by Allen, Jacob
“Nothing is going on.”
“Adam, please,” she said. “I’m not the greatest mother, but I know when my sons are dealing with something unusual. Can you please tell me?”
No.
And what? Continue the cycle of being closed off and pissing everyone off? That sure worked with Emily, didn’t it? Don’t say a word, stay silent and isolated, and then say something snarky to cause her to hate you forever?
“I’m a fucking moron,” I said.
I didn’t even care that she wouldn’t approve of the language. If Mom wanted to know what was going on, she was going to get the unvarnished truth, for better or for worse—and let’s be honest, mostly for worse.
“What happened?” she said. “You’re a smart boy. I know it’s nothing to do with school.”
God. OK, fine. Fuck it, whatever.
“I was an asshole to Emily,” I said. “I told her I just wanted her for sex, but that was just me acting out. She wanted to know why I wouldn’t spend the night with her, and I said I wasn’t ready, that I was…”
I sighed. This wasn’t getting any easier, this level of honesty.
“That I was scared like a little bitch. She asked why, I snapped at her. Now she’s probably never going to talk to me again.”
I prepared myself for my mother to give me a lecture about saving myself for marriage or not using such foul language. I prepared for an old-lady talking-to that would just have me rolling my eyes.
But to my stunned surprise, my mother just simply sat on the edge of the bed and patted my shin.
“Unfortunately, Adam, you and the rest of the boys in this family share the same tendency of wanting to take on the world by yourself,” she said. “You all refuse to let anyone in, thinking ‘I got this.’ When, in reality, you don’t.”
Well, that was nice. It was nice to know that I had the same shitty qualities as my father and brother.
“You have to be a better man than your father and stepfather, Adam.”
That got my attention. I stared at her and sat up.
“What do you—”
“I’ve always known that they were cheaters,” Mom said. “That never surprised me. That doesn’t mean you have to follow in their footsteps. You can be a better man. You can be honest. You can be sincere. You can be real.”
I bit my lip. Why… why would she let them do that?
“If they were such assholes, why did you stay with them?”
“Your father, it was simple. He was your father. He didn’t start cheating until, well, our love life suffered from having two kids in the house. In some ways, I wasn’t even mad. He became less stressed and more relaxed. I wished he hadn’t hidden it from me, but I understood his concern.”
That made zero sense to me, but what the fuck did I know, I didn’t have any kids.
“As for your stepfather… I don’t know, Adam. He charmed me and swept me off my feet. But he’s got wandering eyes. And at this point, what am I going to do, divorce him right before you two go to college?”
“Mom…”
“I know these are terrible excuses, Adam. Don’t be like me. Don’t be like your father and stepdad. Be better. If you did something stupid with Emily, apologize to her. Do whatever you need to in order to make up for it.”
I grimaced. Easy to say, really fucking hard, almost impossible, to do.
“While we’re on this topic of admitting faults,” I said, something lurching to mind I could no longer ignore. “You remember when Dad died?”
“Every day,” she said softly.
I didn’t want to make her feel bad. But too late, we were already into heavy topics. I needed to have my questions answered, goddamnit.
“Why did you keep your distance from Ryan and I so much?” I said. “You saw Dad dying. You heard me screaming. And you did nothing. I feel like half the reason I don’t get close to anyone is because of what happened there. Because I know if I get close to someone like Emily, she’ll fucking shatter my heart.”
“Can you watch your language, please?”
OK, if we got this far and she hadn’t said a word up to this point, then you can forgive her. I nodded and apologized.
“I was scared, Adam, and I didn’t know how to handle it,” she said. “The curse of the family is not so much philandering or cheating. It’s avoiding hard subjects. If we don’t know how to handle something—whether that’s the death of a loved one, an argument with a loved one, or a fight—not only do we not confront it, we deal with it in really unhealthy ways.”
She smiled wearily and looked at me. Mom was always young, but she had never looked so old as she did in that moment, her eyes exhausted from two asshole boys and two cheating and wandering husbands. It must have been a terribly hard adulthood, one that I needed to play my part in helping to make a little easier.
“We all, we all need to stop doing that,” she said. “We need to embrace and accept that we make mistakes. We need to apologize when we make them. And we need to do everything we can to improve the situations. We may not be forgiven, but we need to make the effort anyways. Do you understand?”
I knew what I needed to do. I’d known what I needed to do even before my mother started speaking to me, but hearing her say it erased all the excuses and the barriers. Did I really want to wind up like my father and stepfather? Or, hell, like my mother, unable to confront or address hard issues?
Absolutely fucking not.
And I did know what I wanted. I could have spent several words on it, but it boiled down to simply two.
Emily Zane.
“I do,” I said. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “I’m still learning myself. Thank me when you show that you’ve learned and put into action what I said.”
You won’t have to wait long.
In fact, you won’t have to wait until Monday. I have an idea.
19
Emily
Everything sucked.
And I meant that quite literally.
Ever since Adam had stomped on my heart, shattered it, and swept it under the rug, nothing had gone right. Soccer practice sucked terribly on Saturday. I dropped a package of new clothes at my volunteer gig on Saturday evening that forced us to get rid of the shirts. I got the fewest tips I could ever recall on a Sunday.
The worst, though, might have been having to face my parents when they came back Sunday. Their only child, their little girl wasn’t so innocent anymore. She wasn’t so sweet and nice anymore. Someone had stripped away not only her virginity, but also her dignity. They didn’t understand why I was so cold and distant, but if I told them the truth, I wasn’t sure it wasn’t going to make things worse.
And now, at the last full practice before our first playoff game on Wednesday, I was doing even worse than I had on Saturday.
Could you blame me? My head and heart had been fucked with too hard over the weekend. I couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t see the value in concentrating, not when I’d lost everything I ever valued internally on Friday night. All because I just couldn’t hold off on sleeping—no, fucking—Adam for a few more dates. I’ll definitely never actually sleep with him now.
You won, Adam. Congratu-fucking-lations. You beat me down. The bully wins.
“Zane!” my coach shouted at the top of my lungs when I sent a free kick so wide it went into the nearby parking lot. “Get over here! Cross! Take her place!”
A sophomore named Anna Cross jogged out for me, patting me on the shoulder and telling me she’d seen better days from a kid with her shoes untied. I knew she meant it as a weird pick-me-up—she liked to encourage people by trash talking them—but right now, it just left me feeling even lower than I had moments before. I slowly trudged back, not even getting all the way off the field before I faced our head coach, Coach Alexis.
“What’s going on, Zane?” she said, standing by my side as I looked to the ground. “You haven’t made a clean pass, let alone a free kick, since last Friday. Did s
omething happen this weekend?”
I took a page from Adam’s playbook, since it seemed to be a playbook that worked so damn well. I just clammed up, didn’t say a word, and shook my head. Deflecting hard questions might not wind up working as an adult, but here in senior year of high school, apparently, it was the optimal strategy.
“Look, whatever’s happening, whatever is going on, do your best to put it to the side. Playoffs start Wednesday, and we need you alert and present. If we don’t have you here, Emily… it’s gonna be tough. Can you do that?”
Of course I could try. I didn’t see the point, though.
This whole school was just too damn toxic for me. The only thing I truly cared about was getting to June 5th, 2020—I had the date circled Sunday night—and then never showing my face on campus. I didn’t think I’d even cross the stage for my diploma. They could mail it to me. As soon as I left school that Friday, I was driving away, giving two middle fingers to the sky, and never seeing anyone ever again except for Jackie and Samantha. If others followed me to some school, I was going to ignore them on campus.
Life would begin again on that day.
But until then, I guess I’d have to fake it.
“I’ll do what I can, coach,” I said.
* * *
An hour later, I sat in the locker room by myself.
A part of me almost wondered if I should just go ahead and expect Adam to pop up at some point on my journey home. So far, he’d cornered me in the locker room, at my car… maybe he could “surprise” me at my parent’s house. That would be a first. Or, oh, maybe he could show up in the backseat of my car halfway home. That would truly be going above and beyond.
Stop it, girl. Get yourself together.
Avoid that asshole no matter what it takes. Take different floors if you have to. Get sick during PE. Whatever. Just dodge him. You’ve got, what, seven months and then you’re free?
So no thinking about him. Just go about your day like he doesn’t exist, and if he pops up, run like hell.
I gathered my gym bag and sighed loudly at it.
“What could have been,” I said.
And really, what could have been. But what could have been, never would be.
So I grabbed my gym bag, headed out the door, and holy shit wouldn’t you know who was waiting right outside the front door. So much for thinking that this asshole doesn’t exist.
“Guess you came here to finish the raping you wanted to do in the women’s locker room, huh, dick?”
Also, so much for ignoring him and dodge him.
“No,” he said. “I came here because I want to make a better memory.”
“Oh fuck off,” I said as I stormed to the exit. “I’m not sucking your cock again. I made that mistake once, and you shattered your heart.”
“And for that,” he said, but I ignored him. I got all the way to the exit when he finally said the words that made me pause. “I’m sorry, Emily.”
I wasn’t placated by any stretch of the imagination. But by this point, I had already stopped, and it wasn’t like I had a ton of homework this week. I’d done all the preparation I could have for the soccer game. So, hell, morbid curiosity would win out this round.
“For what, Adam?” I said as I turned, keeping one hand on the bar to push out to the exit. “And start talking. I don’t have time.”
“For everything,” he said. “But, more specifically. For one, being a bully to you the past three years.”
He… he actually did it…
Adam still maintained some distance from me, but I found myself walking over, curious to hear what else he had to say.
“Next, sorry for not telling you more of myself. I’ll get to that in a second. Three, for saying that all I ever wanted to do was fuck you. You were right. That wasn’t the truth. That was just a mean thing I said in the heat of the moment. Apologizing doesn’t change that I said it, but I did. And I’m sorry.”
Even as I felt good hearing all this, I still stayed on guard, clutching my bag close to me. I’d thought during sex and during the soccer game we attended, he was genuine. And, well, at least he’d apologized for having a moment.
It was on me to decide now what the real Adam was. The bully who had all but made me quit high school, or the real guy who had suffered through too much shit to ever feel safe revealing his true self.
“I’m sorry for calling you out in public the way I did,” he said. “I’m sorry for trying to ruin you. I’m sorry for… for everything. Fuck. I don’t want to keep you here—”
“It’s fine,” I said, curt but not as outright annoyed by Adam as before. “I get it, and I appreciate it. But you need to tell me something else, and I’m giving you this one chance to tell me now.”
“Hmm.”
“What the fuck is going on in your home that has affected you so much?”
“Where to start?”
As it turned out, he started with the death of his father at five years old—and the horrible fallout that came from how his mother acted and that his father had cheated on her. My jaw seemed to drop an extra inch with every sentence that Adam revealed, from his stepfather cheating on him to declaring that all women were basically whores. I couldn’t say, hearing this, that it washed away everything from the past three years.
But at least I finally had some answers to what had happened in the summer of 2016. I finally had an explanation for why Adam had so ruthlessly pushed me away, and why every so often, he had showcased some semblance of humanity in his weakest moments.
“So what the hell changed?” I said. “Most of this happened years ago. But only after homecoming did you start to show your true self. Why?”
Adam shook his head.
“Sure would have been nice to have done that well before, huh?”
I didn’t laugh. Not because I disagreed with him, but because I needed him to stay on topic.
“Ryan, actually, had called me out multiple times for acting this way with you. So did Nick and even Kevin, but I just pushed them away. Said they didn’t understand, said whatever I could to get them off my back. When I saw you with Nick… it brought me back to that day outside Starbucks in the summer, when I was just looking for evidence to confirm my suspicion you were cheating.”
“Suspicion?”
Adam bit his lip.
“Who knew what I wanted then,” he said in a resigned fashion.
Suspicion wasn’t the right word. Given everything that Adam had just recounted to me, I wondered if hope wasn’t the right word, if he had hoped I was cheating to give him an easy way out.
“But it also brought me back to the fact that someone else had you, and I thought of how I’d once had you and how great it was. When you took care of me and you slapped me, I realized that the only person I was hurting—well, that’s not true, it hurt you too.”
Thank God he caught himself.
“In any case, I was hurting myself as much as I was hurting you. Again, maybe an exaggeration, but I was isolating myself, alienating myself from my friends, and treated as a good guy basically because my parents had a big ass house and kick ass parties. When you asked me if I meant those words… I saw an opportunity to just instantly wipe away everything from the past.”
“But you couldn’t,” I said solemnly. “Maybe you could wipe it away on your end, but the last three years have just torn at me, Adam. I can’t say I’m over it. I couldn’t even say I was over it when we were out that Friday night. It helped, but…”
“But I needed more time, and what I did was about the worst thing I could have done.”
“Massive understatement. But yes.”
A grim silence formed between us. What now? I appreciated Adam’s apology, and I was glad to have answers, but Adam was still the same person. The same guy who had kissed me sweetly and brought me to orgasm was the same guy that publicly humiliated me from his porch and told me all he’d wanted me for in the last three years was sex. It wasn’t like one conversation could chan
ge things.
“So… can we give this a second chance?”
I sighed. At least he sounded contrite. At least he sounded sincere. But…
“First, Adam, it would be a third chance, not a second chance,” I said with an exasperated sigh. “And, honestly, at this point, this isn’t baseball. I gave you that second chance, and you not only broke my heart. You destroyed it. I don’t think there’s anything left to it.”
Adam bowed his head, but there was a certain look in his eye that said he wasn’t going to give up. I knew that was going to happen; I just hoped that if I put him down nicely, that would be the end of it.
“Sorry, Adam, but I can’t. You can’t win me back. The best we can do is stay peacefully apart.”
Adam nodded. I waited for him to say something, but I guessed the words eluded him. I would have felt bad for him if not for the fact that his own actions had put him there. I nodded to him, said goodbye, and turned around.
I got all the way to the door before Adam said something very familiar.
“Not everything is a competition, Emily,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s good to just let things be and not try and win.”
He remembered that. I wanted him to remember that. And he did. I never imagined…
“I’m not trying to win you back,” he said. “This isn’t a competition with Nick or some random guy in the class or some future boyfriend. I just came here to be with you and let things fall where they may. And when I’m with you, it just feels right.”
I hesitated. I liked what he was saying, and I was lying if I said no part of me still liked him. But…
“Will you come out with me to my car?” he said. “I’m not going to drive you anywhere. I just want to show you something.”
I let out a really long sigh. PTSD-like flashbacks formed in my mind as I imagined Adam stuffing me in the car, forcing me to ice cream, and other acts that would leave me more or less at his whim or at the mercy of an expensive Uber.