𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 ― 𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐑𝐀𝐘𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐎𝐎𝐍 𝐒𝐔𝐍𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐄 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐌𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐃 𝐐𝐔𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐋𝐔𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐋𝐘, 𝐈𝐓 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐀 𝐒𝐔𝐋𝐓𝐑𝐘, 𝐒𝐌𝐎𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐍. The dull hues of the foliage and fauna were made vibrant, and there was not a wisp of white in the clear, cerulean sky. A late, lovely summer sight to behold. Yet the blistering sunlight was oppressive to the East Coast populace and scorched the New Jersey city of Princeton. It was one of the warmest days of the year.

Most people stayed inside, their air conditioning turned on and a fruity, icy drink in their hand, waiting for the heat to pass. The people of Princeton were not accustomed to the humid, hot weather, but Mary Jane Thomas was.

Mary Jane was a West Coast woman at heart, having spent most of her life living in Los Angeles, she was no stranger to a hot summer day. She welcomed it instead, because, despite the scalding leather car seats and melted foundation and mascara, it gave her that taste of home she desperately yearned for.

She hated the East Coast— loathed it, actually. New Jersey was cold and miserable, nothing like sunny California. That made it appear as if she disliked everything about the East Coast, but that wasn't true, there were some, small things she found bliss in. She adored her friends, getting to see family often, and Princeton University, where she would be starting her second year as an English major in a few weeks.

Her family and she had lived in Princeton before, years ago. Princeton was where her father and mother were from, where they met, got married, and had two children, a daughter, and a son. They had a whole life here, they were the picture-perfect family, the American Dream.

Things fell apart when her mom got diagnosed with stage four leukemia a year after she gave birth to her younger brother, Mark. Things appeared to be going well at first, chemotherapy seemed to be working, and her health was on a steady incline for a few months. The prognosis looked good, her doctors strongly believed she would survive the ailment.

Eight months in, something went wrong, her condition worsened abruptly, and she was hospitalized. The doctors tried everything to treat the cancer, a higher dose of chemotherapy, blood cell transfusions, and a stem cell transplantation, but everything was ineffective, nothing worked.

After ten months, her mom couldn't keep fighting, the treatment was having little to no effect. She fought the entire way, for her family, but she died alone, weak, and barely lucid in her hospital bed. Mary couldn't understand why she couldn't see her mother anymore, she was only five years old, a little girl. She didn't get why her mother had left her and her family all alone.

Her father left everything behind, his career as a city councilman, his parents and siblings, and any memory of his deceased wife. He took his children to the other side of the country. Somewhere completely different, where he didn't have to live with a constant reminder that his very heart and soul had died all while he was utterly helpless to save her.

He never spoke of their mother. All she knew of her came from other family members, they were always careful as to never let him overhear them saying anything about her. Any mention of her was strictly forbidden, it was an unspoken rule in the Thomas household.

Mary had a satisfactory childhood, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. Her father was an established, wealthy man, well-off with a distinguished political career. She was never without the faddish style or the latest technology, she always got what she wanted. For her sixteenth birthday, his gift to her was a brand-new Mercedes, white and sleek, it was exactly what she asked for. He couldn't be there for her actual birthday party. For John Thomas, work came before all else.

She was an academic, intelligent girl. She scored the highest grades in every subject without studying, it came naturally to her, especially in the humanities fields.

Literature was her greatest love, but she was fond of classic novels the most. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Orwell, and the Brontë sisters, she read most of them and planned to read them all before she died. There was something truly enlightening about those anecdotes, not merely because of their complex characters and meticulously thought-out plotlines, but because there was a raw depth to them, a humanity not present in postmodern novels.

Her father discouraged her from pursuing a career as an author or historian. He pushed for her to become a lawyer or doctor. The notion of staying in school for all those years and wasting her youth was a distasteful one. She would prefer to settle down with a good man, have a few kids, and spend her days putting her ideas onto paper.

English and the social sciences came easy to her, she wrote pages of analysis on the books she was assigned, annotating purely for the fun of it, it was a pastime of hers. Her history classes were the same, she looked forward to hearing those archaic tales, her memory was exemplary, and not one detail left her mind when she walked out of that classroom. Her classmates couldn't understand, how it was all so effortless for her.

Science and mathematics were always her shortcomings. It never made sense to her, it never did, no matter how attentively she listened to her teacher's lecture, it was as if her brain couldn't comprehend anything beyond basic algebra. Nonetheless, like the overachieving moron she was, she signed up for every single AP course she could. By sheer luck alone, she scored fives and fours on all her exams, even AP Calculus. It was a four, though, much to her father's disappointment.

Being so preoccupied academically was a strain on her sanity, but it at least gave her an excuse to not involve herself with the debauched miscreants of her school. She never had a crush on one of her classmates like her friends did. When she found a guy mildly handsome, he would say something idiotic, and any attraction she had would dissipate instantaneously.

The deeper truth was she didn't like herself. Mary wasn't hideous but she was plain in terms of appearance. She had dark brown curls, honey-brown eyes, and fair skin. She was taller than most guys, flat-chested, five feet and nine inches— and her nose had a bump on it. Some boys would try and hit on her, but after she saw a guy run up to his friends and exaggerate about an uneventful interaction they had, she realized what it all was. Guys saw girls as this prize to win, the prettier and more amicable, the better to tell your friends about.

Mary stopped entertaining any guy's romantic pursuits after that. She didn't swear off men, just high school boys. She told herself it would be better in college, they would be more mature then. Her first year at Princeton University proved her brutally incorrect.

For prom, she didn't want to go on a date, but her friends compelled her to go with some guy, a varsity baseball player. She forgot his last name, but his first name was Daniel, everyone called him Danny. He was tall, thin, blond, and had watery blue eyes, he was decent-looking, but Mary found him to be revolting with his constant, awkward advances. When Daniel tried to kiss her at the end of the night, she slapped him in the face.

College applications were perhaps the most stressful time of her life. She applied to an insane amount of colleges, from Ivy Leagues to UCs to the most obscure colleges. She was terrified that she wouldn't get into any colleges, which was an absurd prospect. She was ranked in the top five of her class every year of high school. She was co-captain of the varsity tennis team for her school. She scored splendidly on her AP exams, her SAT score was 1520, and her GPA never dropped below a 4.0.

She got into a remarkable quantity of colleges of high caliber— UCSD, UCLA, UC Berkeley, NYU, Dartmouth, Stanford, and Princeton, her father's alma mater. She had never seen him so happy when she opened her acceptance letter, and she knew then, she had to commit to Princeton, for her father's sake.

Mary didn't want to leave California, all of her friends and memories behind, they had planned to attend UCLA, get a dorm together, and live wild and hungover for the next four years, but she couldn't let her father down. She owed him the world and more. She committed to Princeton the day before the deadline, the only one of her friends not to select UCLA. She still recalled a snarky comment a girl made about her getting in because of 'daddy's money', adding salt to her gaping wound.

Any sliver of accomplishment she had managed to grasp onto was shattered when she wasn't chosen to be the valedictorian of her graduating class. Laura Howard was chosen instead of her, the sole student who outdid her academically. For Laura, calculus, and physics came as easily as American history and rhetorical analysis.

Mary found Laura's graduation speech monotonous and repetitive, or maybe that was her jealousy that caused her to believe that. She adamantly believed that she should have been selected as valedictorian, but secretly, the little rationality she had knew damn well that Laura deserved it more than her. That didn't make the graduation ceremony any less unpleasant.

They moved to Princeton a month after her graduation. The new house was bigger than their old one in California. The architecture was one of the few areas where the East Coast surpassed the West Coast. Mary loved colonial-style houses and detested modern architecture, and California was as contemporary and technological as science would allow.

Her father was not subtle in his disapproval of her major choice. English was a useless degree in his eyes. He constantly would nonchalantly make a comment about how English graduates made the least income, and how changing majors could be done in time if she did it before the end of her first year. Mary made excuses and empty promises, but she had no intention of switching her major.

She made friends at Princeton, she wasn't particularly outgoing, but she was friendly and cordial. A lot of them were pretentious, out-of-touch idiots, but there were some candid individuals in the midst of the student body.

Mary had her apprehensions about the upcoming year. Her first year at Princeton had been challenging, and she had to get in the habit of studying the coursework more, but it was dreadfully tedious, moreover, reviewing the material didn't appear to change her final grade. She simply didn't understand some of the concepts, which deeply frustrated her.

When she made the stupid mistake of complaining about the difficulty of her classes to her father, he told her to stop slacking off and pay more attention during lectures. She has the capability to be the greatest, and the best, and her only issue is that she didn't push herself hard enough. After her father's scolding, she never brought up the matter of her academic life with him again.

Mary Jane's summer was pleasant enough, but Princeton was dismal and icy, she wasn't used to the colder climate of New Jersey and wore knit sweaters and baggy jeans for the greater part of the last few months. She dreamed of golden, sandy beaches with light, cool breezes, and tan lines with water droplets speckled on her bronzed body. A wish made in vain, she wouldn't return to the West Coast for the next two years at the very least, her priority was to graduate from Princeton University.

Mary was standing on the front porch, it was warm enough for her to ditch the sweater and jeans for more typical summer clothing. She wore a tight-fitting white crop top and light-wash blue shorts that stopped at her mid-thigh. She had straightened her hair earlier that day, but the arid humidity was causing her natural curls to return. She was sipping an ice-cold glass of Diet Coke, flipping through the crinkled, worn-out pages of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.

Her father was at work, at a meeting to address the economic budget for the city's infrastructure. She wouldn't have dared to wear jean cut-offs and a cropped shirt around him, he would reprimand her and bring up how important modesty was for a young woman.

She lifted the glass to her lips and drank a few mouthfuls, she was fascinated by the poetic prose of Nabokov, he couldn't be compared to any other author, and his literary works were some of the most substantial she had ever read. Mary constantly returned to her bookshelf, reaching for his works. Each time she read one of his novels again, she found something new— something she missed, something she hadn't noticed before.

Her deep concentration was interrupted by the sound of a car engine revving. She tore her gaze away from the book and glimpsed towards the road, there was a silver Volvo 880 of the first generation passing by. There usually weren't many cars on the road during this time of day, so the shining automobile caught her interest.

Mary stepped down the wooden staircase to the front garden, and the car slowed down. There was an older man driving the vehicle, mid-thirties, decently handsome, but she couldn't make out his facial features standing so far from his car. She walked closer to the vehicle, the grass blades brushed against her bare ankles, and a dry breeze passed by, her dark hair fell against her cheekbones.

The man grinned at her, a warm, kind smile. A small smile tugged at the corners of her rosy lips. She raised her pale hand and waved shyly at him— an innocuous interaction.

The car continued to go down the black tar road, eventually disappearing in the far distance. Mary Jane only went back to the front porch when she couldn't see the vehicle any longer. She walked back up the stairs, picked up her glass of coke, and opened the book, turning to a torn page, to the line she was on before that fateful encounter with the unknown driver. "She was my darling: difficult, morose - But still my darling."