Her eyes were alight with excitement, sparkling like a thousand diamonds, her tongue painted red with the sugary slush she sips through a plastic straw. She seemed so oblivious to the perfection she was, so oblivious to the effect she has on people. The effect she has on JD.
He stared at the perfect face of Veronica Sawyer as she finished the last dregs of the slurpee he'd bought her a little while before. His own drink sat untouched in the center console of his car, the slush melted and forgotten.
Because when Veronica was in the room, how could someone focus on anything but her eyes and her laugh and her everything. She was the only thing JD found okay in this shitty world that only gave him pain and more pain. But scratch that, Veronica wasn't just okay. She was. . .she was perfect. Nothing JD had ever seen could compare to her. He had never looked twice at anyone at any of his other schools. Never remembered their names or their faces because he was gone as soon as he came. He'd tried at some of the first high schools. He was anxious and alone, reaching out to other students for some kind of anchor to ground him in reality when nothing in his life remained constant. But then he left. No one tried to contact him after he moved. No one seemed to notice he'd gone or that he'd ever been there in the first place. Well, that's what it seemed like to him.
So as the months flew by and he continued to travel from city to city, he stopped trying altogether. Stopped trying to make friends. Stopped trying to be somewhat nice or approachable. Stopped trying to focus in any classes, engage with anybody, live a halfway normal life.
He perpetually became the mysterious new kid who sat in the back of all his classes, silent and uninterested. No one really talked to him and that was perfectly fine by him.
With all the isolation and lack of normality, he started to resent the world. He started to see how fucked up the world was. No one gave two shits about anyone else. The world wasn't fair. It didn't care if someone was a good human being or a nasty scumbag, it just dealt hands and everyone alive had to play theirs.
So when he saw a beautiful girl in an unfortunate shade of blue get bossed around by a group of girls just like any other high school clique, he could tell there was something special about her. She had a soul. Something many teenagers he saw as he stared down bustling hallways in various US high schools lacked. And surprisingly enough, he had the ability to recognize something good in the world after rejecting everything for so long.
As he sat in the driver's seat of his car watching Veronica reapply lipstick, JD realized couldn't be more grateful to have looked up just once. Engaged with one person despite feeling so numb inside.
JD had never felt anything like the feeling in his chest. It overwhelmed him to a degree where he couldn't think straight. He felt physical pain thinking about how much he needed Veronica in his life. It tugged at his chest and colored his world, letting him see Veronica for the angel she was.
It's funny in a kind of ironic way that someone as cynical as himself could experience something as optimistic as love.
Bu there he was, staring wide eyed at the girl he'd kill and die for. She was the only that mattered to him. The only good person in the world as far as JD was concerned. He could never deserve her, but he knew how much he needed her. He finally had something that meant anything in his life after feeling so fucking empty for so long. She was too good to lose, too good for this fucked up world, too good for the people that she called her friends, too good, too good, too good.
"Our love is god," he whispered.
She looked up and saw the passion in JD's eyes.
He took her hand. She squeezed his.
"Our love is god," she repeated.