The Truth About You & Me

by Amanda Grace

  “It’s not illegal,” I said, desperation leaking into every word. “I looked it up. Sixteen is the age of consent in Washingt—”

  “Do you think I fucking care?” you said.

  You never cussed.

  “I slept with a fucking sixteen-year-old !”

  The words rang out around us, falling like anvils, and my throat was so dry I couldn’t speak for long moments.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally said, my voice so sad and empty.

  “Don’t.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Don’t.” The words were spoken with such absolute vehemence it broke me all over again, spun my world and tore it apart. Because in that instant, I knew. Knew you couldn’t forgive me, knew I’d done something so horrible you couldn’t even find the words.

  I’d lost you, just like I’d feared.

  I swallowed and nodded, making no effort now to stop the tears. Your eyes swept over me for a long, silent moment and I think you must have been asking yourself, How could I not have noticed she looked so young? How could I have not ASKED her?

  Maybe that’s not what you were thinking at all. Maybe you were trying to keep yourself from throttling me. Maybe you felt as broken as I did. Maybe you were watching our future—that thing we’d talked about so often—slip through your fingers over the issue of two measly years.

  Why did those two years have to matter so much? In the eyes of the law they didn’t matter at all, not once you weren’t my teacher anymore. But I knew they mattered to you, mattered to everyone around us.

  Was I really going to change that much in two years, become a different person, someone worthy of being loved by you?

  You crossed the living room and grabbed your bag, then shoved your clothes in and zipped it shut. You glanced at me once more, and your look said it all. I scurried over to my own bag, ignoring the pain in my chest, the dark gaping nothingness, and picked up my stuff, yanking my jeans on. I wasn’t even wearing a bra or T-shirt underneath the hoodie, and it suddenly didn’t feel so soft against my bare skin.

  I followed you into the snow—the sparkling white that had been so beautiful the night before now looked deathly, cold and empty.

  I slid into the passenger seat and you fired up the truck and the silence in the cab was so heavy I felt like I was choking on it. You hit the gas so hard the truck almost fishtailed in the snow and gravel. You barely saved it, and then we were on the pavement, hitting the highway.

  It was early, around six, and the few cars on the road were going the opposite way, toward Crystal Mountain, with snowboards and skis strapped to the roof. That morning, whenever there were no other cars in sight, it was almost like we were the only two people left on earth. I kept wishing that was how it really was, so that those two years wouldn’t matter, so we could just be what we wanted to be without any repercussions.

  I pressed my lips together to try to keep the bottom one from trembling, but it was impossible to breathe through my nose so I had to stop.

  “Why?” you asked again. You didn’t look at me, just stared straight out through the windshield, your face all hard lines and shadows in the early morning light. “Why would you do this to me?”

  How could I make you understand? How could you possibly see why I’d done it when all you could see was the number sixteen?

  “I wanted to be with you,” I finally said.

  “In what world could we be together? You’re fucking sixteen!” You slammed your fist into the wheel, making the horn chirp as your shoulders heaved. You never cussed, and you were already up to three or four that day. “You’re a fucking kid!”

  The anger turned abruptly into something else—pity and disgust and fear, and you slumped, barely keeping your eyes on the road. “Oh God, you’re just a kid.”

  And I knew in that moment you were thinking of what we’d done last night. And the sound of the repulsion in your voice broke me in a way nothing else had.

  “Please don’t,” I whispered, bringing my feet up onto the seat and resting my forehead against my knees.

  “Don’t what?” you snapped.

  “Don’t make it sound like what we did is so … revolting.”

  “It is! Don’t you understand that? What we did … that never would have happened if I’d known!”

  You were back to anger again, which was easier to handle.

  I looked up at you, the tears streaming down my cheeks unhindered, my throat raw and my eyes burning as everything shattered all around me and I had no one to blame but myself. “But I’m in love with you.”

  You laughed, an ugly bark of laughter that was like stomping on my already broken heart. “You don’t even know what love is.”

  It was such an ugly thing to say. I knew what I felt, what I still feel as I write this, days after we left the cabin. I was in love with you, and I’m still in love with you. Maybe you don’t think I’m old enough to feel true love, but I can promise you I am. Maybe when you’re done reading this, you’ll finally understand.

  “I had to lie,” I said again.

  “No,” you say, a single word. The only word that mattered. There was a finality to it.

  A decision.

  I turned away and watched all those soaring fir trees stream by the window in a big haze of green and brown, blurring until they didn’t exist anymore.

  We were never going to have a happily ever after.

  You still didn’t know where I lived, and I had to give you directions through town. I bet you were kicking yourself then, realizing you should have asked, realizing you should have paid more attention to the clues. Then again, it was a community college, so most of the freshman still did live with their parents.

  Besides, it wasn’t like I could have introduced you. You were my professor, and so eager to hide our relationship.

  And that’s how I was able to lie for so long. Because we’d agreed to the secret … even if you hadn’t really known what you were agreeing to.

  “The yellow one,” I said, pointing to an old colonial on the right-hand side of the road. You slowed, then stopped at the curb. You didn’t look at me, at the house, at anything but the road, and yet I doubt you even saw the road either. You were staring straight ahead, your eyes sort of glazed, your grip on the steering wheel unwavering, like it was the only thing holding you together.

  I glanced up at the house, and it took only a half a second for suspicion to rise through my limbs. I blinked and scanned the windows.

  Lights.

  “Benn—” My voice cut off and I blinked again, twisting around to glance behind your truck.

  Across the street sat a dark blue Dodge Charger, the windows tinted.

  Fear snaked through me, white hot as I glanced back at the house again.

  Too many lights. It was half past six, and my parents never got up before eight on a Saturday. It was the one day my mom let herself be human instead of a robot.

  I yanked my backpack off the floor.

  “You have to go,” I said, my voice trembling. “Now.” I shoved the door open so fast I tumbled out, narrowly saving myself from falling face-first onto the ground. “I’ll tell them nothing happened. That we talked for hours and that’s it. Got it? Nothing happened,” I said. The desperation in my voice must have registered, because you looked at me with an entirely different expression: confusion.

  “Go,” I said, my voice rising, giving away my panic.

  Behind me, the front door of my house squeaked, followed by the slapping sound of the screen door as it snapped shut.

  I closed my eyes and swallowed as dread hollowed me out, made me feel remorse unlike anything I’d ever felt.

  Will ever feel.

  I turned around to see my parents standing side by side on the front porch, my mom clutching a crumpled tissue, looking shockingly disheveled, her once-perfect bun
loose and hanging down around her face as she held her housecoat tightly around her.

  I stood in front of the door to your truck as if to block you from view, as if there was a way to get you out of this unscathed.

  But then someone stepped out from behind them, and it was all over.

  It was a cop.

  Everything else happened in alternating slow-motion and high-speed. My parents rushing across the lawn in an instant, the subsequent too-tight hug suffocating me for hours. The sound of your truck’s engine cutting off in a split-second, but the thudding noise of the cop’s shoes across the lawn echoing on forever.

  My mom’s arm was draped around me as she led me toward the house—but I wrenched away, turned back to see you.

  You didn’t do the same. The officer walked you over to his car and you leaned against the trunk, your shoulders hunched, your face pale. My mom just kept pulling me toward the house, murmuring something about statements, but I couldn’t seem to process it all.

  It took a few hours of talking to the police officer, my parents, and then the cop again before I figured out how it had all gone down, what they’d been doing while we were together, and that it was all my fault.

  All my fault.

  See, Bennett, I’d been so focused, so excited about our getaway, I’d left something important at home: my cell phone.

  Everything unraveled over a stupid cell phone.

  My mom had seen it on my bed when she went to put away my laundry that night. She thought I’d want it—she knew how attached I was to that thing—and so she decided she’d earn mother of the freakin’ year if she brought it to me at Katie’s house. I’d given her Katie’s address weeks prior, when I’d convinced her to drop off a notebook that was necessary for our study session.

  She’d had to go pick up some take-out or something, anyway. So she dropped by Katie’s house.

  And I wasn’t there.

  But then, you know that, because I was with you. Katie tried to cover for me, but she actually made it worse. She said I was supposed to come over that night but hadn’t arrived yet. Mom told her I’d left three hours ago, that I should have arrived. And so she freaked out, imagining me abducted or dead in a ditch or in a car accident off a ravine or something.

  It never occurred to her that I’d simply lied, that it was a little cover-up. Because to her I was still that Very Perfect Daughter, with the perfect grades and the perfect clothes and the perfect “yes please” and “thank you.”

  She went home and she figured out my cell phone password, since I’d been dumb enough to leave it on the factory default: 1, 2, 3, 4. And when the screen came to life, it was all over.

  That picture I’d taken of you grading papers, your small kitchen behind you … it was my homescreen.

  The second she saw that, she called the cops, claiming an older man must have been romancing me. And in that instant, they labeled you. As something ugly, something so far from who you really are.

  With those words, it became serious, and the cops put everything they had into finding me. See, Mom gave them permission to search my room, and they turned it upside down looking for more clues. They found that silly note you wrote me one day when I’d been particularly quiet during Bio, the one you’d signed Bennett and slipped to me as I left class.

  And they found my schoolwork, and your name stood out. That name no one else has, that name I thought was so pretty, so perfect for you.

  I was right about sixteen being the age of consent. They told my mom several times that I was old enough to make my own choices, that it wasn’t illegal if I was seeing an older man.

  But when they discovered you were my professor, everything changed.

  As it turns out, it doesn’t matter if you’d stopped being my teacher forty-eight hours before we were truly together. Because they say you used your influence to manipulate me, put me in a compromised position.

  While we were still gone, they sent people to your house, Bennett. As I write this, I don’t know if you’ve been back there yet, but if it looks like my room did, I’m sorry.

  And so as dawn approached, they kept a unit at my house in case we came back. And when you dropped me off we walked right into their trap, their ugly accusations. My mom led me into the house even though I was unraveling; she closed the drapes and wouldn’t tell me what they were going to do to you. She refused to give me any answers because all she wanted to do was pose the questions.

  Oddly, my mom burst into tears that day, something I couldn’t remember ever seeing before. She hugged me, because all the time we’d been gone, she’d been convinced that some ugly predator had lured me away. They didn’t know it was me fishing, me reeling you in, me lying.

  My dad stalked back and forth in our kitchen like a tiger in a too-small cage, his fists clenching and unclenching, his neck and cheeks too red.

  I told them we didn’t have sex, Bennett. I told them you didn’t know I was sixteen and we’d just been hanging out. You can see that in the way I wrote my first letter, by the way I left it hanging like nothing had happened.

  See, that letter was going to be my way of explaining everything, to you and to them all at once, redeeming you, making them believe nothing occurred between us, that it was all innocent. But I guess it didn’t end up being that in the end. That’s why I can be honest now.

  They used ugly words, like “violated” and “taken advantage of” and “statutory.” Mom tried to push me to go to the hospital with the cops, to get tested or something, and it was Dad who sided with me. I think he so desperately wanted me to be telling the truth that he latched onto the idea that it hadn’t happened at all.

  I don’t know if they could have forced me to go. Maybe somehow. Maybe it’s a law or something. But after a few hours of asking me to, over and over and over, they acquiesced and let me make the decision.

  I hope you know what my decision was.

  Two days later, I lay on my bed, in the corner, a place I’d hardly left since you’d dropped me off.

  “So you don’t actually have it all together,” came a voice near my bedroom door. “I was kinda thinking you were some kind of cyborg.”

  I lifted my head to meet my brother’s gaze as he stepped into my room and flopped down on the pink bean-bag chair in the corner, stretching his lean legs out in front of him. Sometime since he’d come back home he’d started dressing like he used to, in baggy cargo pants and T-shirts, less Ivy League and more … mallrat.

  “I wish. If I was a robot I wouldn’t feel anything right now,” I said, staring up at the ceiling. I was desperate to feel nothing. Nothing would be so much better than this tortured mixture of guilt and heartbreak, a sort of weight that pressed me into the mattress so that it seemed like too much work to move an inch. I could spend all of eternity just staring at the popcorn ceiling. Truth be told, I kind of missed the stars and posters that used to stare back at me, those things I’d ripped down in my cleaning frenzy weeks ago.

  “Plus, if cyborgs don’t have feelings, they wouldn’t have done the shit I did in the first place,” I added.

  “And you’re cussing. Who are you and what did you do with my sister?”

  “She was bored, so I got rid of her.” Bored. What a stupid reason to do what I did.

  It wasn’t just boredom, anyway. It was so much more than that. It was loneliness and fear and despair. But how could I explain all of that to my brother, the guy who’d followed a plan like he was a laser-guided missile? Even if he’d failed, he knew what he wanted.

  “Boring,” he said.

  “Sh—I’m boring?” I asked, twisting a strand of hair around my finger. The highlights I’d done to impress you were fading by then. A literal symbol of our relationship deteriorating.

  God I missed you.

  “Past tense, obviously. I think sleeping with your professor makes you something other than b
oring.” He cleared his throat. “It’s really disgusting, actually.”

  I picked up a throw pillow and tossed it at him, but I didn’t bother seeing if it hit its mark because my eyes were still trained on the ceiling. He grunted, so I took it as a positive hit.

  “I mean, dude, the guy is like six years older than me. What were you thinking?”

  Judgment. No one would understand why I’d fallen for you because they all saw your age. Funny, how I’d focused so much on my age and they were all focused on yours.

  “I believe the consensus is that I wasn’t thinking,” I said. “I’ve been told that quite clearly.”

  “Somehow I doubt that’s your own assessment. Come on, tell me. What’s going on with you?”

  I sat up, surprised that he was being so … caring. So calm, patient. My parents, the cops … they’d all clearly formed their opinions of you, of us, before we’d even arrived back at my house. No one needed … no one wanted to ask me why we’d done what we did.

  Why I did what I did.

  Hell, they didn’t even ask me what I did, not in a way that begged a real answer. They accused, they stated, they demanded. They’d filled in all the necessary blanks on their own, vilified you as they saw fit.

  And for two days, all I’d done was sit in my room and alternate between staring at this same ugly spot on the ceiling, twisted up in guilt, and writing to you, page after page, until my hand hurt so badly I had to stop. And still our story wasn’t done yet.

  “I don’t know,” I finally answered, sitting up just enough that I could lean back against the wall. Just above me, a corkboard hung, mostly empty after my cleaning binge. “It just … happened. I let him think I was eighteen.”

  “That’s still really young,” my brother pointed out, but not in an accusatory way. He was the good cop to my parents’ bad cop, acting as if he wouldn’t judge me for things. Acting as if we could be friends like we once were. I wasn’t sure if it was the truth or an act. If he genuinely cared, or if Mom had sent him up here.