t stand. She has already proven she can handle a relationship. Bekah being single is not an option.

“We make a list. A list of guys you like and we work that list.” Scarlett looks at Bekah. “This is happening.”

But Bekah’s face has fallen. She is staring ahead at the crew walking toward her. “He’s about to do something awesome,” she says.

Here comes three guys. Bootheel, Teddy, and Ronin. Ronin has not seen Bekah since the last day of eighth grade. He has not been looking for her because he did not think she was real. He had only come out for a few moments. He had seen her and was gone again for a long time. One image, and then recluse for years. Now it’s his junior year and here she is again.

Ronin walks up to her and gently takes her by the shoulders. He stares her in the eyes as he slowly turns her around, both of them locking eyes until he is behind her crew. Then he is gone. He turns and out comes Guardian.

“What was that?” Bootheel asks.

But Guardian was not there even a second ago. He has no idea what Bootheel is talking about, so he ignores it. We all go about business as usual.

The group of girls walks silent for a while until they are a safe distance. Then they blow up.

“Who was that?!” Scarlett asks. She stares back at where I had been, but I am in the Vo Tech building now and out of their lives.

“That was Jesse Teller,” Bekah whines. “I can’t do anything about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He does this every now and then. He just walks up to me and takes my heart and walks off with it for a while. Then he is gone again.”

“Well, what about him?”

“He is gone now,” Bekah says.

“No,” her friend Slate says. “We are going to hook you two up.”

“I can never find him,” Bekah says miserably.

“We will walk to the Vo Tech every lunch and we will see him again and we will make this happen,” Scarlett says.

“That is not how it works with him,” Bekah says. “We won’t see him again.”

Well they all send out feelers. And at the next day’s lunch period they gather. “Okay, he is not dating anyone. I thought for a minute that he was dating Draconic, but he isn’t. It’s open season. We walk to the Vo Tech every day until we see him again.”

“We won’t.”

“Oh stop being like that, it will be fun. We will set up a pool and every one will pick a day that they think he will show back up,” Scarlett said. “What day do you want?”

“None. He is gone now. He won’t be back. I never see him in the same place twice. You guys don’t know how it works.”

So every day they all walked that route. They bought those chips. They waited, and they each picked a day.

But it doesn’t work like that. And they did not see Jesse Teller for the rest of the school year.