by Jay McLean
“And you don’t deserve what I’ve done to you. Consider us even.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Andie’s Past
I got early acceptance to Harvard December of my senior year but was only offered a partial scholarship. Still, Matt took me out to celebrate. Another casino, only this one was real. He’d set me up with a fake ID. That night, I was Bonnie Barrow. Like if Bonnie had married Clyde. He thought it was clever.
In the hotel room prior to hitting the tables, he toasted to Harvard. Toasted to love. Toasted to my brain and my ability to count cards. We’d need the money; the housing market in Boston was insane. “Plus, fuck paying off loans,” he said. “Education should be free!”
I was tipsy enough to agree.
I wore the black wig again; it matched my ID.
We walked away with just under twenty grand in winnings. More money than I knew what to do with. But Matt did, he assured me. “Straight in the bank for a deposit on the house in Boston.” I thought he was so smart, so thoughtful. It was another wild night of over-the-top celebrating. He took me to my first club where he practically poured vodka down my throat, and for a moment, I wondered what Milky was doing. No way she was having as much fun as I was. After Matt’s display on my date with Sean, word spread like wildfire. I denied it to my grandparents, but Milky—Milky was relentless. She’d tried to talk to me about my relationship with Matt, and I shut it down every time. It wasn’t her business. “He’s bad news,” said that girl who once offered her body to the man who was in love with me. “He’s not good for you, Andie.”
I had enough dirt on her to keep her mouth shut when it came to confirming my grandparents’ suspicions. Like the fact that she lost her virginity at thirteen to a college freshman in the back of his mama’s car. Or that every time she said she was taking extracurricular dance classes, she was really in Jodie Hall’s garage smoking a blunt. Or even those rumors that popped up at the start of the school year about her and a guy and another guy...
So my grandparents seemed to be clueless to my forbidden love, and Milky was too afraid to change that.
Matt and I stumbled back to the hotel room, love echoed in our laughter the entire way. Our lovemaking was sloppy and filthy and happened on every surface of that room. He loved me when I was like that, he’d told me... when I was free of the thoughts and the pressures of my academics. When I was nothing more than his girl. Just his. But he didn’t just love my body. He loved my mind. “Your brain’s so fucking sexy,” he said, his arms around me, protecting me under the streams of multiple shower heads. I loved the look in his eyes when he’d said it. Nothing but love and possessive desire.
There was never hot and cold between Matteo Rossi and me.
We were always up in flames.
I stopped making excuses for where I was going and stayed out all night with him. Milky had been doing it for years. Why couldn’t I?
Matt was in my blood, a shot of heroin.
I was a user.
He was my drug.
I needed him.
Craved him.
Just one more fucking hit.
I didn’t worry that my grades were slowly declining. I got into fucking Harvard! My dream. And then finals came along, and all of a sudden I cared. It was programmed into the mind Matt had found so sexy. But I hadn’t been paying attention in class. Even skipping some when I decided seeing Matt was more worthy of my time. I had less than a week to learn a semester’s worth of education. I tried to explain all this to Matt while I paced his living room, fingers curled into my palms, wheezing from the lack of air in my lungs. “You need to relax, babe,” he said, trying to calm me. But nothing worked. My inhaler was useless against a level-ten panic attack. “Breathe, Andie.”
I couldn’t. Every inhale captured a minuscule molecule of oxygen, and it wasn’t enough. He left me alone, just for a second, while he ran to his office. “Do you trust me?” he asked when he returned, grasping my shoulders to keep me still.
I wheezed. Nodded.
He held up a little orange pill between his thumb and forefinger. “Take this.”
“What—”
“Do you trust me?”
I nodded again. I trusted him with my life.
He slipped the pill on his tongue, then reached behind my neck and tugged me to him. He kissed me hard, pushing the pill into my mouth, and I swallowed, ignoring the pain of his hand gripping my nape. We had sex that night. Glorious, mind-blowing sex. The pills—whatever they were—did what they were meant to do. I was up, up, UP. Always up. Always awake. Always focused. Day and night. And when I felt like I was fading, I’d simply go to him, and he’d give me another pill-offering kiss.
It was bad for my heart, throbbing in ways that made my chest hurt.
It was horrid on my looks. Pale, raccoon eyes and untamable, dry hair.
But no one mentioned it. Not the students, not Milky, not even my grandparents. I figured it must have been what I looked like when I was stressed and studying.
Then the exams were done, and I’d fucking nailed them. I stopped taking the pills, but it was awful. So fucking awful. I spent the first day in Matt’s bed while he watched me shake and sweat, urging my body to forgive me for putting it through hell. With damp washcloths, he stroked the sweat off my body and held me to him, repeating promises of better times. “You’re just coming down,” he said, fearful I wouldn’t get through it. He kept telling me that he was sorry he did that to me, that he loved me.
That he would never hurt me.
So I got through it… for him.
Then we celebrated my finals.
A different casino.
Another night of pretending.
New Year’s Eve was spent the same.
The casino was on a ship.
We sailed into the new year pretending to be people we weren’t. The only thing I felt to be true was the way he looked at me when the clock ticked midnight. He kissed me, soft and sweet and so unlike Matteo Rossi. “Tell me you’re mine,” he said.
I nodded.
“Say it,” he begged, his voice cracking.
“I’m yours.”
While I was completing my final semester of high school, Matt searched online for apartments we could afford near Harvard. He had money put aside, money he’d saved from his job, as well as our earnings from our casino ventures.
I spent most of the time at Matt’s. Even when he was gone on business, he gave me his keys. I studied there, or “the library” as my grandparents knew it to be. I drove in my yellow Mustang, around the block, then parked it in his garage, hidden from the world.
Just like us.
But with the return of finals came the return of my overachieving attitude and the return of the pills, pills, pills. I knew what to expect this time, so I was prepared for the downfall. What I wasn’t prepared for was the text Milky sent the afternoon before my first exam. And I sure as hell didn’t expect it to become my downfall.
OMG. You should see the woman who just walked into Matt’s house, her text read.
Still in my school uniform, fuming, anger burning in my blood, I marched right over to his house. I pulled out his keys from the tiny pocket in my skirt and opened the door. My mind knew what the cause of the moans from upstairs was before my body caught up, but when it did, it felt like death. Like that was actually what it felt like to die. Suffocating in my skin, my vision blurred black and red, my feet heavy, lead-weighted as I climbed the stairs, struggling through every wheeze I needed to simply survive.
With my hand on the door to his bedroom, I heard it. The words that raised my anger to rage, to fury: “Fuck, you take my cock better than your sister.”
I opened the door to see Milky straddling my boyfriend, her ass grinding against him, his hands on her tits.
There was no way I could speak. I could barely breathe. Barely see. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember much else of what went on next. Just my footsteps toward the two people I loved more than anyth
ing in this world, two people who’d devastated me, broken me, shattered every single fiber of me. Milky’s hair felt like raw betrayal between my fingers. I yanked. I pulled so hard, she flew back and landed on the floor in all her naked glory. Matt sat up, cock glistening with my sister’s pleasure, and I hated him.
Hated her.
Hated the entire fucking world.
I picked up anything I could, threw them across the room. At my cheating boyfriend, my deceitful sister. Tears burned a trail down my cheeks, fiery hot like my temper. Then I finally found my voice, and the scream that left me tore at my chest, at my insides, while my nails clawed at my addiction. At Matt. My lungs gave out, collapsing in their fight to survive. With eyes shut, darkness consumed me the same time Milky spoke: “Don’t you see, Andie? I did this for you.”
It was at that moment, those words, that pushed me over the edge. I attacked my sister when I should’ve attacked my boyfriend. I took it out on a girl I shared my life with when I should’ve taken it out on the man who used me, abused me, defiled me, controlled me, destroyed and devastated me.
Matt stood, tried to comfort me.
“I hate you,” I screamed, hitting at his chest. “I fucking hate you. I never want to see you again! Ever!” Blood whooshed in my ears while the loudness of my voice felt harsh against my dry throat.
“You don’t mean that, baby. It was a mistake. I’m sorry,” he pled, hands clasped beneath his chin, tears in his eyes. Tears he wasn’t fucking worthy of.
I felt my heart beat out of my chest, and then stop. Anger and regret and awareness licked at my nerves until I could no longer breathe. I searched for something to steady me, but all I felt was air.
“Andie?” Milky’s voice, her presence, was a stab in my back, in my chest, ripping through whatever blood connection we had left.
I couldn’t face her, so I turned to Matt with no fight left in me. “I loved you. I gave you everything. You were everything to me. And now...” I couldn’t even finish my sentence. Couldn’t think of a single moment beyond that point.
I left Matt standing naked in the middle of his fucked-up room, the girl he’d been screwing standing opposite him, trying to cover her shame.
I got in the car the bastard gave me, and I drove and drove, all night, all morning, until I felt nothing but dead inside.
And then, as if it were programmed into me, I showed up to school to take my first final, my mind numb, my dead heart left in my past.
I thought it was over.
I wanted it to be.
Needed it to be.
But then the door opened, and the principal walked in, two uniformed officers following after him, and I knew.
My broken heart and beaten conscience knew.
“Andromeda Reynor?” one of the officers asked, and I nodded. “I’m going to need you to come with us.”
“Why?” I whispered, feeling the eyes of everyone in the room on me.
“Because you’re under arrest.”
My eyes searched for Milky. I expected to see her at the door, my grandparents beside her, supporting her in her decision to ruin me. She wasn’t there, so I looked back at the officer. “For what?”
“For many things,” he answered. “But mainly possession of illegal narcotics with intent to distribute.”
I got to my feet, my stomach dropping. “What?!”
“Just come with us.”
I was handcuffed in front of my class, taken through the halls of a school that was once my pride. My joy. Outside, kids stood around in the parking lot watching dozens of men in uniform around a single car. My car. My yellow Mustang.
And as I got closer, I saw the interior of the car stripped, exposing bags upon bags of pills, powder, pot. All things I’d never seen before, never knew about. I wanted to ask why, but I didn’t want to know the answer. Instead, I asked, “How?”
The officer led me by my cuffed arms to the back of his cruiser and said, his hand guiding my head into the cab, “Your neighbor turned you in.”
It felt like a dream.
A nightmare.
A nightmare that was just beginning.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Noah
Bradley and I make sure to get the girls settled in our house and away from theirs before stepping outside so we can talk. I’d been in my room packing for class when I heard the commotion going on downstairs. I had no idea what I’d walk into, but Bradley throwing some guy outside and then walking in their house to see Milky half-naked and Andie—Fuck, I can’t get the vision of Andie curled into herself, tears streaking down her cheeks, struggling for air, out of my head. She couldn’t get a word out. She still can’t. I tried to pry it out of her, but she kept crying, crying, crying, and now my thoughts were in places where light holds the darkness hostage.
“Nothing happened,” Bradley says, and I exhale a rushed breath.
“Then what the hell was that?”
“Andie nearly busted the door down. She said her parole officer—”
“Parole officer?” I almost shout.
His hands indicate for me to keep it down, but my heart is thumping, my mind circling, round and round, until dizziness makes my vision blur.
“Noah, maybe you should sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“Nothing happened,” he repeats, more for himself than me. He flexes his hands, blood dusting his knuckles, bruises starting to show.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, looking at his girl trying to comfort my girl. “I’m more worried about Milky. She was…” He shakes his head. “Never mind.”
“Is Andie…?”
“I don’t know. But Milky and I will stay close. You have class today, right?”
I nod, chew my lip. “I have a fucking test. Maybe—maybe I could—”
“Don’t. I’ve got it covered.”
I glance at Andie quickly, catch her eyes on mine, but she looks away, her hand going to her cheek, wiping away the tears. “I should stay.”
“No. You should go to class. Take that test. It can wait.”
With a sigh, I look back at Bradley. “I have to go home after.”
“Why? Are your parents—”
“They’re fine… I think. I don’t know. But Dana—”
“Christa’s friend?”
I nod. “She’s home for some reason. She says she has something she needs to show us.”
“What is it?”
“Fuck if I know.” I rub my eyes. “I’m going to be home late, man. Just—”
Bradley grips my shoulder with his good hand, squeezes once. “I’ll take care of your girl. I promise.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Andie
When I was with Matt, I believed myself to be fearless. That nothing and no one could take me down. It was just one of the many mistakes I’d made in my life, one of the many bad decisions.
The thing about fear is that it’s comparable. People go out every day and risk their lives. I go out every day and stack shelves. And so I tell myself that my life, my past—is nothing to fear.
And yet, I sit on the boys’ couch, watching Bradley speaking to Noah out in the yard, and it’s the only emotion that consumes me. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can guess what Bradley has to say:
Andie has a parole officer.
Andie’s been in prison.
Andie is a criminal.
Andie is bad fucking news, dude, and you should stay the hell away from her.
Occasionally, Noah shakes his head, shifts his gaze to me. That’s when fear forces me to look away. I have three people in my life who mean everything to me. Noah is one of them. Another is sitting by my side, holding my hand, her way of letting me know that it’s okay. That everything will be okay.
Only it’s not.
Because my past will never be my past, both good and bad, and now Noah has an insight into my deepest, darkest secrets. Secrets filled with shame.
No wonder
Milky didn’t want our grandparents knowing what she’d done for me.
The patio doors slide open, and I focus on the woodgrain of the coffee table, too ashamed to make eye contact with Noah.
Milky releases my hand as she stands, and I almost look up, just so I can beg her to stay. To not leave me alone with him.
Noah seems to wait until Bradley and Milky are behind Bradley’s bedroom door, before squatting down in front of me, his eyes trying to catch mine. “Andie,” he whispers, and the sympathy in his voice forces that knot that’d been in my gut to rise, rise, rise to my throat.
“I’m really sorry, but I have to get to school. I have a huge test that makes up—”
“It’s okay,” I tell him, my voice cracking.
He rests his hands on my knees, causing my breath to catch, and I reach for the inhaler in my pocket.
Vivid blue and full of pity, his eyes hold mine, while mine hold back tears. “And then I have this… thing that I have to go to afterward, so I won’t be home until later. But I’d like it if you stayed here with Bradley today. Don’t go back to your house. Will you wait for me? I think… I think we should talk.”
He wants to talk.
I want to run.
I nod. “Okay.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Noah
I shouldn’t have taken the stupid test. My thoughts were all over the place, and not a single one of them was focused on the pages in front of me.
Andie.
Dana.
My parents.
Home.
The place hasn’t been home since the last time any of us had been in the garage. I try to convince myself that it’ll be different. That with Dana here, something has to change. For over two years now, I’ve hoped for the same thing. That something will change. It never does. And as I pull into the driveway, both my parents’ cars parked exactly where they were when I left, I ready myself for the inevitable.