“Killed himself,” I finished.
The newspapers blamed it on the Winthrop Scandal.
I had, too.
Still did.
Emery’s involvement, on the other hand, remained fuzzy. Mostly, I couldn’t pinpoint her motivations. She reminded me of time—out of reach, always changing, never conforming to my needs.
“Yeah.” Fika clutched the chair handles, the same exact spot Dick had after picking at his nose. “Yeah, he did. Shit, this is depressing.”
“And Emery is paying for his daughter to go to college?”
“Yeah, Demi’s a good kid. They both are. Don’t go after Emery, Nash.” His hesitation invaded the space between us. “She has no money.”
I could list Emery’s sins, but I locked my jaw, counted down from three, and said, “She has a massive trust fund.”
“She doesn’t touch it.” He leaned forward until the only thing that separated us was the ebony-stained desk. “I know that makes her an easier target, but don’t you dare touch her. You get away with a lot of shit when it comes to me, but I wouldn’t be okay with it if you hurt her. Not one bit.”
“She knew about the embezzlement while it was happening.”
“No way.”
“I heard Virginia say it.”
She already knows. Why do you think I sent her to that shrink to set her straight?
Word for word, I remembered it.
“Well, you heard wrong.” A sigh laced his words, along with a determination I recognized but not on him. “Poor girl can’t even afford a damn meal.”
My eyes snapped to his. I searched his face, didn't find what I wanted, and searched it again.
I didn’t hear wrong, Fika. She met with a fucking S.E.C. agent.
I left that argument out, because if she had, I definitely deserved it.
My brain kicked into overdrive, recalling all the fucked-up things I had done to her because I had thought she was complicit in the Winthrop Scandal.
Being a general dick.
Laughing in her face when she accidentally screwed me instead of Reed.
Stealing her wallet.
Making her buy me coffee with her twenty-dollar bill.
Forcing her to give me the change.
Ripping her photo of Reed in half.
Watching her shower.
Threatening her.
Getting her off when she was barely older than half my age.
Ripping her clothes.
Leaving her naked when we both wanted to fuck each other’s brains out.
Embarrassing her in front of her coworkers.
Giving her grunt work.
Depriving her of a meal.
Shit, the list went on, flashes of scenes I’d been able to justify at the time.
Fika’s revelation haunted me.
She can’t even afford a meal.
And I’d taken one from her.
The thing about revenge is, people feel entitled to it. Being wronged is an invitation to retaliate, but the cycle never stops. I had justified everything I did to her at the time with one sentence—Dad died. My morals didn’t exist, though I told myself I thrived on them.
I tried to fix myself by breaking her.
Fika made me promise to leave Emery alone before he left. I didn’t remember what I had muttered back, but it must have pacified him because he placed a palm on my shoulder, said something I didn’t hear, and left right after.
My new phone hit the wall as soon as the door shut behind him. It clattered to the floor, chunks of glass flying off, the screen looking eerily similar to the one Emery had crushed to pieces.
She can’t even afford a meal, and you took her money and publicly shamed her for eating a pathetic slice of turkey. She can break all your damn phones until you die, you miserable bastard.
I stepped on the glass, uncaring that the shards dug into my heels and drew blood. Kicking my broken phone to the side, I stripped off my suit, scattered it to the ground like littered trash, and stood under the shower head. It hammered scalding-hot water onto my scalp and shoulders.
My skin turned red beneath the blaze, but I didn’t let myself move. I ground the glass deeper into my skin. Blood drifted from my feet. The dark red faded into the water, diluted to pink, and swirled down the drain.
Two palms pressed against the wall, I studied the floor, placing my feet exactly where Emery had stood when I’d watched her finish her shower. My dick instantly hardened, and I was so fucked up for grabbing it.
Stroking it.
Picturing her.
For the first time in my life, I accepted the truth.
I am the villain in this story.
Freshman year of college, I realized I would forever spend my life chasing redemption. Finals week came to a conclusion, the winter frost biting my cheeks until they turned a bright scarlet. The paper clenched between my fingers bore a capital A in red marker. It had taken me all semester to write it, the grade a culmination of an entire semester of effort.
I should have been happy.
I should have been a lot of things.
Instead, I walked like a hollowed-out tree, arms swaying with life, but inside a gaping cavity. Dad would have thrown a party and shouted my accomplishments until I hid my face into his side and begged him to stop embarrassing me.
Virginia would have scoffed at our loud, uncouth behavior, but when cocktail hour rolled around, she’d brag about my grades to her friends, tittering when one of them complained about their child’s failures.
With the essay clamped in my palms, the weight of loneliness struck me until I ran to the nearest trashcan and dry heaved. Nothing came out. A semester with minimal food had turned my corpse to skin and bones.
Spit flew past my lips. I fell to the concrete and leaned against the sticky can, trying to get ahold of myself. Magic words didn’t work. They evaded me, my brain suddenly feeling like a dangerous place to be trapped in.
Ironic that I sought reality on my phone, pulling up Instagram as if it was my sole tether to the real world. No new pictures from Reed. I talked to no one else. Told myself I needed no one else.
Pictures of book spines kept me company, my heart almost seizing at the incoming message alert.
“Die. Just die.”
I remembered the words, often rolling them around my tongue, feeling how they formed on my lips with so little effort.
I had gotten death threats in the past, but something about this one felt different.
Two words.
Just and die.
The threat shouldn’t have given me pause, not after the long paragraphs and soliloquies I had received, creative fantasies of my death that, honestly, deserved to be featured in some Chris Mooney thriller novel.
Blaming Reed seemed like the perfect route whenever I scrolled through a series of messages that should have struck me with their brutality but didn’t. I had never been a fan of social media, but one night, Reed had posted a picture of his lips locked with Basil’s, and I had caved to masochistic needs.
Basil had always been the one to post pictures of herself with Reed, captioned with hashtags like #Forever, #Soulmates, #DatingTheFootballCaptain, #QB1, and #MineAlways stamped on each one.
But Reed? His feed consisted of the three Fs—food, family, and football, an endeavor to impress college scouts with his dedication. Posting this picture equaled some stamp of approval, a sign of commitment I couldn’t ignore no matter how much I wanted to.
I stalked them both for months, following Reed and a few logophile accounts to cover the fact that I had opened a social media account for the sole purpose of stalking my best friend. I posted quotes twice a month, the occasional t-shirt, and one time, a potato from the garden in the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s head.
The day after the Eastridge Daily published an article on the F.B.I.-S.E.C. raid, I had woken to death threats scattered across my posts. They ebbed and spiked with the news cycles, reappearing each time something about the case came up
.
When the site wrote about the lack of conclusive evidence, I laughed at the names people called my dad, Virginia, and me. Most of them didn’t even make sense, proof conspiracies about the case ran rampant or people just plain hated us.
Overprivileged red necks. (Virginia tossed a 14th century Ming dynasty vase against the butler’s pantry wall at that one.)
Succubi of the South. (Virginia dumped her fresh-squeezed kumquat juice into the pool and booked a four-hour-long, deep-tissue massage at an overnight spa.)
Stock Fraud Barbie. (Virginia legit flipped her shit, binge eating her way through a thousand grams of cheap carbs.)
By the time Hank Prescott had died and the threats grew to the worst they had ever been, I had long since abandoned checking my comments and messages. I still refused to delete my account or set it to private because it felt like admitting defeat.
Didn’t matter either way.
The threats didn’t get to me. Not until Hank died, and I had felt the real-world impact of Dad’s theft and the accusations finally held merit. Angus Bedford’s death came next, and that brought more nasty comments.
I accepted them all as my new normal, occasionally logging on to Insta and searching for pretty words to pass time. But this message took me by surprise. Not because I felt lonely but because her words felt lonelier.
Die. Just die.
The sender hadn’t bothered to put her feed on private or create a fake new profile like some of the others. It was so simple a threat on a rare moment the Winthrop family had left the news cycle, so it made me curious.
Demi Wilson.
18.
Dog lover.
Car lover.
People hater.
A kindred spirit.
I browsed her feed, learned her life, and found one picture I couldn’t forget.
She had her arm around Angus Bedford’s shoulders. They stood in front of a classic car with tools sprawled all over the floor. Rain plastered their hair to their foreheads, but it didn’t faze their goofy smiles.
The caption: I miss my dad something fierce on rainy days. #RIP
The next day, she apologized, told me she’d been drunk, and said she didn’t blame me for my dad’s mistakes. I messaged back a cheesy meme of two stick figure eggs hugging that read, “Apology Egg-ccepted.”
What I really wanted to say was—Forgiving others is a myth. The only prisoner freed when you forgive someone is you.
It didn’t matter if the Winthrop haters ever forgave me, because I would never forgive my family and the way I’d lived a life of privilege, oblivious to the sins that funded it.
I never talked to Demi again, but I checked on her like you would a wild animal in your backyard.
From afar.
Never speaking a word.
Just watching.
Waiting.
Wondering.
Months later, Demi posted her acceptance to Wilton University on her Insta feed. Two weeks later, she added to her Snap story when she received a full-ride scholarship from Wilton, then again when she got a C in Art History and it was rescinded.
I signed her change.org petition, which begged Wilton to change its mind. She had thirty-six signatures excluding my own, none of which did a thing. What she really needed was a wealthy father like mine, or at the very least, Angus Bedford, who had invested a decent chunk in Winthrop Textiles’s college fund before his death.
Each dollar put in would be matched by the company for use on college tuitions of employees and their families. When the company fell, so did the college fund.
My freshman year of college, I barely left my apartment, pigging out on packets of ramen I bought four for a buck at the dollar store down the block. My books landed on the iPhone Dad gifted me ages ago from my library scans. I paid my tuition and a small stipend with the crazy amounts of student loans I had taken out.
Virginia held my trust fund over my head, which meant I was broke, spending more money than I had each year, and taking out student loans to sustain the costs. Broke as I was, I couldn’t let Demi skip college.
I asked Dad’s old fixer to set up the anonymous scholarship fund and applied for a full-time job at the diner.
The double shifts gave me feet and back pain, but they didn’t kill me.
The inflexible work hours forced me to take classes I hated, but they didn’t kill me.
The extra responsibility racked me with anxiety, but it didn’t kill me.
The sleep deprivation made paying attention in class close to impossible, but it didn’t kill me.
The hunger pains bothered me, but they didn’t kill me.
At the end of the day, I didn’t regret paying for Demi.
It was the right thing to do.
I was a hollowed-out tree, long past death, and I had found a way to grow a leaf.
Nothing made me more agitated than talking about Sisyphus with Ben.
Not hunger.
Not poverty.
Not Virginia.
Not Dad.
Not even Nash Prescott.
Ben saw Sisyphus as having been punished, but I knew Sisyphus was smart.
Cunning.
A planner.
Here’s my take: Sisyphus created an empire. He was a human, yet he ruled the winds. He tricked gods and goddesses. Even Death feared him.
Sisyphus wanted his punishment; otherwise, he would have escaped it, too. Sisyphus chose not to, and each day, he got to reach heights no other mortal man could.
Through his punishment, he was the never-ending battle of the sea, the constant rise and fall of the tides, the cycle of the moon and the sun. His punishment immortalized him. Placed him in the company of gods and goddesses. Gave him the power of a god, too.
Ben didn’t see it that way, and no matter how much I wanted to shake him and demand he wake up, I couldn’t. I scrolled through our messages, resisting the urge to run out into the rain and let it drown my screams.
Benkinersophobia: What do you think about regret?
Durga: Regret is endless. That’s why it’s life’s longest punishment. There’s no way to fight it. You just learn to live with it.
Benkinersophobia: Like Sisyphus, destined to carry the boulder for eternity.
Durga: He could stop it if he wanted.
Benkinersophobia: It wouldn’t be a punishment if you can choose when it ends.
Durga: It’s not a punishment. It’s a test. Sisyphus has to prove he is worthy of the gods. By continuing to roll the boulder uphill, he is immortalized, a never-ending cycle, experiencing heights no other mortal has, in a place built by gods for gods. If he beats the test and levels the mountain by chipping a piece off each trip, he tricks Zeus once again. Either way, he has won.
Benkinersophobia: So, why would he choose to roll the boulder instead of leveling the mountain?
Durga: Sometimes, the struggle is important. Struggle changes people more than success.
I’d spent the past two days trying to explain this to Ben, but it was useless. He’d set his mind on condemning himself. I didn’t understand why, and I felt powerless to help him.
I rolled my bottom lip into my mouth, scraping my teeth against it just to feel the bite, wishing I could distract him from his demons. I hoped Ben considered me his escape as much as I considered him to be mine.
Durga: Tell me what you would do if we met in person.
Benkinersophobia: You’re changing the subject.
Durga: Am I that obvious?
Benkinersophobia: Nothing about you is obvious. But I read you well, Durga, and often.
I would take that any day. Two giant wings expanded in my belly, flapping their way to my chest. They weren’t butterflies. They were powerful tsunami waves, consuming me each time I spoke with Ben.
He’s a fantasy, Emery. You will wake up one day, and he’ll be gone. Keep your distance. Save your heart. Nothing good lasts.
Like always, my warnings didn’t deter me. I typed out a reply, hoping I was B
en’s fantasy, too—a warrior princess who fought his demons beside him.
Durga: I love you.
I’d said it before.
After he’d talked me down a ledge caused by a failed finals exam.
Or when I got evicted from my apartment sophomore year, and he offered to break the rules and help me in person.
And that time I nearly caved and answered Dad’s postcard, where he told me he loved me, missed me, and would always be here to balter with me.
Probably a dozen times after, too.
Each time felt different.
This time, the declaration came from comfort. I needed him to know someone cared about him, was there for him, and would always be there for him. Because at the end of the day, that’s all any of us really need. Someone who shares their sunshine no matter the weather.
Benkinersophobia: I don’t deserve it.
Durga: Just tell me what you would do if we ever met.
Benkinersophobia: I’d say, “Hi. I like your ass. Would you like to fuck?”
Durga: Romantic.
Benkinersophobia: I thought so.
Durga: You don’t know what I look like. You may not like my ass.
Benkinersophobia: I like you, therefore I like your ass.
I never stopped smiling when I talked to Ben. I hoped, wherever he was, I made him smile, too.
Durga: Have you heard of the Maasai?
Benkinersophobia: From Africa?
Durga: Yes. About four hundred years ago, a Maasai leader had a daughter named Naserian. She dated a village elder’s son, who eventually broke her heart. Naserian’s father banished him. When he left, he took his elder father, mother, sister, uncles, aunts, and cousins.
Devious Lies: A Cruel Crown Novel Page 26