An Education in Ruin

by Alexis Bass

  “Jasper.” I turn on my side so I can see him. Talking to him like this makes the knot of nerves in my stomach dissipate. “That’s the opposite of boring. That’s fascinating.”

  “You think so?” Until he turns on his side, too, and we’re face-to-face and the knot dispels and turns into a fluttery sensation.

  “What was the outcome of the study?”

  “It was inconclusive,” he says. He puts his hand over the pillow, holding it down so it doesn’t impede his view of me.

  “I wouldn’t lie in either of those situations,” I say.

  “I would’ve lied in both of them.”

  “I hate secrets,” I say, adjusting so I’m lying on my back. I try to take a deep breath. “Even something that seems small. Why hide it, or cover it, or lie about it, you know?” I can feel the ground coming out from under me now—just like on the day I learned the truth. I hate how easily it sneaks up on me, this awful feeling; how the memory can flood me, suffocating me, without any warning, when I’ve been doing such a good job of pressing it away.

  I see him turn toward me out of the corner of my eyes. “Hey—are you okay?” he says.

  “Yeah, fine.” My voice betrays me; it comes out high yet raspy.

  “Collins?”

  “I’m fine.” I pinch my eyes closed and try to steady myself. It takes every bit of my concentration to breathe.

  “I read about this other study that examined situations where one person was upset and they didn’t want anyone to know why. All subjects conclusively ended up admitting the reason they were unhappy because they knew it would ultimately make them feel better.”

  I open my eyes and turn to look at him. I feel a few tears slip down my cheeks.

  “Subjects in Group A at first resorted to yelling and storming out of the room. Subjects in Group B’s initial reaction was to shut down entirely. But subjects in Group C admitted to their feelings immediately. Group C’s life expectancy was the greatest out of the three groups.”

  “Really?” I say.

  He hesitates. “No.” The slightest smile forms on his lips. At first I’m very confused. Then, I get it.

  “You made up a psychological experiment?” I feel myself smiling, too, the sudden urge to laugh taking over.

  “Did it work?” He shrugs. “Do you feel better?”

  His hand brushes up against mine. I squeeze his fingers. Fabricating a research study because he thought it might cheer me up might be as romantic as Jasper gets. He noticed I was losing it and took it upon himself to try to straighten me out.

  “You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong,” he says. “But I don’t like it when you do that—you get this look on your face, like that day in the gym, like you’re—I don’t know, like you’re unraveling or something.”

  I study him for a moment, his concerned expression, his proximity. My chest still feels tight, but I manage to take a breath deep enough that air swells in my lungs.

  “I don’t like it that you can’t sleep,” I say.

  “I slept last night,” he says. He shifts slightly and puts his other hand over mine. I think it’s weird at first, but then he says, “You’re shaking,” and I realize he’s using both his hands to try to keep mine steady. “What’s wrong?” he whispers.

  I think about telling him, letting the words go. Getting them out and letting him tell me how maddening it all is—letting him see. But then would I think of it every time I looked at him? Or would I find solace in him, the way I do now, and instead of remembering the secret and forgetting how to breathe, I’d think of his kindness, his hands covering mine?

  Weaving my fingers through his, I turn to the side, toward him. He leans in my direction at the exact same moment. This is it, I think. This is when he’ll kiss me. It’s the perfect time for him to kiss me. I close my eyes. They fly open again when I feel him move, the heat of him next to me suddenly gone.

  He’s sitting up. He looks out the window instead of at me. I sit up also, hot with embarrassment, my heart racing with confusion.

  He clears his throat. “We shouldn’t,” he says.

  We shouldn’t. All the moments that got us here are compounding in my mind—the almost-touches, the hidden smiles, the easy conversation, the way he looked at me after the snowball fight today. How he was holding my hand tonight, how I’d helped him finally relax enough to sleep last night. I was trying to make him love me, but I was helping him, too—wasn’t I? The way he’d been helping me? I’d hoped I was; I’d wanted to.

  “Why—why not?” I say. Maybe he can sense it, that I come with strings attached. And after whatever he’s been through, I know he deserves someone who doesn’t have the baggage that I come with or all that I’m going to inflict on him. Maybe since he’s already been ruined once, getting involved with the wrong girl, he doesn’t want to risk it again. But the thing I was counting on was Mrs. Mahoney sparing his heart—promising to leave my dad alone, and I’d carry on with Jasper for as long as we wanted, until Dartmouth would inevitably pull us apart. It’d be an easy split—I promise myself that now, watching as he glances at me, then turns his attention nervously to the sleeve of his bathrobe, that whatever happens, I’ll make it easy on him. One of the lingering, leftover tears cascades down my cheek. I try to wipe it away before he sees.

  He shakes his head but doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m nothing like her,” I say. I want him to know; I don’t want him to be afraid of this, whatever is between us. “Being with me would be nothing like being with her.”

  “I know that,” he says quietly.

  “Then why—” But he’s shaking his head again.

  “All right,” I say. I get up and take off the robe. “I guess I’ll just see you tomorrow. Good luck sleeping.”

  “Collins, wait—”

  And I do wait. I turn around, and he’s standing there like he’s helpless, his palms out like he’s ready to explain. But he still says nothing.

  So I leave, and this time he doesn’t try to stop me. My heart is hammering hard in my chest when I get back to my suite, and I can’t fall asleep, no matter what I do. I keep thinking about it. How suddenly he moved away from me on the bed. If he doesn’t love me, he doesn’t love me. It’s so embarrassing—why did I ever think he could? I’m a Rutherford near failure who goes from laughing to unraveling in minutes. He fell asleep next to me at the pool, and I took that as a sign we were getting closer. But it was probably his weariness catching up with him, the tranquil environment, the coziness of the robe. It’s certainly not proof that he’s falling for me.

  Rosie told me the secret so that I would know I could do this. But she was wrong. I’m not like her, not in the ways that she thinks I am, not in the ways that I want to be.

  I understand that things can change in an instant, and that’s both hopeful and discouraging. They can shift outwardly—like forcing your aunt and mother on an expedition out of the country while moving 2,200 miles away to attend an institute with a study schedule and plan to save your dad that crowds your thoughts, makes you forget. And you hope that will be enough. But change can also make things corrode inwardly, and you find yourself up all night because of one instant, one mention of secrets and lies, and you’re brought back to the moment you tried to forget because of a boy you’re supposed to be able to conquer—but here you are, three in the morning and you can’t stop shaking and pacing, hyperventilating into your pillow so your father won’t hear, trying to pull apart and bury the way it made you feel. The way it still makes you feel.

  Thirty-five

  It was a few days before I left for Rutherford when Rosie let the secret out. I’ve debated in my head a million times if she’d planned it all along or if it was an impulse decision—she was either suddenly desperate for me to know or she wanted to punish Mimi and knew this was the deepest she could cut.

  “I want to show you something,” she said to me out on the back patio. The weather was still hot and sticky. We were due for rain. I was d
reaming of the ocean breeze that was promised to dance across the Rutherford campus.

  Rosie sat down next to me on the bench swing. She was holding a beat-up copy of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

  “This was a gift. It’s a first edition.”

  “Wow.”

  “Do you know who gave it to me?”

  I shook my head, readying myself for anything. With Rosie, it could’ve been anyone. A relative of T. S. Eliot. Some Parisian politician like the one she’d traveled to Croatia with. Maybe a renowned Harvard professor who had fallen in love with her when she’d spent that summer living in Boston.

  “Your father.” She cracked open the book and pulled out two photos that were stashed in between the pages. They were Polaroids. She handed me the first one. It took a moment for me to really understand what I was seeing. In the photo, my father and Rosie were squished together on a love seat, their feet up on an ottoman. They were much younger. They were relaxed and happy, wearing big smiles, and they were looking at each other. The first thing I noticed was the intimacy of the photo, their proximity and how comfortable they seemed. Whenever I’d seen them together, they were friendly, but in this photo, there was a tenderness between them. The second thing I noticed was the protruding stomach under Rosie’s shirt. And even when I registered it, I contemplated if it really was what I thought it might be. A pregnant belly.

  She handed me the second photo. It made me drop the first one. Rosie was with my father again, this time in a hospital bed. Rosie’s hair was damp, and she was dressed in a hospital gown. She was holding a tiny, crying baby. My father was in scrubs, one arm around her, one arm under the baby. They were both looking down at the baby, their mouths slightly open in awe.

  Rosie grabbed my hand. I looked up at her, but I couldn’t fathom that she was there or what she was saying. I only saw the photos flashing over and over again in my mind.

  “Collins? Collins?” She tightened her grip around my hand. “Do you understand?”

  I couldn’t speak as the possibility mounted itself within me as a reality, the lie still swirling in my head.

  “I’m your mother,” she said. She smiled. There were no tears in her eyes. Her voice was strong, assured. The same tone as when she’d asked me if I knew who’d given her the book. “Do you understand? You and me, we’re the same.”

  Mimi came out and realized quickly that something was wrong. She saw my unresponsive face; then she noticed the photos, one resting on my lap, the other scattered to the ground.

  “Collins? Collins—it’s not—it’s okay—I’m so sorry—” She was panicking, too, and I still hadn’t found my voice, though I could feel myself shaking, could feel tears encroaching.

  That’s when the fight started. I’d never seen Mimi crying so hard, screaming so loudly. I’d never seen Rosie so defensive, her voice on fire. If we’d had neighbors, surely the police would’ve been called.

  “We were supposed to tell her together, all of us, when the time was right,” Mimi said.

  “The time was right tonight; it was my secret to tell,” Rosie countered before she walked away.

  Mimi following Rosie into the kitchen, saying, “Make a mess, then leave, that’s what you’re good at.”

  “My messes are the best thing to ever happen to you, Michelle!”

  “You’re right—Collins is the best thing to ever happen to me, and you ruined it because you put this lie between us—”

  “No one forced you to lie to her!”

  “What were we supposed to do? You disappeared for seven years! She was born, and the next week you were gone! We didn’t hear from you for seven years while you were living large, traveling the world! Jake was scared shitless and didn’t know what to do. I was her mother because there was no one else. I loved her the way you didn’t know how to.”

  “I wasn’t only talking about Collins!” Rosie shouted back. “I was talking about Jake—about the money. This house, your whole life! A rich man and a wonderful daughter and new house where you could do whatever you felt like doing, spend the day however you pleased, raise goats to entertain yourself.”

  “Our life is so much more than that!” Mimi cried. “And maybe it would’ve been different if you’d have stuck around to see it—to be part of it.”

  “He enabled you—that’s the truth, and you loved it. You’ve always been a coward. More than happy to stay in your sheltered life and never go outside of your comfort zone. Never change or grow or experience new things, or take risks with your heart.”

  “Loving you was risky enough for a lifetime.”

  “You liked being a mother; you were grateful that I made you one. You never would’ve allowed yourself to get close enough to anyone to have a real relationship where you’d have a baby of your own. And you liked playing house with Jake—don’t tell me that you didn’t. You knew you weren’t bold enough to ever find someone like him—someone that interesting and kind and wealthy. I gave you your fantasy life—and hey, look, Collins had a great life, too—so don’t act like in this scenario I ever did anything but make you happy, giving you exactly what you wanted.”

  Mimi shrieked. The first plate went soaring through the air. “Don’t you dare stand there and tell me you were thinking of anyone except yourself when you left us!” Another plate went flying, and at the third plate, Rosie left the room.

  Mimi stood shaking in the kitchen. Crying harder than I’d ever seen anyone cry.

  I was frozen on the patio, my eyes wide with disbelief, my hands shaking.

  When she noticed me, she tried to steady her breathing. She wiped her face with her sleeve. She stepped carefully around the broken pieces of glass and walked through the open door. She knelt in front of me, grabbing my hands.

  “Jake and I didn’t want you find out like this,” she said. “I’m so sorry this is how you had to learn about it. I’m so sorry we lied to you—but we were scared. We tried to do what’s best for you; we never wanted you to feel abandoned. It might’ve been the wrong thing to do—”

  “It was the wrong thing to do,” Rosie interrupted, coming from around the side of the house, stepping into the glow of the patio lights.

  “The wrong thing to do, Rose, was spring this on Collins now, without talking to me or Jake, right before she’s about to leave for Ruther—”

  “Stop it!” I shouted. Right then, I felt a flood of madness from deep inside of me. I didn’t care if Mimi was only trying to do right by me, that she never wanted me to feel deserted. I felt tricked. Like I should’ve figured it out somehow. I’d known my whole life that I looked like Rosie, but Rosie and Mimi looked alike, too. I hated that they both knew this truth about me and talked about it behind my back, so many discussions that didn’t include me that were about me.

  “I’m so glad I’m about to leave!” I screamed. “How am I supposed to trust either of you ever again? I hate what you’ve done, hate everything about being here and hate that of all the people who could’ve been my mother or acted as her stand-in, I’m stuck with the two of you!”

  I said things to them that would’ve ruined my father, not caring if it destroyed them. Because in that moment, I only wanted my father. Maybe that wasn’t fair to them. But I wanted to shut them out and pull him closer, and that’s exactly what I did. One of them had left me and one of them had used me, and all he’d done was be my dad, the best he could, which was pretty damn great. They’d lied to me about who they were to me, but he didn’t lie about who he was. I needed him. And I couldn’t bear to lose him. Not to this secret and certainly not to Marylyn Mahoney.

  Thirty-six

  When I meet Jasper, Theo, and Stewart in the sky lounge to take the tram to the mountain the next morning, Anastasia is there. She envelops me in a hug.

  “You look terrible,” she says.

  “It’s nice to see you, too, Anastasia.” I tug my beanie down farther. I don’t want them to know that after I left Jasper’s room, I barely slept. I want them to think everything i
s fine—wonderful, even. Normal, at least.

  Anastasia is mortified that none of us are great skiers. She’s been skiing since she could walk and can’t fathom how slow and awkward the four of us are. For the last run of the day, Anastasia convinces us to do one of the more reclusive trails that cuts through the forest, insisting she can coach us through it and that it’s not as steep as the other advanced runs. There’s also a map we’ve pulled up on our phones, and there are tracks in the snow from skiers who’ve been there before for us to follow.

  I like this route the best because it’s gorgeous. It’s isolating, but in a very good way. No sounds except the swishing of our skis against the powder and our own laughter.

  “Let’s split up,” Anastasia declares when we come to a fork in our path and have two trails to follow, one to the right and one to the left. According to the map, they both let out in an open valley that curves like a bowl before it lets us off at the base of the mountain.

  “Shall we race?” Stewart asks. He smiles at Anastasia. “You don’t count since you’d wipe the floor with us.”

  She looks down at her feet. Her crush on him is still in full effect, I’ve noticed.

  “She’s such a show-off,” Theo says, pushing her playfully. It backfires, and instead of sending her sliding forward, he sails backward and has to fall to stop himself.

  “Let’s race,” I say. To prove to them I’m up for anything even if I seem somewhat listless today.

  “I’ll take Stewart,” Theo says.

  “Sehr gut. Fine by me,” Stewart boasts with confidence because really Theo is the fastest out of the four of us, even if he also falls the most.

  “On your mark!” Anastasia yells. Theo and Stewart quickly scoot over to their side of the trail. “Get set! Go!” They take off with Anastasia trailing behind them barking orders.

  Jasper and I don’t move. He grinds the end of his pole into a patch of icy snow. He watches as it chips away at the crystals.