I'm really sorry my short story is long but...I think it needed to be said...so read it and get into Emily's pathetic real life! I also just updated it to include some new shit that could be insightful...or not...
I dont know!

I wrote a short story called "A Vignette from Muncie, IN" and I'm really depressed. Peter Sourian really wanted me to write about Indiana and so I did and I didn't realize that it was so depressing and i didn't know how much I have blocked from my mind. I'll let you read what really happened that night
A Vignette from Muncie, IN
We drove in the darkness of the Indiana night. I was sitting in the passenger seat of the family car. I don’t remember the time but the sky was black, purple, and unpleasant. It might have been raining. I didn’t remember these things because I didn’t want to remember them.
I remember we didn’t talk. He just grasped the steering wheel, looking forward and drove fast down the very straight and very flat roads of the farmland. I had never seen such straight roads in my life.
I was looking out the window and all I could see was dark. I saw the traffic lights change colors in front of us. We seemed so close to it but it was fifteen more minutes of quiet until we actually reached the blinking red light.
We stopped outside a convenient store. He didn’t ask me if I wanted anything and walked inside, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I wanted to escape but where? I didn’t know where I was and it was too dark. I was trapped to face whatever what was going to happen to me. And it was very uncertain what was going to happen to me.
Just by the way Alex walked, I knew he was in pain. I didn’t like seeing him like this, but I didn’t care. It was sad that I didn’t care that my boyfriend, who they say was obviously in love with me, was in extreme amounts of pain. I shouldn’t have told him. I shouldn’t have told him at all. Johnny told me not to tell but goddammit, why did I have to listen to Alex’s stupid ex girlfriend in that horrible Chinese restaurant and tell him! I had to tell someone. When something happens to you that you think was amazing, you have to tell someone and I happened to tell the wrong person.
Alex walked out of the convenient store holding a bottle of water. He looked like he had been crying. It was kind of weird to see a 235 lbs, 6’4” soldier of America’s elite Armed Forces cry when I wasn’t even shedding a tear. I wasn’t crying because I was too frightened.
He got back in the car and started to drive again. I still didn’t know where we were going. He had just put me in the car because we needed to talk about what transpired on New Year’s Eve. I told my therapist that when I got back to Connecticut and she shook her head.
“Emily, never get in the car with them! You have common sense to know that!”
Alex looked over at me but I didn’t look back at him. I just stared out at the black Midwestern space I was occupying.
“How could you?” It was first thing he had said to me since I had told him. “My best friend…I swear Johnny’s going to get the shit kicked out of him…”
“No…” I interrupted him and looked into his eyes. “It was my fault and my doing. Don’t blame him.”
In all honesty, it was Johnny Allen Garrison’s fault and not mine. I just didn’t want Johnny to be hated by his best friend for something like this. I would never see either of them again and they…they were on the swim team together! They sat next to each other in second grade! I didn’t want to be the cause of a falling out.
It was Johnny Garrison’s fault. It always has been and it always will. I try to tell myself that everyday that he’s not worth my time. Johnny Garrison was never worth waiting for, day after day at my mailbox, hoping for a letter from Sheppard Air Force base with no results. He wasn’t worth writing; he wasn’t worth throwing away a relationship for. To think I believed him when he told me that we’d see each other again; “undoubtedly” was the word he used.
“So what happened?” I hadn’t noticed he had stopped the car in his old high school parking lot. So this was where he’d played football and been the Midwestern dream.
“Oh Alex…” I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to tell him that his best friend and his girlfriend had secretly had sex on the bathroom floor while he was asleep, thinking that his girlfriend, the girl he loves, was sleeping in the bed next to him in the Radisson hotel in Muncie, Indiana.
His voice grew stronger. He lifted his hand and I flinched. “Tell me what happened.”
I had stopped looking at him and looked out the car window to the cold Indiana parking lot. “Well…I had sex with him.” I said it. It hurt to say it but I did. But when the words came out, it sounded like I was proud of what I did.
Alex’s eyes filled up with tears. “What? You did what?” He opened the car door and slammed it, leaving me alone again in the car. I know it was because he didn’t want me to see him cry.
I thought I was dead. I knew in the glove compartment or in this car somewhere, there’s a gun and he’s going to shoot me. I’m not going to be alive anymore. I had never feared for my life in such a way that I did in the car in the Delta High school parking lot. But I had brought this on myself. I was the one that got drunk. I was the one that should have gone to the hospital with the alcohol poisoning. But Alex was the one that put me in the hands of his best friend Johnny A. Garrison.
“Wait, Johnny…you’re a medic in the Air Force, you take care of her.” And for three hours, there I was, in the lap of a stranger, who was holding my hair back, whispering in my ear with his soothing and beautiful voice about how I needed to drink water from this black coffee mug. I had come to my senses wrapped in a blanket in the arms of the most beautiful man I had ever seen. And where was my boyfriend? I had asked Johnny Garrison in an incoherent stupor and he told me Alex was smoking a cigar in the lobby. His girlfriend was dying, her pupils rolled in the back of her head, her body slipping in and out of consciousness and where was he? Smoking a fucking cigar in the fucking hotel lobby!
In the car, I went through the entire night in my head. I had no sense of time and Alex was nowhere to be seen. I closed my eyes and thought of Johnny.
“I know I shouldn’t be saying this,” Johnny Garrison whispered in my ear. “But you’re very beautiful.”
Johnny told me I was beautiful when my hair was a mess, I wasn’t wearing a shirt, only Johnny’s black zip up sweat shirt and my mouth encrusted with vomit. He pushed away the hair from my face.
When I was throwing up and unknown of what was going on, Johnny made me feel safe. No one had ever been this nice to me, not even Alex…no one had taken such good care of me. I looked into his electric blue eyes, looked at his short blonde hair, his pale skin with a smile draped across it, and I fell in love.
It was I that kissed him so maybe it was my fault. I had just thrown up for the eighth time (so they say it was the eighth time, I don’t remember) that night but he didn’t seem to mind reminisces of vomit that floated into his mouth. Let this be known: Johnny Allen Garrison was completely sober.
We lay on the floor of the bathroom for a while with the light turned on. We talked about relationships.
“I’ve only been in love once.” He kissed me on the cheek. “You remind me a lot of her.”
He asked me if I had been with another John before. I told him of my best friend John from home and how he’s amazing.
“He sounds like an incredible guy.” Johnny smiled. “I hope I can only be as amazing as your best friend.”
I nodded. “You’ve already done so much for me. You’re more amazing than anyone I have ever met in my whole life.”
I opened my eyes when Alex got back in the car. The light from the high school showed he had been crying. The bottle of water sat unopened in the cup holder. He opened it and drank.
“You’re very lucky I’m not a violent man.” He started to car and then stopped it.
“So what was this relationship about Emily? What was I to you?” He voice started to rise until he was shouting. The windows of the car vibrated with the sound of his voice. I started to tremble but I wouldn’t look or say anything. “Was I just your fucking soldier boy? Answer me!”
“I don’t know…” It was the only thing I could say. It took all the courage to even say that.
“You don’t know?” He was still yelling. “You don’t fucking know?”
“I don’t know.” I just said it again. Why had I gone out with Alex? I don’t know why I did. He was just there at West Point; he was outgoing, intelligent, and a grasp of some sort of goals. But I couldn’t tell him that in the car. So I just kept saying, “I don’t know.”
“Well I’ll tell you why I loved you.” The car had started to move, faster than before, and was charging down the Indiana roads with great force. “I went out with you because it looked like you had potential. That you were going to change and be something great.”
Change. Alex had spoke repeatedly about change. Of course, I didn’t know how to change and what was I supposed to change into, maybe his spineless senator’s wife who wore pillbox hats and baked fruitcake?
“I don’t know how to change Alex.” I just told him simply. I didn’t want to be here in Indiana anymore. I was starting not to care about him and I felt less sorry for him. “I am who I am.”
“Yeah, and it sickens me. You have so much potential…”
I didn’t ask about change and what it meant ever again. All I said was, “Okay I’ll change.” I just wanted him to be quiet.
He started to talk about New Years Eve but I had tuned him out. I remember him talking about “mocking his love” but I wasn’t sure what it was a reference to. Probably something I said while I lay on the hotel floor with strangers staring at me. The reference had come back to me but not till I was safely on the airplane in mid air.
I had asked Alex if he loved me, and he told me yes. He asked if I loved him and I said yes. He asked me if I was serious, I laughed and said no. In a way, I had, “mocked his love,” and only months after I left do I feel actually bad for what I did to him. But when I was in that car, I didn’t want to listen and didn’t want to even care about what Alex was actually saying to me.
We drove for a long time in silence again. It was well needed and I just wanted to think about the night before.
“I’ll give you two choices,” Johnny whispered in my ear, “one is I can pick you up and put you to bed because you need it after the night you’ve been through or we close this door, never tell Alex any of this that happened, and I’ll slowly and humanely make love to you.”
Alex had pulled the car into the garage and got out. He looked awful. His eyes were bloodshot and red as fire.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.” He opened the door to the garage and walked into the house. I followed him but turned into the guest bedroom and shut the door. I flopped down on the fold out bed and finally had to cry.