Sterling Fight (Sterling Falls #5)
Prologue
PROLOGUE
Nineteen-years old
[Genie]
A s I round the stacks in the university library, my gaze catches on a lone student sitting at a dark wood table amid the numerous empty ones. The hour is late, nearly closing time. The lights are low. The scent of leather bindings and old paper is more prominent in the emptiness, and I’m on my final stretch of reshelving books. Work-study for financial assistance isn’t glamorous, especially when it cuts into your Saturday night plans.
From where I stand, I simply admire the man I know is a senior. His head is bowed. His wet-sand colored hair is shaggy and flopping forward against a prominent forehead. He dresses in dark colors giving off a broody vibe, like a poet from the 1960s. He’s quiet, reserved, and often alone.
But he didn’t have to be.
The first time I met Judd Sylver, I was in third grade. It was February 11, National Make a New Friend Day, and I wrote him a note on lined paper decorated with a unicorn.
Do you want to be my new friend? Check yes or no.
With eyes the same shade as the brilliant blue sparkles on the cover of my notebook, he looked up at me from underneath that disheveled hair and stared. An entire conversation went on behind those eyes, like he was actually considering being my friend, then he blinked once, narrowed his gaze, tugged one of my French braids, and said, “Why would I be friends with a girl?”
I might have only been a skinny eight-year-old, but my arms had enough strength to push him right off the low desk chair.
Judd was a reading buddy in the elementary school program that paired fifth graders with third graders. I don’t know why third graders needed reading buddies. I’d known how to read since I was six. While at first, I’d been excited to have Judd as my buddy, hopeful of a new friend, I’d wished for someone else after that encounter.
Then, there was a brief period in middle school when I had a crush on Judd. He wasn’t the most popular kid in Sterling Falls, our small mountain town in West Virginia. He was considered shy and aloof. Sometimes he looked a little dirty with matted hair, pants too short for his long, thin legs. He had the saddest blue eyes, and that was something which constantly drew my attention. A time or two, I caught him glancing over at me across the crowded lunchroom or in the library where I’d wait for my mom to pick me up after school. An eighth-grader rarely looked at a sixth-grader, but I’d feel those eyes on me and glance up, knowing exactly who was watching. My innocent heart would flutter in my chest, like the wings of a majestic bird taking flight. A slow pump on liftoff before the thumping wings gracefully flapped faster and faster. Sometimes, I’d ship Judd’s name and mine together in a pretty floral notebook where I kept all my precious thoughts and important dates.
Such a silly girl back then .
Finally, Judd and I connected for a while in high school. Being two years ahead of me, seniors didn’t often associate with sophomores, but we were in Math Club together. By then, Judd was no longer a scrawny mountain rat but a young man on the verge of adulthood. He’d bulked up but kept his head down. He was in the extra-curricular activity to beef up his college applications. He was so smart. He was also quiet but polite. Teachers adored him. He was your average good guy, and that was the best of compliments. I dare to say, we were friends. My secret crush on him was renewed.
And I made the bold move to ask him to his senior prom.
I have an obsession with national dates, the odder— the quirkier —the better, and I’d been a trendsetter when I hadn’t even known it. National Promposal Day, which takes place on March 11, would not become a thing until years after I graduated from high school. Back then, I thought I was so clever, finding that old unicorn notebook from third grade in the bottom of a dresser drawer, and ripping out a blank piece of paper, then handwriting my promposal question in a similar fashion to how I asked Judd to be friends when I was a child.
Finally, in high school, Judd checked yes.
Excitement brewed with every minute I stood in my living room, twirling around in the dress that I’d picked because it matched the bright blue of Judd’s eyes. He was special to me. Important even. He’d be my first kiss, and I couldn’t wait.
Until those minutes added up to an hour, then two, and then the clock struck midnight.
Judd never showed. He never called either.
He missed his prom. He even skipped his high school graduation.
After finally winning his friendship, which I did consider a rare prize, the hurt I’d experienced from his absence was unbearable. I already had an aversion to being abandoned, as in, I didn’t want it to ever happen again.
Judd had been that again .
Next thing I knew, he was here in Tennessee. Maybe I should have known he attended the same university I did, but I didn’t. Then one day, I spied him working in the dining center. After that, I noticed him a time or two, or twenty. Who was counting? And each time I saw him, my opinion of him changed from anger to grief to confusion.
The quiet of the library, on late Saturday nights, was the place I found him most often.
He never noticed me.
Head down, book in hand, he wasn’t the boy I’d pushed off a chair or the teenager who stood me up for prom. He was solid, refined, haunted-looking, like ghosts followed him, and he was determined to ignore their presence. That buzzing energy also suggested I keep my distance.
I’d learned my lesson with Judd long ago and swore he’d broken my fragile heart for the last time.
But as I watched him at the ripe age of nineteen on another National Make a New Friend Day, despite all that happened between us, I wished silently Judd Sylver and I were friends.
He looked like he could use one.